Preliminary Results from the 12 GeV EMC Effect Experiment in Jefferson Lab's Hall C

In 1983, results published by the European Muon Collaboration (EMC) at CERN suggested that a nucleon's structure is modified when multiple nucleons are bound together in the nuclear environment. This modification, now known as the EMC Effect, was largely unexpected and has been the subject of a significant amount of theoretical and experimental effort to determine its underlying cause. Despite this effort, physicists are still unable to pin down the driving mechanism behind the EMC Effect.

Experiment E12-10-008 at Jefferson Lab aims to shine a new light on this 40-year-old problem. This experiment collected data in Hall C from Fall 2022 through Spring 2023, utilizing the high luminosity 12 GeV electron beam of CEBAF to probe the quark structure of nearly 20 different nuclei. In this talk, I will give an overview of the EMC Effect, highlight the motivation and key physics goals for experiment E12-10-008, and present preliminary results from our analysis.