Speaker
Christian Weiss
(Jefferson Lab)
Description
An Electron-Ion Collider would enable next-generation measurements of DIS on light
nuclei (deuteron, 3He, ...) with detection of nucleons and fragments in the nuclear
fragmentation region ("spectator tagging"). Such measurements allow one to control
the nuclear configuration during the high-energy process and could greatly advance
our understanding in several areas of partonic structure and QCD: (a) precision
measurements of neutron structure functions (including spin) in electron-deuteron
scattering with proton tagging, eliminating nuclear binding through on-shell
extrapolation in the recoil proton momentum; (b) controled studies of the nuclear
modifications of quark and gluon densities (EMC effect, antishadowing), using the
recoil momentum dependence to control the size of nuclear configurations; (c) novel
studies of coherence and nuclear shadowing at x << 0.1 using tagged DIS. We present
an overview of the physics applications of spectator tagging at intermediate and
small x and comment on theoretical challenges and experimental requirements.
We report about results of an R&D project aiming to demonstrate the feasibility of
spectator tagging with EIC and quantify the physics impact.
Author
Christian Weiss
(Jefferson Lab)
