Universality of the EMC effect

Using effective field theory, we investigate nuclear modification of nucleon parton distributions (for example, the EMC effect). We show that the universality of the shape distortion in nuclear parton distributions (the factorisation of the Bjorken x and atomic number (A) dependence) is model independent and emerges naturally in effective field theory. We then extend our analysis to study the analogous nuclear modifications in isospin and spin-dependent parton distributions and generalised parton distributions. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.