Deuteron Structure Ambiguities and Smearing Effects in Inelastic Electron-Deuteron Scattering

The freedom due to uncertainties in the off-shell nucleon-nucleon interaction is exploited by means of unitary transformations to generate a set of deuteron wave functions which differ primarily at short distances but reproduce the well-known static and dynamic properties of the deuteron. A set of transformations is introduced which offers a much wider degree of freedom in short-range correlations over those of Haftel and Tabakin. The bound-state momentum distributions, $P\left(p\right)\mathrm{}$, differ significantly for large $p$ from each other and from the momentum distribution for the Reid soft-core wave function. These variations in the wave functions introduced here, while consistent with the conventional deuteron properties, generate a significant uncertainty in a model calculation of smearing effects for inelastic electron-deuteron scattering. This uncertainty increases with $x=\frac{q^2}{2M\nu }$, the scaling variable. For these wave functions we estimate a maximum of 15% uncertainty in the smeared ratio of the neutron to proton structure functions [$\frac{W_{2n}}{W_{2p}}$] at $x=0.788\mathrm{}$ for a target missing mass greater than 2 GeV. Additionally, we find, in agreement with West, evidence to support the conclusion that smearing effects vanish near $\omega =1.5\mathrm{}$. This property is observed for all the wave functions studied here.