A quark-cluster description of the EMC effect (Seminar given in the 18th Course of the "International School on Nuclear Physics", 16-23/9/'94, Erice, IT. To be published in Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics, Vol. 34, Pergamon Press)

TL;DR

This paper models the EMC effect by treating nuclei as clusters of nucleons and quarks, showing how quark structure influences nuclear responses and addressing off-shell energy issues in structure functions.

Contribution

It introduces a non-relativistic cluster model incorporating quark degrees of freedom to explain the EMC effect, with a conjecture for relativistic extension.

Findings

The nuclear response is a convolution of nucleon and quark responses.

Off-shell energy in structure functions is not a fundamental problem.

A potential relativistic generalization is proposed.

Abstract

The response of a nucleus composed of nucleons and confined quarks is calculated in a non-relativistic cluster model and is shown to be a convolution of responses of, respectively, a nucleus with interacting point-nucleons and of a nucleon composed of quarks. We further show that the apparent off-shell energy in the expression for the nucleon structure function in Impulse Approximation does not constitue a real problem. We conjecture a generalization to the relativistic regime.