Deep Inelastic Scattering with Application to Nuclear Targets: Lectures at the 1985 Los Alamos School on Relativistic Dynamics and Quark Nuclear Physics

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed reconstruction of 1985 lectures on deep inelastic scattering and quark structure of nuclei, highlighting foundational concepts still relevant despite experimental and theoretical advances.

Contribution

It provides a historical and pedagogical account of the derivation of the parton model and related formalism, serving as a useful reference for foundational understanding.

Findings

Rest frame derivation of the parton model

Convolution formalism for nucleons and nuclei

Discussion of scaling violation and operator product expansion

Abstract

This paper is essentially a verbatim reconstruction of lectures that I gave at the Los Alamos School on Relativistic Dynamics and Quark Nuclear Physics in 1985. They were published in the school proceedings, but the book is not widely available. The Los Alamos School took place at the height of the first wave of interest in the quark substructure of nuclei, stimulated by the 1983 discovery of the EMC Effect. Interest in this subject has been increasing for years and the prospect of a dedicated Electron Ion Collider within the decade guarantees even greater attention to quarks and gluons in nuclei among both theorists and experimentalists. Recently, to my surprise, I learned that copies of my old lectures have been circulating and been found useful by the relatively few people who know about them. The are, of course, dated: experiments have far outstripped what was available 37 years ago and theory has progressed too. However, the rest frame derivation of the parton model, the derivation and discussion of the convolution formalism for nucleons, nucleon correlations, and other, virtual, constituents of nuclei, and sections on scaling violation and the operator product expansion have aged pretty well and seem to still be useful. With the help and encouragement of Richard Milner, I have recreated the LaTeX files necessary to post the 1985 Lectures on the arXiv, making them available to the nuclear and particle physics community. Apart from correcting some typographical errors, I have made no attempt to edit, improve, or update these lectures. I hope readers will nevertheless find them useful.