Longitudinal-Transverse Separation of Deep-Inelastic Scattering at Low Q² on Nucleons and Nuclei

Since the early experiments at SLAC, which discovered the nucleon substructure and led to the development of the quark parton model, deep inelastic scattering (DIS) has been the most powerful tool to investigate the partonic substructure of the nucleon. After about 30 years of experiments with electron and muon beams the nucleon structure function F{sub 2}(x,Q{sup 2}) is known with high precision over about four orders of magnitude in x and Q{sup 2}. In the region of Q{sup 2} > 1 (GeV/c){sup 2} the results of the DIS measurements are interpreted in terms of partons (quarks and gluons). The theoretical framework is provided in this case by perturbative Quantum Chromo Dynamics (pQCD), which includes scaling violations, as described by the Dokshitzer-Gribov-Lipatov-Altarelli-Parisi (DGLAP) equations. The description starts to fail when Q{sup 2} becomes of the order of 1 (GeV/c){sup 2}, where non-perturbative effects (higher-twist effects), which are still not fully understood, become important (non-pQCD). The sensitivity for order-n twist effects increases with decreasing Q{sup 2}, since they include a factor 1/(Q{sup 2}{sup n}) (n {ge} 1).