Revealing Nuclear Pions Using Electron Scattering

Abstract

A model for the pionic components of nuclear wave functions is obtained from light front dynamical calculations of binding energies and densities. The pionic effects are small enough to be consistent with measured nuclear di-muon production data and with the nucleon sea. But the pion effects are large enough to predict substantial nuclear enhancement of the cross section for longitudinally polarized virtual photons for the kinematics accessible at Jefferson Laboratory.