Reflections on the origin of the EMC effect

In the 35 years since the European Muon Collaboration announced the astonishing result that the valence structure of a nucleus was very different from that of a free nucleon, many explanations have been suggested. The first of the two most promising explanations is based upon the different effects of the strong Lorentz scalar and vector mean fields known to exist in a nucleus on the internal structure of the nucleon-like clusters which occupy shell model states. The second links the effect to the modification of the structure of nucleons involved in short-range correlations, which are far off their mass shell. We explore some of the methods which have been proposed to give complementary information on this puzzle, especially the spin-dependent EMC effect and the isovector EMC effect, both proposed by Cloët, Bentz and Thomas. It is shown that the predictions for the spin-dependent EMC effect, in particular, differ substantially within the mean-field and short-range correlation approaches. Hence, the measurement of the spin-dependent EMC effect at Jefferson Lab should give us a deeper understanding of the origin of the EMC effect and, indeed, of the structure of atomic nuclei.

The role of quark exchange in the structure function of Lithium nucleus

The quark exchange formalism is formulated to calculate the quark momentum distribution in the iso-scalar Lithium nucleus. Then by boosting the nucleus to an infinite momentum frame, the Lithium structure function is evaluated at different nucleon "sizes", i.e., b = 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 and 1 fm and the Bjorken scale (x) values. It is shown that the Lithium structure function becomes narrower, and it is pushed to the smaller x values, as the nucleon size is increased. Similar to our previous works for three nucleon systems, the Lithium nucleus European muon collaboration (EMC) ratio decreases, as we increase the x and b values and it shows larger effect, with respect to the free nucleon and three nucleons iso-scalar nucleus. On the other hand, present calculation of the EMC ratio for Lithium nucleus shows a good agreement with the corresponding NMC data, which is available for 1.4 × 10-4 ≤ x ≤ 0.65. Since the atomic number is still small (A = 6), in this work as usual, we ignore the possibility of simultaneous exchange of quarks between more than two nucleons, which can be important as one moves to the heavy nuclei. Although, according to Hen et al., in the neutron rich nuclei the protons have a greater probability than neutrons to have momentum greater than the Fermi momentum, the three-body contribution may be suppressed.

SPIN AND ORBITAL ANGULAR MOMENTUM IN THE PROTON

Since the announcement of the proton spin crisis by the European Muon Collaboration there has been considerable progress in unravelling the distribution of spin and orbital angular momentum within the proton. We review the current status of the problem, showing that not only have strong upper limits have been placed on the amount of polarized glue in the proton but that the experimental determination of the spin content has become much more precise. It is now clear that the origin of the discrepancy between experiment and the naive expectation of the fraction of spin carried by the quarks and anti-quarks in the proton lies in the non-perturbative structure of the proton. We explain how the features expected in a modern, relativistic and chirally symmetric description of nucleon structure naturally explain the current data. The consequences of this explanation for the presence of orbital angular momentum on quarks and gluons is reviewed and comparison made with recent results from lattice QCD and experimental data.