Investigation of the deuteron spin structure at short nucleon-nucleon distances in the reaction of polarized-deuteron fragmentation to cumulative pions

Experimental results on the vector (A _y ) and tensor (A _yy ) analyzing powers in the fragmentation of 5- and 9-GeV/c polarized deuterons to high-momentum pions in the kinematical region corresponding to pion production on a strongly correlated nucleon pair (cumulative meson production) are presented. The angular and momentum dependences of A _yy are not described by calculations performed in the impulse approximation by using standard deuteron wave functions. An explanation for our data should be sought on the basis of models that treat the deuteron at short distances (deuteron-core region) as a multiquark state—for example, a 6q cluster, whose high orbital angular momentum (D wave) leads to the observed strong dependence of the reaction tensor analyzing power A( $vec d$ , π)X on the pion transverse momentum.