Structure of the deuteron from an analysis of bremsstrahlung emission in proton-deuteron scattering in cluster models

Abstract

Emission of bremsstrahlung photons in the scattering of protons off deuterons is investigated on the microscopic cluster basis in a wide region of beam energy from low energies up to 1.5 GeV. Our aim is to construct a model extracting new information about the structure of the deuteron from analysis of accompanying bremsstrahlung in proton-deuteron scattering. A three-cluster model of bremsstrahlung is constructed. The formalism includes the form factor of the deuteron, which characterizes the dependence of bremsstrahlung cross sections on the structure of the deuteron. This gives a possibility to investigate the structure of nuclei from analysis of bremsstrahlung cross sections. We studied the dependence of the bremsstrahlung cross section on the structure of the deuteron. We used three different shapes of the deuteron wave functions. Besides, we also calculated the cross section by neglecting the internal structure of the deuteron. Analysis of the dependence of the cross section on such a parameter shows the following. (1) At beam energies 145 and 195 MeV used in experiments, the bremsstrahlung cross section is not sensitive enough to variations in the shape of the deuteron wave functions. (2) A stable difference between cross sections calculated with and without the internal structure of the deuteron is observed at higher bean energy (higher than 500 MeV). (3) The spectrum is increased as we pass from the structureless deuteron (the oscillator length b=0) to the deuteron described by the shell-model wave function (the realistic oscillator length) inside the full energy region of the emitted photons. Our cluster model is a suitable tool to study the structure of the deuteron with high enough precision from bremsstrahlung analysis. We propose new experiments for such an investigation.Published by the American Physical Society2024