Electromagnetic response of confined Dirac particles

Abstract

The eigenstates of a single massless Dirac particle confined in a linear potential are calculated exactly by direct solution of the Dirac equation. The electromagnetic structure functions are calculated from the Dirac wave functions of the ground and excited states of the particle by coupling to its conserved vector current. We obtain the longitudinal and transverse structure functions as a function of y=nu-q, where nu and q are the energy and momentum transferred to the target in its rest frame. At values of q>~2.5 GeV, much larger than the characteristic energy scale ~440 MeV of the confining potential, the response exhibits y scaling, a generalization of Bjorken scaling. We compare the exact structure functions with those obtained from the ground state wave functions in the plane wave impulse approximation. The deviation from the Callan-Gross relation is compared with the parton model prediction.