Abstract
A study is made of the propagation of a deuteron through a nuclear medium. We consider the effect of the Pauli exclusion principle on the internal motion of the deuteron, for the idealized case of a deuteron propagating through infinite nuclear matter, assumed to be adequately described by the Fermi-gas model. This greatly simplifies the calculations and enables us to include explicitly the D-state component of the deuteron wavefunction in our model. It is shown that the action of the Pauli exclusion principle, on the D-state part of the deuteron, endowes various properties of the deuteron with strong dependence on the relative orientation of the deuteron spin and its linear momentum. The dependence of the binding energy of the deuteron on this relative orientation is particularly important, because, it can be associated with a new tensor term, of the T[p] type, in the deuteron optical potential. The strength of this tensor potential is found to be non-negligible at high incident deuteron energies, for the realistic case of a deuteron propagating through a finite nucleus. Rough estimates of this strength at lower energies, indicate that this new tensor interaction is large for these energies too. The important implications of this, for the interpretation of experiment with polarized deuterons, are discussed.