On the change of scale observed in nuclear deep-inelastic scattering.

Abstract

We reexamine claims that the European Muon Collaboration effect provides direct evidence for a change in the quark structure of a nucleon inside a nucleus. To the extent that binding corrections can account for the data, we show that there is in fact no change in the momentum distributions of the quarks as a fraction of the nucleon momentum; nor does an increased correlation length necessarily imply an increase in size. The real problem is that Bjorken x is not the most appropriate scaling variable for nuclear deep-inelastic scattering.