Neutron Spin Structure from e-3He Scattering with Double Spectator Tagging at the Electron-Ion Collider

Understand

The spin structure function of the neutron is traditionally determined by measuring the spin asymmetry of inclusive electron deep inelastic scattering (DIS) off polarized3He nuclei.

• In such experiments, nuclear effects can lead to large model dependencies in the interpretation of experimental data.
• Here we study the feasibility of suppressing such model dependencies by tagging both spectator protons in the process of DIS off neutrons in3He at the forthcoming Electron-Ion Collider (EIC).
• This allows reconstructing the momentum of the struck neutron to ensure it was nearly at rest in the initial state, thereby reducing sensitivity to nuclear corrections, and suppress contributions from electron DIS off protonsin3He.