New measurements of the EMC effect in few-body nuclei

Abstract

Measurements of the EMC effect show that the quark distributions in nuclei are not simply the sum of the quark distributions of the constituent nucleons. However, interpretation of the EMC effect is limited by the lack of a reliable baseline calculation of the effects of Fermi motion and nuclean binding. We present preliminary results from JLab experiment E03-103, a precise measurement of the EMC effect in few-body and heavy nuclei. These data emphasize the large-xregion, where binding and Fermi motion effects dominate, and thus will provide much better constraints an the effects of binding. These data will also allow for comparisons to calculations far few-body nuclei, where the uncertainty in the nuclear structure is minimized. © 2007 IOP Publishing Ltd.