Quark effects, meson-exchange currents and background in the d(e,e'p)delta reaction

[EN] We have studied in detail the cross section for the d(e, e'p)Delta reaction leading to the emission of a fast nucleon and a Delta at rest, which has been advocated as a tool to investigate quark effects in nuclei. We find that ordinary meson-exchange currents mechanisms dominate the quark-exchange effects in the region of excitation of the Delta and could be competitive at higher energies. Furthermore, at these higher energies, the small cross sections for the quark signal, together with the presence of a background about one order of magnitude bigger than the quark signal, make in any case the extraction of information about quark-exchange currents effects extraordinarily difficult.