A Perturbative Calculation of the Electromagnetic Form Factors of the Deuteron

David B. Kaplan, Martin J. Savage, Mark B. Wise

Published 1998-04-16, updated 1998-11-18Version 3

Making use of the effective field theory expansion recently developed by the authors, we compute the electromagnetic form factors of the deuteron analytically to next-to-leading order (NLO). The computation is rather simple, and involves calculating several Feynman diagrams, using dimensional regularization. The results agree well with data and indicate that the expansion is converging. They do not suffer from any ambiguities arising from off-shell versus on-shell amplitudes.