We present the results of a phenomenological study of unpolarized nuclear structure functions for a wide kinematical region of x and Q 2 . As a basis of our phenomenology we develop a model which takes into account a number of different nuclear effects including nuclear shadowing, Fermi motion and binding, nuclear pion excess and off-shell correction to bound nucleon structure functions. Within this approach we perform a statistical analysis of available data on the ratio of the nuclear structure functions F 2 for different nuclei in the range from the deuteron to the lead. We express the off-shell effect and the effective scattering amplitude describing nuclear shadowing in terms of few parameters which are common to all nuclei and have a clear physical interpretation. The parameters are then extracted from statistical analysis of data. As a result, we obtain an excellent overall agreement between our calculations and data in the entire kinematical region of x and Q 2 . We discuss a number of applications of our model which include the calculation of the deuteron structure functions, nuclear valence and sea quark distributions and nuclear structure functions for neutrino charged-current scattering. * kulagin@ms2.inr.ac.ru † Roberto.Petti@cern.ch

We have studied the muon neutrino and antineutrino quasi-elastic (QEL) scattering reactions (ν μ n → μ − p andν μ p → μ + n) using a set of experimental data collected by the NOMAD Collaboration. We have performed measurements of the cross-section of these processes on a nuclear target (mainly carbon) normalizing it to the total ν μ (ν μ ) charged-current cross section. The results for the flux-averaged QEL cross sections in the (anti)neutrino energy interval 3-100 GeV are σ qel ν μ = (0.92 ± 0.02(stat) ± 0.06(syst)) × 10 −38 cm 2 and σ qel ν μ = (0.81 ± 0.05(stat) ± 0.09(syst)) × 10 −38 cm 2 for neutrino and antineutrino, respectively. The axial mass parameter M A was extracted from the measured quasi-elastic neutrino cross section. The corresponding result is M A = 1.05±0.02(stat)±0.06(syst) GeV. It is consistent with the axial mass values recalculated from the antineutrino cross section and extracted from the pure Q 2 shape analysis of the high purity sample of ν μ quasielastic 2-track events, but has smaller systematic error and should be quoted as the main result of this work. Our measured M A is found to be in good agreement with the world average value obtained in previous deuterium filled bubble chamber experiments. The NOMAD measurement of M A is lower than those recently published by K2K and MiniBooNE Collaborations. However, within the large errors quoted by these experiments on M A , these results are compatible with the more precise NOMAD value.PACS 13.15.+g · 25.30.Pt

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The ProtoDUNE-SP detector is a single-phase liquid argon time projection chamber with an active volume of 7.2× 6.1× 7.0 m3. It is installed at the CERN Neutrino Platform in a specially-constructed beam that delivers charged pions, kaons, protons, muons and electrons with momenta in the range 0.3 GeV/c to 7 GeV/c. Beam line instrumentation provides accurate momentum measurements and particle identification. The ProtoDUNE-SP detector is a prototype for the first far detector module of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, and it incorporates full-size components as designed for that module. This paper describes the beam line, the time projection chamber, the photon detectors, the cosmic-ray tagger, the signal processing and particle reconstruction. It presents the first results on ProtoDUNE-SP's performance, including noise and gain measurements, dE/dx calibration for muons, protons, pions and electrons, drift electron lifetime measurements, and photon detector noise, signal sensitivity and time resolution measurements. The measured values meet or exceed the specifications for the DUNE far detector, in several cases by large margins. ProtoDUNE-SP's successful operation starting in 2018 and its production of large samples of high-quality data demonstrate the effectiveness of the single-phase far detector design.

We present a unified description of nuclear deep inelastic scattering (DIS) over the whole region 0 < x < 1 of the Bjorken variable. Our approach is based on a relativistically covariant formalism which uses analytical properties of quark correlators. In the laboratory frame it naturally incorporates two mechanisms of DIS: (I) scattering from quarks and antiquarks in the target and (II) production of quark-antiquark pairs followed by interactions with the target. We first calculate structure functions of the free nucleon and develop a model for the quark spectral functions. We show that mechanism (II) is responsible for the sea quark content of the nucleon while mechanism (I) governs the valence part of the nucleon structure functions. We find that the coherent interaction ofqq pairs with nucleons in the nucleus leads to shadowing at small x and discuss this effect in detail. In the large x region DIS takes place mainly on a single nucleon. There we focus on the derivation of the convolution model. We point out that the off-shell properties of the bound nucleon structure function give rise to sizable nuclear effects.