Deuteron photodisintegration in the Bethe-Salpeter formalism

A relativistically invariant analysis of the deuteron-photodisintegration reaction is performed. The reaction γd → pn is considered in the plane-wave approximation on the basis of the Bethe-Salpeter equation with a separable kernel. The results obtained in this way are compared with the results based on nonrelativistic models and on the quasipotential approximation. It is shown that the most important relativistic contributions to the relevant angular distributions are associated with the dependence of the Bethe-Salpeter amplitude on the relative energy of nucleons and on the boost transformation of this amplitude.