Neutral pion electroproduction off deuterium - art. no. 058201

Threshold neutral pion electroproduction on the deuteron is studied in the framework of baryon chiral perturbation theory at next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion. To this order in small momenta, the amplitude is fini te and a sum of two- and three-body interactions with no undetermined param eters. We calculate the S-wave multipoles for threshold production and the deuteron S-wave cross section as a function of the photon virtuality. We al so discuss the sensitivity to the elementary neutron amplitudes.