Photodisintegration of the Deuteron

The two-body system has played a major role in nuclear physics and still holds the stage. Over the past fifty years a steady flow of experimental and theoretical papers on deuteron photodisintegration and its inverse reaction demonstrates the continuing interest in this fundamental process. This book contains an almost exhaustive review of the theoretical approaches employed to evaluate two-body photodisintegration of the deuteron at low and intermediate energies. Moreover, a critical survey of all the experiments concerning this process is given and the most accurate data are selected in order to compare the experimental results with the theoretical ones. Many information can be taken from this review, in particular that the current theory is able to describe the experimental data pretty well in the energy region below the pion production threshold, while more precise experimental data and improved theoretical calculations are needed in and above the delta-resonance region.Moreover, the role of meson exchange currents and isobar degrees of freedom is clearly seen in this process, the importance of different approximations in the calculations is clarified and the necessity of studying polarization observables is stressed.