Jefferson Lab at 4 GeV offered significant improvements over previous experiments. The solid angle of the HMS as well as its large momentum acceptance allowed measurements in previously unexplored regions of and . A program of measurements with 4 GeV beam ran in Hall C in Summer 1996, and greatly increased the range of the available data for (GeV/c). Cross sections were measured at seven angles and are shown in Fig. 4 for the Fe data. Data was also taken on H, C, and Au targets. Scattered electrons were detected in the HMS and SOS spectrometers using their standard detector packages.
Cross section were measured for all targets, and a -scaling analysis performed. An article was published in Physical Review Letters [29] describing the inclusive scattering measurement and the analysis of in terms of the -scaling variable. The nuclear structure function was also extracted and scaling in both Bjorken and Nachtmann have been studied. Also the -dependence of the structure function for fixed bins of and has been studied. An article was published in Physical Review C [4] presenting the structure function results. These results along with some new results will be summarized in the following sections.
While this experiment was a significant improvement over previous measurements, it was approved for just 8 days of beam time. The emphasis of the measurement was to maximize the and coverage on one target (Fe). Lower precision data was taken on the other nuclei. Because of this, there was not enough deuterium data at the highest and values to make precise comparisons between the high- cross sections in heavy nuclei, where multi-nucleon short range correlations are believed to dominate the scattering, and the cross sections from deuterium, where the high- components are generated entirely by two nucleon short range correlations.