Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Diquark formation across a short-range nucleon-nucleon pair is proposed as the underlying QCD physics of short-range correlations (SRC) in nuclei. SRC pairs have been proposed as the cause of distorted quark behavior in nuclei; experimentally observed quark momentum distribution distortions termed the EMC effect. The strong spatial overlap of SRC pairs brings nucleon constituents within range of inter-nucleon QCD potentials and any bonds formed - such as the diquark bond - affects their distributions. In this SRC model, diquarks form in the 3C⊗3C→3¯C channel of SU(3)C acting on valence quarks from highly overlapping nucleon wavefunctions. The most energetically favorable diquark is a valence u quark from one nucleon with a valence d quark from the other in a spin-0 state bound together via continual single gluon exchange and an attractive quantum chromodynamics short-range potential. Formation of a new scalar isospin-singlet [ud] diquark across a NN pair is proposed as the primary QCD-level theoretical foundation for SRC models of distorted structure functions in A≥3 nuclei. Contributions from the higher mass spin-1 isospin triplet states (ud), (uu) and (dd) are possible, with the spin-1 (ud) diquark proposed as a higher mass but viable structure function distortion mechanism for the spin-1 ground state deuteron. Predictions are made for lepton scattering experiments on H3 and He3 nuclear targets, with implications for the coefficients of the 3-valence quark Fock states in the nucleon wavefunction.