Global Study of Nuclear Structure Functions

We present the results of a phenomenological study of unpolarized nuclear structure functions for a wide kinematical region of x and Q2. 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 nuclear binding, nuclear pions 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 F2 for different nuclei in the range from Deuterium to 207Pb. 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. We extract such parameters from a 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 Q2. 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. [email protected] [email protected]