Nuclear structure effects in high momentum transfer reactions

Abstract

It is shown that, at large momentum transfers, one can extract nuclear structure information from the response (function) of the nucleus to an external scalar probe by factorizing the on-shell form factor associated to the struck nucleon. This result, derived both for elastic and inelastic scattering, arises from compensations between off-shell effects and exchange current effects generated by the (local) nucleon-nucleon interaction. The corrections to this on-shell factorization are in general found to be small at large momentum transfers. The role of the final state interaction in the nuclear transition form factor is then investigated and it is shown how one can, for instance, correct the orthogonality defect introduced by using a plane wave approximation for the struck nucleon.