Sensitivity of the pQCD deuteron structure to the nucleon form factors

We discuss the applicability of pQCD to the elastic scattering of electrons on protons and deuterons. We analyze the Q²-dependence of the reduced deuteron form factor, taking into account the recent data on the electric proton form factor and we find that the value of the QCD-scale parameter Λ differs essentially from the value Λ = 0.1 GeV, previously found using the dipole parametrization of the electromagnetic nucleon form factors G_E and G_M. Moreover, the predicted scaling behavior of the reduced deuteron form factor cannot be recovered in the Dirac and Pauli representations for the nucleon electromagnetic form factors. Received: 14 October 2002 / Accepted: 12 November 2002 / Published online: 11 March 2003 RID="a" ID="a"Permanent address: National Science Center KFTI, 310108 Kharkov, Ukraine. RID="b" ID="b"e-mail: etomasi@cea.fr Communicated by V.V. Anisovich