Neutron spin structure with polarized deuterons and spectator proton tagging at EIC

Abstract

The neutron's deep-inelastic structure functions provide essential information for the flavor separation of the nucleon parton densities, the nucleon spin decomposition, and precision studies of QCD phenomena in the flavor-singlet and nonsinglet sectors. Traditional inclusive measurements on nuclear targets are limited by dilution from scattering on protons, Fermi motion and binding effects, final-state interactions, and nuclear shadowing at x << 0.1. An Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) would enable next-generation measurements of neutron structure with polarized deuteron beams and detection of forward-moving spectator protons over a wide range of recoil momenta (0 < p_R < several 100 MeV in the nucleus rest frame). The free neutron structure functions could be obtained by extrapolating the measured recoil momentum distributions to the on-shell point. The method eliminates nuclear modifications and can be applied to polarized scattering, as well as to semi-inclusive and exclusive final states. We review the prospects for neutron structure measurements with spectator tagging at EIC, the status of R&D efforts, and the accelerator and detector requirements.

11 pages, 3 figures. To appear in proceedings of Tensor Polarized Solid Target Workshop, Jefferson Lab, March 10-12, 2014

References in corpus (6)

• Parton distributions for the LHC
• Short Range Correlations and the EMC Effect
• Spin Structure of the Nucleon - Status and Recent Results
• The Challenge of the EMC Effect: existing data and future directions
• High precision determination of the $Q^2$-evolution of the Bjorken Sum
• Final-state interactions in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering off the Deuteron

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Polarized electron-deuteron deep-inelastic scattering with spectator nucleon tagging
• Deep-inelastic electron-deuteron scattering with spectator nucleon tagging at the electron-ion collider. Extracting free nucleon structure
• Neutron Spin Structure from e-3He Scattering with Double Spectator Tagging at the Electron-Ion Collider