Abstract

A phenomenological Lagrangian approach is employed to study the electromagnetic properties of the deuteron. The deuteron is regarded as a weakly bound state of the proton and neutron. We construct a general form for the electromagnetic one- and two-body transition operators formulated in terms of the nucleon fields, which are then used in the calculation of the electromagnetic deuteron form factors. One of the two-body operators is responsible for explaining the quadrupole moment form factor. We show that in our approach the data on the deuteron form factors as well as on the differential cross section of elastic electron-deuteron scattering are well explained.