Double-pion electroproduction off protons in deuterium: Quasifree cross sections and final-state interactions

Abstract

The single-differential and fully integrated cross sections for quasifree $\pi^{+}\pi^{-}$ electroproduction off protons bound in deuterium have been extracted for the first time. The experimental data were collected at Jefferson Laboratory with the CLAS detector. The measurements were performed in the kinematic region of the invariant mass $W$ from 1.3 to 1.825 GeV and the photon virtuality $Q^{2}$ from 0.4 to 1.0 GeV$^2$. Sufficient experimental statistics allowed for narrow binning in all kinematic variables, while maintaining a small statistical uncertainty. The extracted cross sections were compared with the corresponding cross sections off free protons, which allowed us to obtain an estimate of the contribution from events in which interactions between the final-state hadrons and the spectator neutron took place.