The two-body electrodisintegration of 4He studied through the (e,e'X) reaction

In this thesis a study of the electrodisintegration of 4/He into a proton and a triton is discussed. The purpose of this investigation is to obtain the proton spectral function which in turn is expected to contain information on the short-range and tensor correlations in the four-nucleon system. The 4He(e,e'p)3H experiment was performed with the electron-scattering facility at NIKHEF-K. A specially designed cryogenic target system was used (ch. 3). From the data precise absolute cross sections were extracted with good missing-energy resolution as a funtion of missing momentum in the range 10<|pm| <350 MeV/c (ch. 4). The data were taken in two kinetamical configurations, corresponding to different combinations of the transferred four-impuls Q2 and the polarization parameter of the exchanged virtual photon (ch. 5). In PIWA the (e,e'p) cross section factorizes into an off-shell electron-proton cross section and the spectral funtion. In the region where both kinetamics overlap a strong dependence of the extracted spectral-function results on the kinetamic variables was observed whereas such a dependence should not occur in PWIA. In order to understand this apparent breakdown of the PWIA the influence of rescattering of the outgoing proton on the residual nucleus or final-state interactions (ch. 6) and the electron-proton coupling on the spectral function (ch. 7) have been investigated. The spectral-function data for the full missing-moment range have been compared to various theoretical results (ch. 8). It turns out that the data are best described in the microscopic framework starting from a correlated wave function. In ch. 9 the results are presented obtained with the 4He(e,e'3H)p reaction from which information can be obtained about the proton spectral function at momentum values up to 550 MeV/c. At these high proton moments a more direct signature of pair-correlations in the 4He system can be obtained. 242 refs.; 85 figs.; 24 tabs