Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2021

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.023240

Publication Title

Physical Review Research

Volume

3

Issue

2

Pages

023240 (1-19)

Abstract

The EMC effect in deuterium and helium-3 is studied using a convolution formalism that allows isolating the impact of high-momentum nucleons in short-ranged correlated (SRC) pairs. We assume that the modification of the structure function of bound nucleons is given by a universal (i.e., nucleus independent) function of their virtuality, and find that the effect of such modifications is dominated by nucleons in SRC pairs. This SRC-dominance of nucleon modifications is observed despite the fact that the bulk of the nuclear inelastic scattering cross-section comes from interacting with low-momentum nucleons. These conclusions are found to be robust to model details including nucleon modification function parametrization, free nucleon structure function, and treatment of nucleon motion effects. While existing data cannot discriminate between such model details, we present predictions for measured, but not yet published, tritium EMC effect and tagged nucleon structure functions in deuterium that are sensitive to the neutron structure functions and bound nucleon modification functions.

Rights

© 2021 The Authors.

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the authors and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Original Publication Citation

Segarra, E. P., Pybus, J. R., Hauenstein, F., Higinbotham, D. W., Miller, G. A., Piasetzky, E., Schmidt, A., Strikman, M., Weinstein, L. B., & Hen, O. (2021). Short-range correlations and the nuclear EMC effect in deuterium and helium-3. Physical Review Research, 3(2), 1-19, Article 023240. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.023240.

ORCID

0000-0002-1265-2212 (Hauenstein), 0000-0001-5416-2900 (Weinstein)

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