Jet quenching in lepton nucleus scattering

Two mechanisms for attenuation of produced hadrons in 10-100 GeV deep inelastic lepton-nucleus (lA) reactions are contrasted and compared to data: (1) independent quark fragmentation followed by final state intranuclear cascading and (2) string-flip fragmentation. We find that contrary to previous estimates, the observed suppression of low-momentum secondaries is substantially greater than can be accounted for by the first mechanism. The second mechanism, which involves a strong nuclear modification of quark fragmentation up to jet energies ≅ 10-20 GeV, appears to be more consistent with the available data. (orig.)