The European Muon Collaboration effect in Light-Front Hamiltonian Dynamics

Abstract: A rigorous light-front formalism for electron deep inelastic scattering on unpolarized nuclei, in Bjorken limit, is reported. It preserves Poincar\'e covariance, macroscopic locality, both number of particles and momentum sum rules. The scheme is applied to the A=3 iso-doublet, very relevant in view of the planned operation with unpolarized and polarized beams at the Electron-Ion Collider. At variance with previous light-front estimates, our procedure, including a realistic nuclear description and free-nucleon structure functions, predicts a sizeable European Muon Collaboration effect for $^3$He. This will allow to analyze deviations from the proposed baseline in terms of genuine QCD effects. The extension to heavier nuclei is straightforward, although numerically challenging.