Color transparency effects in electron deuteron interactions at intermediateQ 2

High momentum transfer electrodisintegration of polarized and unpolarized deuterium targets,d(e, ep)n is studied. We show that the importance of final state interactions FSI, occuring when a knocked out nucleon interacts with the other nucleon, depends strongly on the momentum of the spectator nucleon. In particular, these FSI occur when the essential contributions to the scattering amplitude arise from internucleon distances 1.5 fm. But the absorption of the high momentum ^* may produce a point like configuration, which evolves with time. In this case, the final state interactions probe the point like configuration at the early stage of its evolution. If the point like configuration is still small after propagating about 1.5 fm, the FSI are suppressed. The result is that significant color transparency effects, which can either enhance or suppress computed cross sections, are predicted to occur forQ ²4GeV². We suggest searching for color transparency phenomenon by examining ratios of experimentally measured quantities. Possible theoretical uncertainties of the calculations, including those due to the deuteron wave function and relativistic effects, are found to be small.This work was supported in part by the USA — Israel Binational Science Foundation Grant No. 9200126 and by the US Department of Energy under Contract Nos. DE-FG02-93ER40771 and DE-FG06-88ER40427.