The electromagnetic form factors of the deuteron in the quark cluster model

Abstract

We evaluate the charge monopole, quadrupole and magnetic-dipole form factors and the tensorpolarization of the deuteron in a microscopic meson-quark cluster model. The deuteron wave function is derived from a microscopic six-quark hamiltonian which, in addition to a quadratic confinement potential includes the one-pion and one-gluon exchange potential between quarks. The electromagnetic current operators are constructed on the quark level, i.e., the photon is coupled directly to the quarks. Aside from the one-body impulse current, pionic and gluonic exchange current corrections are included. Due to the Pauli principle on the quark level, new quark interchange terms arise in the one-body and two-body current matrix elements that are not present in a nucleon level calculation. While these additional quark exchange currents are small for low momentum transfers, we find that they appreciably influence the electromagnetic structure of the deuteron beyond q = 5 fm −1.