EMC effect and short-range correlations
Quarks inside a nucleus move differently from quarks inside a free proton or neutron, an effect found by the European Muon Collaboration (EMC) in 1983. Pairs of nucleons that briefly overlap at short distance appear to be connected to it.
Why it matters
It shows that nucleons in nuclei are modified objects, which affects how nuclear-target data are used to extract quark distributions and neutrino interaction rates.
Review
Hen, Miller, Piasetzky, Weinstein, Nucleon-nucleon correlations, short-lived excitations, and the quarks within, Reviews of Modern Physics, 2017. https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.09748 reference checked
Timestamp record
- Signed record
- 7a074c9c2794…
- Public log
- Entry 282, in checkpoint 2,123
- In the log by
- Block 969,698, 2026-10-03
This text was in the PubPhys log by that date. The date says nothing about when the problem was first posed.