From Desire to Data: How JLab’s Experimental Program Evolved
Measurements of the EMC effect in the tritium and helium-3 mirror nuclei are reported. The data were obtained by the MARATHON Jefferson Lab experiment, which performed deep inelastic electron scattering from deuterium and the three-body nuclei, using a cryogenic gas target system and the High Resolution Spectrometers of the Hall A Facility of the Lab. The data cover the Bjorken x range from 0.20 to 0.83, corresponding to a squared four-momentum transfer Q2 range from 2.7 to 11.9 (GeV/c)2, and to an invariant mass W of the final hadronic state greater than 1.84 GeV/c2. The tritium EMC effect measurement is the first of its kind. The MARATHON experimental results are compared to results from previous measurements by DESY-HERMES and JLab-Hall C experiments, as well as with few-body theoretical predictions.