Mass dependence of short-range correlations in nuclei and the EMC effect

Department of Physics and Astronomy, Ghent University, Proeftuinstraat 86, B-9000 Gent, Belgium

^a e-mail: wim.cosyn@ugent.be

Published online: 20 March 2014

Abstract

We sketch an approximate method to quantify the number of correlated pairs in any nucleus A. It is based on counting independent-particle model (IPM) nucleon-nucleon pairs in a relative S-state with no radial excitation. We show that IPM pairs with those quantum numbers are most prone to short-range correlations and are at the origin of the high-momentum tail of the nuclear momentum distributions. Our method allows to compute the a₂ ratios extracted from inclusive electron scattering. Furthermore, our results reproduce the observed linear correlation between the number of correlated pairs and the magnitude of the EMC effect. We show that the width of the pair center-ofmass distribution in exclusive two-nucleon knockout yields information on the quantum numbers of the pairs.