EMC Effect at 11 GeV

I will report on the Jefferson Lab (JLab) Hall C experiment E12-10-008, which completed data taking in 2023. The experiment used a 10.5 GeV electron beam incident on a variety of cryogenic and solid nuclear targets to measure inclusive electron scattering across a wide range of nuclei. The focus is on the EMC effect—the modification of the internal structure of bound nucleons relative to free nucleons—which manifests at Bjorken-x < 1. By measuring cross-section ratios from light to heavy nuclei, this experiment provides new insights into how quark distributions are modified in the nuclear environment. In addition to presenting the N/Z dependence of the EMC effect for light and medium nuclei, I will discuss theoretical predictions for the isospin and nuclear structure dependence of light and medium nuclei based on many-body calculations using variational Monte Carlo methods.