Neutron Structure Functions

Abstract

Neutron structure functions can be extracted from proton and deuteron data and a representation of the deuteron structure. This procedure does not require DIS approximations or quark structure assumptions. We find that the results depend critically on properly accounting for the Q^2 dependence of proton and deuteron data. We interpolate the data to fixed Q^2, and extract the ratio of neutron to proton structure functions. The extracted ratio decreases with increasing x, up to x \approx 0.9, while there are no data available to constrain the behavior at larger x.

16 pages, 6 figures