Mechanisms for hadron continuum scattering from complex nuclei

The continuum spectra of hadrons scattered from complex nuclei are influenced by several features of the strong interaction, even at beam energies and momentum transfers where an incoherent quasifree mechanism is formally valid. These hadrons may suffer multiple scattering, they may interact with nucleons in correlated motion with other bound nucleons, and the spectra may become contaminated with events including pion production. In this work, nuclear spectra at energy losses less than those for free beam-nucleon scattering are compared as ratios to similar spectra for deuterium, an idea recently used for simpler electron scattering spectra, and as ratios to scattering from free nucleons, as the single-nucleon responses in scaling formats. A large array of data is organized to distinguish among the possibilities leading to hadron continuum spectra from complex nuclei, and the relative contributions of single-nucleon responses and other mechanisms are distinguished. It is concluded that for a range of three-momentum transfers near 500 MeV/c it is correlations among bound nucleons that generate the hadron spectra.