Non-nucleonic degrees of freedom and the spin structure of the deuteron

Abstract

Electro-disintegration of the deuteron at large $Q^2$ currently represents on of the most promising reactions which allows to probe the bound nuclear state at internal momenta comparable to the rest mass of the nucleon. Large internal momentum in this case makes non-nuncleonic states energetically more feasible and the question that we address is what are the signatures that will indicate the existence of such states in the ground state of the nuclear wave function. To probe such states we developed a light-front formalism for relativistic description of a composite pseudo-vector system in which emerging proton and neutron are observed in electro-disintegration reaction. In leading high energy approximation our calculations show the possibility of the existence of a new ``incomplete" P-state-like structure in the deuteron at extremely large internal momenta. The incompleteness of the observed P-state violates the angular condition for the momentum distribution, which can happen only if the deuteron contains non-nucleonic structures, such as $ΔΔ$, $N^*N$ or hidden color components. Because such states have distinctive angular momentum ($l=1$) they significantly modify the polarization properties of the deuteron wave function. As a result in addition to angular anisotropy of the LF momentum distribution of the nucleon in the deuteron one predicts strong modification of the tensor polarization asymmetry of the deuteron beyond the S- and D- wave predictions at large internal momenta in the deuteron.