Extraction of the ratio of the neutron to proton structure functions from deep inelastic scattering

Abstract

We study the nuclear ( A) dependence of the European Muon Collaboration (EMC) effect at high values of x ( x ≥ 0.6). Our approach makes use of conventional nuclear degrees of freedom within the Relativistic Impulse Approximation. By performing a nonrelativistic series expansion we demonstrate that relativistic corrections make a substantial contribution to the effect at x ≳ 0.6 and show that the ratio of neutron to proton structure functions extracted from a global fit to all nuclei is not inconsistent with values obtained from the deuteron.