QCD Rescattering and High Energy Two-Body Photodisintegration of the Deuteron

Photon absorption by a quark in one nucleon followed by its high-momentum transfer interaction with a quark in the other may produce two final-state nucleons with high relative momentum. We sum the relevant quark rescattering diagrams to show that the scattering amplitude depends on a convolution between the large angle $\mathrm{pn}$ scattering amplitude, the hard photon-quark interaction vertex, and the low-momentum deuteron wave function. The computed absolute values of the cross section are in reasonable agreement with the data.