Compton scattering from the deuteron at intermediate energies

Elastic and quasi-elastic photon scattering from the deuteron were studied in the context of the polarizability of the neutron. We have measured the elastic and quasi-elastic cross sections for the scattering of tagged photons from a liquid deuterium target at $E\gamma$ = 50 MeV and scattering angles of 50$\sp\circ$, 75$\sp\circ$, 110$\sp\circ$ and 140$\sp\circ$ and at $E\gamma$ = 70 MeV and scattering angles of 60$\sp\circ$ and 135$\sp\circ$. The use of quasi-monochromatic photons and two high resolution NaI spectrometers provided the means of separating the elastic and quasi-elastic contributions to the scattering spectrum.The current results of theoretical calculations were found to be in reasonable agreement with the experimental results for elastic scattering. Improvement of uncertainties in both the experiment and the theoretical calculations are required in order to extract significant values for the neutron polarizabilities using elastic photon scattering from the deuteron. The shape and magnitude of the quasi-elastic spectrum was consistent with theoretical predictions.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio