Pion-Induced Pion Production on the Deuteron

Doubly differential cross sections were measured for pion production in the reaction ${\pi }^{-}d\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}\mathrm{nn}$ at 256 and 331 MeV and in ${\pi }^{+}d\to {\pi }^{-}{\pi }^{+}\mathrm{pp}$ at 256 MeV. At each incident energy observations were made at 35 to 40 points distributed uniformly over the center-of-momentum phase space of the produced pion. Comparison of these measurements with the cross sections for ${\pi }^{-}p\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}n$ suggests that they are consistent with the dominance of quasifree production on a single nucleon. Upper limits for production of bound ${\pi }^{-}\mathrm{nn}$ and ${\pi }^{+}\mathrm{pp}$ systems were measured.