Hadron Formation in DIS in a nuclear environment

TL;DR

This paper reports on the HERMES experiment's measurements of how nuclear environments affect hadron production in deep inelastic scattering, revealing a reduction in charged hadron multiplicities and potential modifications in quark fragmentation.

Contribution

It provides new experimental data on hadron multiplicity suppression in nuclei and suggests possible modifications to quark fragmentation processes in nuclear matter.

Findings

Significant reduction in charged hadron multiplicities in nuclei

Larger multiplicity ratio reduction in krypton compared to nitrogen

Indications of modified quark fragmentation in nuclear environments

Abstract

The influence of the nuclear medium on the production of charged hadrons in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering has been studied by the HERMES experiment at DESY using 27.5 GeV positrons. A substantial reduction of the multiplicity of charged hadrons and identified charged pions from nuclei relative to that from deuterium has been measured as function of the relevant kinematic variables. The preliminary results on krypton show a larger reduction of the multiplicity ratio $R_M^{h}$ with respect to the one previously measured on nitrogen and suggest a possible modification of the quark fragmentation process in the nuclear environment.