Extraction of the ratio of the neutron to proton structure functions from deep inelastic scattering

We study the nuclear (A) dependence of the European Muon Collaboration (EMC) effect at high values of x (x ≥ 0.6). Our approach makes use of conventional nuclear degrees of freedom within the Relativistic Impulse Approximation. By performing a nonrelativistic series expansion we demonstrate that relativistic corrections make a substantial contribution to the effect at x ≳ 0.6 and show that the ratio of neutron to proton structure functions extracted from a global fit to all nuclei is not inconsistent with values obtained from the deuteron.