Speaker
Description
Deeply inelastic scattering (DIS) of a high-energy leptons ($\ell$ or $\nu$) off hadronic targets remains an incredibly powerful probe of both hadronic substructure and leptonic couplings to matter. As current and near-future experiments will investigate DIS kinematics at large Bjorken $x$ and small momentum transfers to unrivaled precision on a variety of nuclei, it remains crucial that our theoretical understanding of this regime remains firm. Along these lines, we have revisit so-called target mass corrections (TMCs) to nuclear structure functions, which account for the fact that the masses of nuclei are not guaranteed to be small compared to momentum transfers in DIS.
In this talk, we start with a qualitative picture, intended for a broad audience, and move onto more technical details of the work, e.g., cross sections, ratios of cross section, etc. We show that nuclear parton distribution functions can be expressed directly in terms of partonic degrees of freedom (quarks and gluons), and that intermediate pictures of "bound nucleons" are not necessary. If time allows, we also show that nuclear TMCs can be expressed in a way that is universal for all nuclei and readily implemented in numerical codes.
