Isospin-dependent nuclear forces play a fundamental role in nuclear structure. In relativistic models of nuclear structure constructed at the quark level these isovector nuclear forces affect the $u$ and $d$ quarks differently, leading to nontrivial flavor-dependent modifications of the nuclear parton distributions. We explore the effect of isospin dependent forces for parity-violating deep inelastic scattering on nuclear targets and demonstrate that the cross sections for nuclei with $N\ne Z$ are sensitive to the flavor dependence of the EMC effect. Indeed, for nuclei like lead and gold we find that these flavor-dependent effects are large.

• Received 4 April 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.182301