Abstract for seminar by Ian Cloet (CSSM-Jefferson Lab.)


Ian Cloet
CSSM-Jefferson Lab.

Wednesday, December 14th

Seminar Room, First Floor, Physics, University of Adelaide





The discovery in the early 80's by the European Muon Collaboration (EMC) that nuclear structure functions differ substantially from those of free nucleons caused a shock in the nuclear community. A few years later the EMC discovered the so-called ``spin crisis', where it was found that the fraction of the spin of the proton carried by its quarks is unexpectedly small. With this background it is surprising that in the 18 years since the discovery of the spin crisis, there has been no experimental and little theoretical investigation of the spin-dependent structure functions of atomic nuclei. In this talk we present results for the spin-dependent structure functions of atomic nuclei and nuclear matter. The quark degrees of freedom in nuclei are accessed via the convolution formalism, where the nucleon bound state is obtained by solving the relativistic Faddeev equation, and a relativistic shell model is used to model the atomic nucleus. We find the exciting result that the medium modifications to the polarized structure functions is about twice that of the unpolarized case.


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