The European Muon Collaboration effect in Light-Front Hamiltonian Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper develops a rigorous light-front formalism for electron deep inelastic scattering on nuclei, accurately predicting the European Muon Collaboration effect in helium-3, which aids in understanding QCD effects in nuclear structure.

Contribution

It introduces a Poincaré covariant light-front approach with realistic nuclear and nucleon models, predicting a significant EMC effect in helium-3, differing from previous estimates.

Findings

Predicts a sizeable EMC effect in helium-3.

Provides a covariant formalism preserving key physical sum rules.

Facilitates analysis of QCD effects in nuclear structure.

Abstract

A rigorous light-front formalism for electron deep inelastic scattering on unpolarized nuclei, in Bjorken limit, is reported. It preserves Poincar\'e covariance, macroscopic locality, both number of particles and momentum sum rules. The scheme is applied to the A=3 iso-doublet, very relevant in view of the planned operation with unpolarized and polarized beams at the Electron-Ion Collider. At variance with previous light-front estimates, our procedure, including a realistic nuclear description and free-nucleon structure functions, predicts a sizeable European Muon Collaboration effect for $^3$He. This will allow to analyze deviations from the proposed baseline in terms of genuine QCD effects. The extension to heavier nuclei is straightforward, although numerically challenging.