Deuteron Electromagnetic Properties with a Poincaré-covariant Current Operator within Front-form Hamiltonian Dynamics

Deuteron elastic and deep inelastic electromagnetic properties have been studied within the front-form Hamiltonian dynamics, using a Poincaré-covariant current operator. The deuteron elastic form factors are strongly sensitive to different realistic N−N interactions, while the relevance of different nucleon form factor models is huge for A(Q), weak for B(Q) and negligible for the tensor polarization. The possibility to gain information on the neutron charge form factor from an analysis of A(Q) has been investigated. The extraction of the neutron structure functions from the deuteron deep inelastic structure functions at high x is largely affected by the use of our Poincaré-covariant relativistic approach instead of the usual impulse approximation within an instant-form approach.