Hard Rescattering in QCD and High Energy Two-Body Photodisintegration of the Deuteron

Photon absorption by a quark in one nucleon followed by its high momentum transfer interaction with a quark in the other may produce two nucleons with high relative momentum. We sum the relevant quark rescattering diagrams, to show that the scattering amplitude depends on a convolution between the large angle $pn$ scattering amplitude, the hard photon-quark interaction vertex and the low-momentum deuteron wave function. The computed cross sections are in reasonable agreement with the data.