Off-shell effects in electromagnetic reactions on the deuteron Original Research Article

Off-shell contributions to the electromagnetic nuclear current are evaluated within a nonrelativistic approach by incorporation one-pion loop contributions in time-ordered perturbation theory. By construction, the correct experimental on-shell properties of the nucleon current are ensured so that only the genuine off-shell effects appear as model dependent. For a qualitative assessment of such off-shell effects, this model is applied to photodisintegration of the deuteron for photon energies up to 500 MeV. While at low energies off-shell contributions are small, above 300 MeV they lead to sizeable effects in observables up to about 30 percent pointing to the necessity of incorporating such effects if one aims at theoretical predictions of high precision.