Motivated by the wide range of kinematics covered by current and planned deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) facilities, we revisit the formalism, practical implementation, and numerical impact of target mass corrections (TMCs) for DIS on unpolarized nuclear targets. An important aspect is that we only use nuclear and later partonic degrees of freedom, carefully avoiding a picture of the nucleus in terms of nucleons. After establishing that formulae used for individual nucleon targets , derived in the Operator Product Expansion (OPE) formalism, are indeed applicable to nuclear targets, we rewrite expressions for nuclear TMCs in terms of re-scaled (or averaged) kinematic variables. As a consequence, we find a representation for nuclear TMCs that is approximately independent of the nuclear target. We go on to construct a single-parameter fit for all nuclear targets that is in good numerical agreement with full computations of TMCs. We discuss in detail qualitative and quantitative differences between nuclear TMCs built in the OPE and the parton model formalisms, as well as give numerical predictions for current and future facilities.

中文翻译：

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轻子-核 DIS 中的目标质量校正：核 PDF 的理论和应用

在当前和计划中的深度非弹性散射（DIS）设施所涵盖的广泛运动学的推动下，我们重新审视了DIS的目标质量校正（TMC）对非极化核目标的形式主义、实际实施和数值影响。一个重要的方面是，我们只使用核和后来的部分自由度，小心地避免用核子来描述原子核。在确定用于单个核子目标的公式（以算子乘积展开（OPE）形式导出）确实适用于核目标后，我们根据重新缩放（或平均）的运动学变量重写了核 TMC 的表达式。因此，我们发现核 TMC 的表示大致独立于核目标。我们继续构建适合所有核目标的单参数拟合，该单参数拟合与 TMC 的完整计算具有良好的数值一致性。我们详细讨论了 OPE 中构建的核 TMC 与 Parton 模型形式之间的定性和定量差异，并对当前和未来的设施进行了数值预测。