Measurement of the helicity dependence of deuteron photodisintegration for photon energies below 450 MeV

In 1998 a pilot experiment was carried out to study the helicity dependence of photoreaction cross sections using circularly polarized real photons on longitudinally polarized deuterons in a deuterated butanol target. The knowledge of these cross sections is required to test the validity of the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn sum rule on the deuteron and the neutron. The focus of this thesis is on the results for the differential and total cross sections for the photodisintegration reaction for various photon energies in the range from 200 to 450 MeV using data taken with the detector system DAPHNE. The current understanding of the NN interaction as represented by the calculations by M. Schwamb could be confirmed within the given uncertainties. In addition, the detector DAPHNE has been prepared for the main experiment in 2003. The according work is presented together with results of the quality-test measurements of the renewed detector components.