The elastic electron-deuteron scattering beyond one-photon exchange

We discuss the elastic ed scattering beyond Born approximation. It is shown that the reaction amplitude contains six generalized form factors, but only three linearly independent combinations of them (we call them generalized charge, quadrupole and magnetic form factors) contribute to the reaction cross section in the second order perturbation theory. We examine two-photon exchange and find that it includes two types of diagrams, when two virtual photons interact with the same nucleon and when the photons interact with different nucleons. Estimations based on nonrelativistic calculations with the deuteron wave function for realistic NN potential show that the main contribution to the generalized charge, quadrupole and magnetic form factors comes from diagrams of the first type.