Nucleon emission in electron scattering

Abstract

Coincidence electron scattering experiments at large energy transfer in which an emitted nucleon is detected in addition to the electron are potentially very useful since they probe the detailed structure of the nucleus. The most important process which contributes in such an experiment is quasi-elastic scattering, and we review how the cross section for this process may be used to obtain single particle momentum distributions and binding energies. We also show that for certain regions the cross section comes only from processes involving nucleon-nucleon interactions and, thus, can be used to investigate such interactions in the nucleus and possibly the ground state correlations they produce. As an order of magnitude estimate, the Coulomb cross section in such a region for a hard-sphere Fermi gas is calculated to lowest order in the gas parameter. The results indicate that such experiments should be feasible. We also discuss the general form of the double coincidence cross section in Born approximation and show that it is a linear combination of four generalized form factors which can be separated experimentally. As is the case for non-coincidence experiments, this provides a method for extracting the Coulomb cross section.