It has been known for several decades that the inelastic structure of the nucleon is modified by the presence of the nuclear medium. This modification is called the EMC effect. However, there is still no consensus as to the underlying QCD-based quark-gluon dynamics driving the effect. One approach to describe the EMC effect is to slightly modify the structure of all the nucleons in the nucleus. Recent evidence, however, suggests that the EMC effect may arise due to two-nucleon Short Range Correlations (SRC), which are pairs of nucleons close together in the nucleus. If this is true, it implies that nucleons are largely unmodified most of the time, but have their structure significantly modified when they temporarily fluctuate into SRC pairs. In this presentation, I will discuss the experimental evidence linking the EMC effect to two-nucleon SRCs. I will then describe a new data-driven phenomenological model of the EMC effect based on neutron-proton SRC pairs, and I will show that this model can consistently describe the effect across nuclei.
Jin Huang