https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-025-01505-9
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
Observing short-range correlations in nuclei through 
photo-production
Department of Physics, The George Washington University, 725 21st St. NW, 20052, Washington, DC, USA
Received:
14
February
2024
Accepted:
24
January
2025
Published online:
27
February
2025
Short-range correlations (SRCs) are a universal feature of nuclear structure. A wide range of measurements, primarily using electron scattering, have revealed SRC properties, such as their abundance in different nuclei, as well as the strong preference for proton-neutron pairing over proton-proton or neutron-neutron pairing. Despite the inherent complexity of many-body systems, a number of the salient features of electron scattering measurements are described by a simple, factorized theory called Generalized Contact Formalism. A key element of this theory, the factorization of the interaction with a hard probe, has yet to be tested. An experiment conducted at Jefferson Lab in 2021 collected data from scattering a tagged photon beam, with an energy up to 10 GeV, from several nuclear targets, measuring final state particles in the large-acceptance GlueX spectrometer. In this paper, we propose a test of probe factorization by measuring cross section ratios sensitive to proton-proton pair prevalence and relative SRC abundances in 4He and 12C. We present GCF predictions of the observables and make projections of the expected precision the experiment can achieve.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
