The photodisintegration cross sections of the deuteron have been systematically measured over the photon energy range of 2.33–19.65 MeV at the Shanghai Laser Electron Gamma Source. By applying the well-established Baldin sum rule to the newly obtained data, the sum of the electric and magnetic dipole polarizabilities of the deuteron is extracted for the first time based solely on a dense and continuous experimental dataset, yielding ${\alpha }_E+{\beta }_M=0.719\pm 0.009_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.014_{\mathrm{algo}}\pm 0.023_{\mathrm{syst}}{\mathrm{fm}}^3$. With theoretical values of the magnetic polarizability ${\beta }_M$ calculated from the pionless effective field theory, a new value of the electric polarizability is obtained as ${\alpha }_E=0.637\pm 0.009_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.014_{\mathrm{algo}}\pm 0.023_{\mathrm{syst}}\pm 0.004_{\mathrm{theo}}{\mathrm{fm}}^3$, which is in excellent agreement with current theoretical predictions. This result resolves the previous discrepancy between experimental measurements from elastic scattering and theory, providing a high-precision benchmark for nuclear interaction models.

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• Photonuclear reactions