Short Range Correlations and the EMC Effect in Effective Field Theory

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the observed linear relationship between the EMC effect and short-range correlations in nuclei naturally arises from effective field theory, supported by Monte Carlo calculations matching experimental data.

Contribution

It derives the EMC-short-range correlation relationship using effective field theory and verifies it with Monte Carlo calculations across various light nuclei.

Findings

The ratio of nuclear matrix elements is scheme-independent.

Calculated values for helium isotopes agree with experimental data.

Results for beryllium and carbon are consistent with observations.

Abstract

We show that the empirical linear relation between the magnitude of the EMC effect in deep inelastic scattering on nuclei and the short range correlation scaling factor $a_2$ extracted from high-energy quasi-elastic scattering at $x\ge 1$ is a natural consequence of scale separation and derive the relationship using effective field theory. While the scaling factor $a_2$ is a ratio of nuclear matrix elements that individually depend on the calculational scheme, we show that the ratio is independent of this choice. We perform Green's function Monte Carlo calculations with both chiral and Argonne-Urbana potentials to verify this and determine the scaling factors for light nuclei. The resulting values for $^3$He and $^4$He are in good agreement with experimental values. We also present results for $^9$Be and $^{12}$C extracted from variational Monte Carlo calculations.