n-p short range correlations from (p,2p + n) measurements

We studied the 1 2 C(p, 2p + n) reaction at beam momenta of 5.9, 8.0, and 9.0 GeV/c. For quasielastic (p, 2p) events p f , the momentum of the knocked-out proton before the reaction, was compared (event by event) with p n ,the coincident neutron momentum. For ‖p n ‖ > k F = 0.220 GeV/c (the Fermi momentum) a strong back-to-back directional correlation between p f and p n was observed, indicative of short-range n-p correlations. From p n and p f we constructed the distributions of c.m. and relative motion in the longitudinal direction for correlated pairs. We also determined that 49 ′ 13% of events with ‖p f ‖ > k F had directionally correlated neutrons with ‖p n ‖ > k F .