RELATIVISTIC MEAN FIELDS AND THE EMC EFFECT

The effects of nuclear binding and Fermi motion on deep-inelastic structure functions are studied in relativistic mean-field treatment. For a relativistic Fermi gas of nucleons interacting with mean scalar and vector fields, the nucleon light-cone momentum distribution has a peak which is shifted by the nucleon Fermi energy instead of the average separation energy, as often assumed in non-relativistic treatments. The results indicate that mean-field contributions to nucleon binding can account for only a rather small fraction of the depletion of nuclear structure functions at x is similar to 0.5.