Extraction of the Ratio of the Neutron to Proton Structure Functions from Deep Inelastic Scattering

Abstract

We study the nuclear ($A$) dependence of the European Muon Collaboration (EMC) effect at high values of $x$ ($x \geq 0.6$). Our approach makes use of conventional nuclear degrees of freedom within the Relativistic Impulse Approximation. By performing a non-relativistic series expansion we demonstrate that relativistic corrections make a substantial contribution to the effect at $x \gtrsim 0.6$ and show that the ratio of neutron to proton structure functions extracted from a global fit to all nuclei is not inconsistent with values obtained from the deuteron.