Isospin dependence of nuclear EMC effect from global QCD analysis

Abstract

We perform a new global QCD analysis of unpolarized parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the nucleon from proton, deuteron and $A=3$ data, including recent measurements of ${}^3$He/$D$ and ${}^3$H/$D$ cross section ratios from the MARATHON experiment at Jefferson Lab. Simultaneously inferring the PDFs and nucleon off-shell corrections allows both to be determined consistently, without theoretical assumptions about the isospin dependence of nuclear effects. The analysis provides strong evidence for the need of nucleon off-shell corrections to describe the $A=3$ data, with large isoscalar and a suggestion of nonzero isovector contributions in $A\le 3$ nuclei. We find that the extracted EMC ratios of nuclear to nucleon structure functions for $A=2$ and 3 differ from those naively extrapolated from heavy nuclei down to low $A$.

Comments: 32 pages, 10 figures