The Transparent Nucleus: Unperturbed inverse kinematics nucleon knockout measurements with a 48 GeV/c carbon beam

Measuring ground-state distributions of nucleons in atomic nuclei is a formidable challenge in nuclear physics, often met by particle knockout reactions. In this talk I present results from a new fully exclusive proton-knockout measurement in inverse kinematics at high energy that overcomes limitations posed by initial and final state interactions (ISI/FSI). The experiment was carried out at the JINR (Russia), where a $^{12}$C beam at 48~GeV/c impinged on a liquid hydrogen target, the reaction products were measured with the BM$@$N detector setup, using in particular a proton spectrometer and charged particle tracking system. By missing momentum reconstruction, quasielastic $pp$ scattering at large angles is identified, while the selection of the heavy fragment suppresses FSI. It is shown that this kind of $^{12}$C($p,2p$)$^{11}$B reaction probes single nucleon properties in a single-step knockout reaction, being in agreement with theoretical calculations. We probe Short-Range Correlations (SRC) in the same way by the break up of SRC pairs in $^{12}$C($p,2pN$)$^{10}$B/$^{10}$Be reactions. We not only identify SRCs in such kinematical conditions for the first time but also deduce factorization and other pair properties from direct measurements.