Coherent pion-photoproduction by deuterons at intermediate energies

Exact single scattering calculations for coherent pion photoproduction by deuterons at intermediate photon energies (200 MeV to approx. 500 MeV) are presented. For the two-body γN → π0N process we use the well-known dispersion theoretic model by Chew et al. and for the deuteron wave-functions we employ the Yamaguchi and the two term Gaussian wave-functions. We find that while both the wave-functions reproduce the deuteron e.m. form factor reasonably well, the results for the pion photoproduction cross-section show, however, a sensitive dependence on their detailed forms. The angular distributions at various energies are found to have considerable variations from the usual impulse approximation calculations but tend to improve the agreement with the data in a large kinematical region. (orig.)