Electromagnetic responses induced by one- and two-body nuclear currents in inclusive electron-nucleus scattering

Abstract: The longitudinal and transverse nuclear response functions encode information about the electromagnetic behavior of the nuclear target probed in inclusive electron-nucleus scattering. We present a microscopic calculation based on an independent-particle model, where a non-relativistic nuclear mean-field potential governs both the initial and final hadronic states of the interaction. We add dynamically generated short-range nucleon-nucleon correlations (SRCs), as well as meson-exchange currents (MECs) derived from one-pion exchange and intermediate $Δ$-resonance excitation. We evaluate the contributions from one- and two-nucleon knock-out reactions to nuclear responses in inclusive electron scattering from $<sup>{12}\mathrm{C}$ in the quasielastic and dip regions. We demonstrate that for quasielastic kinematics, SRCs quench both nuclear responses, while the MECs enhance the transverse signal, substantially improving the predicted transverse-to-longitudinal ratio. In the dip region between the quasielastic and the $Δ$-resonance peaks, we find that the observed excess of transverse strength originates mainly from explicit two-nucleon knock-out following a $Δ$-resonance excitation.