Final state interactions and y-scaling in inclusive electron scattering

Abstract

The role of final state interactions in inclusive electron scattering off nuclei is investigated in the single-particle Green function formalism with a complex optical potential. In the eikonal approximation the y-scaling properties are discussed. It is suggested that the dominance of the contribution from the imaginary part W of the optical potential to the scaling function at large negative values of the scaling variable y found by Gurvitz and Rinat is appreciably reduced if off-shell effects are taken into account. It is shown that if a reasonable off-shell extrapolation of W is used, a satisfactory description of the observed scaling function is obtained for 4He and nuclear matter.