Description of inclusive scattering of few-GeV electrons from finite A nuclei and nuclear matter

Abstract We study eA scattering in a model where the total nuclear structure function is a convolution of components W N for an isolated nucleon and W N A for a nucleus composed of point nucleons. W N is represented by its elastic and lowest inelastic parts. W N A has been computed from its asymptotic limit, supplemented by final-state interactions due to binary collisions between the knocked-out and core nucleons. The reduced response per nucleon φ = ( q M )W N A appears to be practically independent of mass number A and momemtum transfer q . Consequently, quasi-elastic inclusive cross sections per nucleon for given kinematic conditions are predicted to depend only weakly on the target and the same transpires from the data. Generally the agreement between predictions and the data is good. Occasional exceptions are regions of low energy loss, where the small cross sections are shown to be sensitive to details of the single nucleon momentum distribution and to FSI, involving multiple collisions. Approach, results and conclusions are compared with the same, starting from the PWIA.