Physics Commons^™

Neutron Valence Structure From Nuclear Deep Inelastic Scattering, E. P. Segarra, A. Schmidt, T. Kutz, D. W. Higinbotham, E. Piasetzky, M. Strikman, L. B. Weinstein, O. Hen

Physics Faculty Publications

Mechanisms of spin-flavor SU(6) symmetry breaking in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) are studied via an extraction of the free neutron structure function from a global analysis of deep inelastic scattering (DIS) data on the proton and on nuclei from A = 2 (deuterium) to 208 (lead). Modification of the structure function of nucleons bound in atomic nuclei (known as the EMC effect) are consistently accounted for within the framework of a universal modification of nucleons in short-range correlated (SRC) pairs. Our extracted neutron-to-proton structure function ratio Fⁿ₂/F^p₂ becomes constant for x_B ≥ 0.6, equaling 0.47 …