Advanced extraction of the deuteron charge radius from electron-deuteron scattering data

TL;DR

This paper advances methods for accurately extracting the deuteron charge radius from electron scattering data by developing and testing robust fitting procedures, building on frameworks used for proton radius measurements.

Contribution

It introduces an improved framework for selecting optimal fit functions and testing the robustness of deuteron radius extraction from scattering data, tailored for upcoming Jefferson Lab experiments.

Findings

Developed a systematic approach for fit function selection.

Proposed a robust extraction method for the deuteron radius.

Framework can be refined with additional data.

Abstract

To extract the charge radius of the proton, $r_{p}$, from the electron scattering data, the PRad collaboration at Jefferson Lab has developed a rigorous framework for finding the best functional forms - the fitters - for a robust extraction of $r_{p}$ from a wide variety of sample functions for the range and uncertainties of the PRad data. In this paper we utilize and further develop this framework. Herein we discuss methods for searching for the best fitter candidates as well as a procedure for testing the robustness of extraction of the deuteron charge radius, $r_{d}$, from parametrizations based on elastic electron-deuteron scattering data. The ansatz proposed in this paper for the robust extraction of $r_{d}$, for the proposed low-$Q^{2}$ DRad experiment at Jefferson Lab, can be further improved once there are more data.