Interpretations of the nuclear dependence of deep-inelastic lepton scattering

A review is presented of data and theoretical interpretations of A dependent effects observed in the deep inelastic scattering of neutrinos and charged leptons from nuclei. After a detailed summary of the experimental situation and survey of the broad spectrum of proposed explanations, I concentrate on the implications of a pion exchange model. This conventional nuclear physics approach provides a unified quantitative description of all features of the present data except, possibly, for the normalization at small x. The pion exchange model reproduces the magnitude and shape of the depression below unity of the ratio of structure functions F2/sup A/(x,Q2)/F2/sup D/(x,Q2) for 0.2 < x < 0.6, observed in all experiments, its rise above unity as x → 1, and the weak enhancement of the antiquark distribution anti q/sup A/(x) demonstrated by the neutrino experiments. If the normalization of the European Muon Collaboration data is reduced by 5%, the model would be in fine agreement for all x. Expectations are presented for the A dependence of massive lepton pair production in hadron collisions. The review concludes with a list of desirable future experiments. 36 refs., 11 figs