Mass dependence of nuclear short- range correlations and the EMC effect

TL;DR

This paper presents an approximate method to quantify correlated nucleon pairs in nuclei, linking short-range correlations to the EMC effect and providing insights into nuclear structure through electron scattering data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to count specific nucleon pairs prone to correlations, connecting microscopic pair properties to observable nuclear phenomena.

Findings

The method accurately predicts the $a_2$ ratios from electron scattering.

A linear correlation between correlated pairs and the EMC effect is observed.

The pair center-of-mass distribution width reveals quantum number information.

Abstract

We sketch an approximate method to quantify the number of correlated pairs in any nucleus $A$. It is based on counting independent-particle model (IPM) nucleon-nucleon pairs in a relative $S$-state with no radial excitation. We show that IPM pairs with those quantum numbers are most prone to short-range correlations and are at the origin of the high-momentum tail of the nuclear momentum distributions. Our method allows to compute the $a_2$ ratios extracted from inclusive electron scattering. Furthermore, our results reproduce the observed linear correlation between the number of correlated pairs and the magnitude of the EMC effect. We show that the width of the pair center-of-mass distribution in exclusive two-nucleon knockout yields information on the quantum numbers of the pairs.