Nuclear Quark and Gluon Distributions in Coordinate Space

Abstract

In coordinate space, quark and gluon distributions of the nucleon are defined as correlation functions involving two field operators separated by a light-cone distance $y^{+}=2l$. We study the nuclear modifications of these distributions. The largest effect is a strong depletion of parton distributions (shadowing) at large longitudinal distances, which starts for all parton species at $l=2$ fm, i.e. at the average nucleon-nucleon separation in nuclei. On the other hand, the nuclear radius does not play a significant role. At $l \lsim 1$ fm, nuclear modifications of parton distributions are small. The intrinsic structure of individual nucleons is evidently not very much affected by nuclear binding. In particular, there is no evidence for a significant increase of the quark or gluon correlation length in bound nucleons.

17 pages; Latex and Postscript files

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Flavor Asymmetry of Light Quarks in the Nucleon Sea
• Moments of nuclear and nucleon structure functions at low Q^2 and the momentum sum rule
• Evolution of the nucleon structure in the lightest nuclei
• Coordinate Space Distributions of Antiquark Flavor Asymmetries in the Proton
• Refined analysis on the parton distribution functions of the proton
• QCD Aspects of Hadron Physics
• Nuclear Shadowing and the Optics of Hadronic Fluctuations