A NEW METHOD FOR EXTRACTING SPIN-DEPENDENT NEUTRON STRUCTURE FUNCTIONS FROM NUCLEAR DATA

High-energy electrons are currently the best probes of the internal structure of nucleons (protons and neutrons). By collecting data on electrons scattering off light nuclei, such as deuterium and helium, one can extract structure functions (SFs), which encode information about the quarks that make up the nucleon. Spin-dependent SFs, which depend on the relative polarization of the electron beam and the target nucleus, encode quark spins. Proton SFs can be measured directly from electron-proton scattering, but those of the neutron must be extracted from proton data and deuterium or helium-3 data because free neutron targets do not exist. At present, there is no reliable method for accurately determining spin-dependent neutron SFs in the low-momentum-transfer regime, where nucleon resonances are prominent and the functions are not smooth. The focus of this study was to develop a new method for extracting spin-dependent neutron SFs from nuclear data. An approximate convolution formula for nuclear SFs reduces the problem to an integral equation, for which a recursive solution method was designed. The method was then applied to recent data from proton and deuterium scattering experiments to perform a preliminary extraction of spin-dependent neutron SFs in the resonance region. The extraction method was found tomore » reliably converge for arbitrary test functions, and the validity of the extraction from data was verifi ed using a Bjorken integral, which relates integrals of SFs to a known quantity. This new information on neutron structure could be used to assess quark-hadron duality for the neutron, which requires detailed knowledge of SFs in all kinematic regimes.« less