Near threshold neutral pion electroproduction on deuterium in chiral perturbation theory

Near threshold neutral pion electroproduction on the deuteron is studied in the framework of baryon chiral perturbation theory at next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion. We develop the multipole decomposition for pion production off spin-1 particles appropriate for the threshold region. The existing data at photon virtuality k(2) = -0.1 GeV2 can be described satisfactorily. Furthermore, the prediction for the S-wave multipole E-d at the photon point is in good agreement with the data. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved