Parity-violating DIS and the flavour dependence of the EMC effect

TL;DR

This paper investigates how isospin-dependent nuclear forces influence the flavor dependence of the EMC effect, particularly in parity-violating deep inelastic scattering, revealing significant effects in non-isoscalar nuclei like lead and gold.

Contribution

It introduces a relativistic quark-level model showing that isovector nuclear forces cause flavor-dependent modifications in nuclear parton distributions affecting parity-violating DIS.

Findings

Flavor-dependent effects are significant in nuclei with N ≠ Z.

Parity-violating DIS cross-sections are sensitive to the flavor dependence of the EMC effect.

Large effects are observed in heavy nuclei like lead and gold.

Abstract

Isospin-dependent nuclear forces play a fundamental role in nuclear structure. In relativistic models of nuclear structure constructed at the quark level these isovector nuclear forces affect the u and d quarks differently, leading to non-trivial flavour dependent modifications of the nuclear parton distributions. We explore the effect of isospin dependent forces for parity-violating deep inelastic scattering on nuclear targets and demonstrate that the cross-sections for nuclei with N /= Z are sensitive to the flavour dependence of the EMC effect. Indeed, for nuclei like lead and gold we find that these flavour dependent effects are large.