Short-Range Structure of Nuclei

The nucleons in a nucleus can form short-range correlated pairs. A recent Jefferson Lab electron scattering experiment. where a proton was knocked-out of the nucleus with high momentum transfer and high missing momentum, has shown that in C-12 the neutron-Proton pairs are nearly twenty times as prevalent as proton-proton pairs and, by inference, neutron-neutron pairs. This difference between the types of pairs has been shown to be due to the short-range tensor part of the nucleon-nucleon interaction.