Nuclear medium modification of the F2 structure function

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nuclear effects like Fermi motion, meson clouds, and correlations modify the F2 structure function in nuclei during deep inelastic scattering, providing detailed comparisons with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive calculation of nuclear modifications to F2 using relativistic spectral functions and compares results with recent and older experimental data.

Findings

Nuclear effects cause a non-trivial A dependence in F2 modifications.

The slope of x distributions is insensitive to normalization uncertainties.

Results agree with recent JLAB measurements and older experiments.

Abstract

We study the nuclear effects in the electromagnetic structure function F2(x,Q^2) in nuclei in the deep inelastic lepton nucleus scattering process by taking into account Fermi motion, binding, pion and rho meson cloud contributions. Calculations have been done in a local density approximation using relativistic nuclear spectral functions which include nucleon correlations for nuclear matter. The ratios over deuteron structure function are obtained and compared with the recent JLAB results for light nuclei with special attention to the slope of the x distributions. This magnitude shows a non trivial A dependence and it is insensitive to possible normalization uncertainties. The results have also been compared with some of the older experiments using intermediate mass nuclei.