Probing the deuteron structure at small N-N distances by cumulative pion production

The fragmentation of deuterons into pions emitted forward in the kinematic region forbidden for free nucleon-nucleon collisions is analyzed. It is shown that the inclusion of the non-nucleonic degrees of freedom in a deuteron results in a satisfactory description of the data for the inclusive pion spectrum and improves the description of the data about T20. According to the data, T20 has very small positive values, less than 0.2, which contradicts the theoretical calculations ignoring these degrees of freedom. (orig.)