“…With the development of modern facilities to perform the necessary detailed experiments combined with more sophisticated theoretical models than were available in the past, we are now in a much better position to investigate off-shell effects. In addition to the intrinsic interest in the NNg, reaction, the observation of high energy photons produced in intermediate energy heavy ion collisions has also motivated a considerable effort to better understand the elementary NN~ process which is the main/eaction mechanism for producing hard photons in these collisions [9,10]. The weakness of the electromagnetic interaction, combined with the fact that these photons are very energetic, makes them (the photons) a clean probe of the reaction dynamics.…”