Diffractive Dissociation of Alpha Particles as a Test of Isophobic Short-Range Correlations inside Nuclei

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experimental test involving diffractive dissociation of alpha particles to investigate the isophobic short-range correlations inside nuclei, aiming to clarify the origin of the EMC effect and test various nuclear models.

Contribution

It introduces a definitive experimental approach to test nucleon-nucleon correlations and isospin symmetry breaking in nuclei, addressing the isophobic nature of the EMC effect.

Findings

Proposes high-energy nuclear dissociation experiments to compare nucleon pair production.

Provides a method to directly test isospin symmetry breaking in nuclear wavefunctions.

Aims to distinguish between nucleon-nucleon correlation models and hidden-color explanations.

Abstract

The CLAS collaboration at Jefferson Laboratory has compared nuclear parton distributions for a range of nuclear targets and found that the EMC effect measured in deep inelastic lepton-nucleus scattering has a strongly "isophobic" nature. This surprising observation suggests short-range correlations between neighboring $n$ and $p$ nucleons in nuclear wavefunctions that are much stronger compared to $p-p$ or $n-n$ correlations. In this paper we propose a definitive experimental test of the nucleon-nucleon explanation of the isophobic nature of the EMC effect: the diffractive dissociation on a nuclear target $A$ of high energy $\rm ^4He$ nuclei to pairs of nucleons $n$ and $p$ with high relative transverse momentum, $\alpha + A \to n + p + A' + X $. The comparison of $n-p$ events with $p-p$ and $n-n$ events directly tests the postulated breaking of isospin symmetry. The experiment also tests alternative QCD-level explanations for the isophobic EMC effect. In particular it will test a proposal for hidden-color degrees of freedom in nuclear wavefunctions based on isospin-zero $[ud]$ diquarks.