General multipole expansion of polarization observables in deuteron electrodisintegration

Formal expressions are derived for the multipole expansion of the structure functions of a general polarization observable of exclusive electrodisintegration of the deuteron using a longitudinally polarized beam and/or an oriented target. This allows one to exhibit explicitly the angular dependence of the structure functions by expanding them in terms of the small rotation matrices d^j_m'm(θ), whose coefficients are given in terms of the electromagnetic multipole matrix elements. Furthermore, explicit expressions for the coefficients of the angular distributions of the differential cross-section including multipoles up to L_max = 3 are listed in tabular form.