Theory of the Photodisintegration of the Deuteron

By means of a covariant field-theoretic technique, a formally exact expression has been derived for the amplitude for photodisintegration of the deuteron. By expanding the result only in the number of mesons exchanged and by making a series of nonrelativistic approximations, the expression is reduced to one in which the corrections to the conventional dipole matrix element depend only on the amplitude for photomeson production, the renormalized meson-nucleon coupling constant, and the appropriate two nucleon wave functions. One finds that virtual meson effects play little role at energies below 100 Mev, in justification of recent calculations based on the conventional nonrelativistic theory. At higher energies good agreement with the total cross section was obtained by the inclusion of both hard core and tensor force effects in the wave functions. In addition the folded angular distribution could be fitted by using a reasonable extrapolation of the phase shifts in the ${}_{}{}^1{}_{}{}^{}S_0^{}{}_{}{}^{}$ and ${}_{}{}^1{}_{}{}^{}D_2^{}{}_{}{}^{}$ states.