Sensitivity of the pQCD deuteron structure to the nucleon form factors

Abstract

We discuss the applicability of pQCD to the elastic scattering of electrons on protons and deuterons. We analyze the Q2-dependence of the reduced deuteron form factor, taking into account the recent data on the electric proton form factor and we find that the value of the QCD-scale parameter Λ differs essentially from the value Λ = 0.1 GeV, previously found using the dipole parametrization of the electromagnetic nucleon form factors GE and GM. Moreover, the predicted scaling behavior of the reduced deuteron form factor cannot be recovered in the Dirac and Pauli representations for the nucleon electromagnetic form factors.