Fermi-motion effects in deep-inelastic lepton scattering from nuclear targets

Abstract

The ratio of deep-inelastic structure functions of nuclear targets to the sum of free neutron and proton structure functions has been calculated using a modified form of the Atwood-West technique for deuterium. Fermi-gas momentum distributions were used with modifications to include high-momentum tails resulting from nucleon-nucleon correlations. Tables of smearing ratios for $W_1$, $W_2$, and $W_3$ are given as a function of $x$ and $Q^2$ for deuterium and several heavy nuclei. We find that for $x>\mathrm{}0.5\mathrm{}$ the scaling violations for heavy nuclei are smaller than those for free nucleons. The shapes of the antiquark distributions are also changed.