The discovery in the early 80's by the European Muon Collaboration (EMC) that nuclear structure functions differ substantially from those of free nucleons caused a shock in the nuclear physics community. A few years later the EMC discovered the so-called ``spin crisis', which probably had even larger ramifications for nuclear/particle physics. With this background it is surprising that there has been no experimental and little theoretical investigation of the spin-dependent structure functions of atomic nuclei.
In this talk we present results for the spin-dependent structure functions of atomic nuclei and nuclear matter. The quark degrees of freedom in nuclei are accessed via the convolution formalism. Where the nucleon bound state is obtained by solving the relativistic Faddeev equation, and a relativistic shell model is used to model the atomic nucleus. We find the exciting result that the medium modifications to the polarized structure functions are about twice that of the unpolarized case.
Back to the theory seminar page.