Hadron formation and attenuation in deep inelastic lepton scattering off nuclei

We investigate hadron formation in deep inelastic lepton scattering on N, Kr and Xe nuclei in the kinematic regime of the HERMES experiment. The elementary electron-nucleon interaction is described within the event generator PYTHIA while a full coupled-channel treatment of the final state interactions is included by means of a BUU transport model. We find a good agreement with the measured charged hadron multiplicity ratio R-M(h) for N and Kr targets by accounting for the deceleration and absorption of the primarily produced particles as well as for the creation of secondary hadrons in the final state interactions. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.