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

Photon absorption by a quark in one nucleon followed by a high momentum transfer interaction with a quark in the other may produce two nucleons with high relative momentum. This process is shown to depend on the well-known, low-momentum, two-nucleon component of the deuteron wave function and therefore is dominant. 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 absolute values of the cross section are in reasonable agreement with the data.