Shadowing, binding, and off-shell effects in nuclear deep-inelastic scattering.

We present a unified description of nuclear deep inelastic scattering (DIS) over the whole region 0 < x < 1 of the Bjorken variable. Our approach is based on a relativistically covariant formalism which uses analytical properties of quark correlators. In the laboratory frame it naturally incorporates two mechanisms of DIS: (I) scattering from quarks and antiquarks in the target and (II) production of quark-antiquark pairs followed by interactions with the target. We first calculate structure functions of the free nucleon and develop a model for the quark spectral functions. We show that mechanism (II) is responsible for the sea quark content of the nucleon while mechanism (I) governs the valence part of the nucleon structure functions. We find that the coherent interaction of q̄q pairs with nucleons in the nucleus leads to shadowing at small x and discuss this effect in detail. In the large x region DIS takes place mainly on a single nucleon. There we focus on the derivation of the convolution model. We point out that the off-shell properties of the bound nucleon structure function give rise to sizable nuclear effects. PACS numbers: 13.60.Hb, 25.30.-c Typeset using REVTEX