On the significance of radiative corrections in EMC measurements

Deep-inelastic scattering allows examination of the parton distribution functions (PDFs) of quarks within nucleons and nuclei. Ever since the EMC collaboration initially gauged the distinction in PDFs between iron and deuterium, termed the "EMC effect" (1983), substantial efforts have been invested in comprehensively characterizing the nuclear A dependence of the structure function and delving into its origins. However, discrepancies across different experiments, such as SLAC and JLab (Hall-C and CLAS), make extraction of the A dependence sensitive to the selection of data sets. Through a comparison of different methods and approximations employed for calculating radiative corrections, we have pinpointed subtle differences that, despite their small scale, significantly influence the size of the EMC ratios, which is parametrized by taking the slope of the ratios for 0.3