Study of the derivative expansions for the nuclear structure functions

Abstract

We study the convergence of the series expansions sometimes used in the analysis of the nuclear effects in deep inelastic scattering (DIS) processes induced by leptons. The recent advances in statistics and quality of the data, in particular for neutrinos calls for a good control of the theoretical uncertainties of the models used in the analysis. Using realistic nuclear spectral functions which include nucleon correlations, we find that the convergence of the derivative expansions to the full results is poor except at very low values of x.