The EMC Effect of Tritium and Helium-3 from the JLab MARATHON Experiment

TL;DR

This paper reports the first measurement of the EMC effect in tritium and helium-3 nuclei using deep inelastic scattering at Jefferson Lab, providing new insights into nuclear structure and quark distributions.

Contribution

It presents the first experimental measurement of the EMC effect in tritium, expanding understanding of nuclear modifications of quark distributions in light nuclei.

Findings

First measurement of EMC effect in tritium

Comparison with previous experiments and theory

Data covering a broad range of Bjorken x and Q^2

Abstract

Measurements of the EMC effect in the tritium and helium-3 mirror nuclei are reported. The data were obtained by the MARATHON Jefferson Lab experiment, which performed deep inelastic electron scattering from deuterium and the three-body nuclei, using a cryogenic gas target system and the High Resolution Spectrometers of the Hall A Facility of the Lab. The data cover the Bjorken $x$ range from 0.20 to 0.83, corresponding to a squared four-momentum transfer $Q^2$ range from 2.7 to $11.9\gevsq$, and to an invariant mass $W$ of the final hadronic state greater than 1.84 GeV/${\it c}^2$. The tritium EMC effect measurement is the first of its kind. The MARATHON experimental results are compared to results from previous measurements by DESY-HERMES and JLab-Hall C experiments, as well as with few-body theoretical predictions.