Parity-violating deep inelastic scattering and the flavor dependence of the EMC effect

Abstract

Isospin-dependent nuclear forces play a fundamental role in nuclear structure. In relativistic models of nuclear structure constructed at the quark level these isovector nuclear forces affect the u and d quarks differently, leading to nontrivial flavor-dependent modifications of the nuclear parton distributions. We explore the effect of isospin dependent forces for parity-violating deep inelastic scattering on nuclear targets and demonstrate that the cross sections for nuclei with N*Z are sensitive to the flavor dependence of the EMC effect. Indeed, for nuclei like lead and gold we find that these flavor-dependent effects are large. © 2012 American Physical Society.