Global Study of Nuclear Structure Functions

We present the results of a global study of unpolarized nuclear structure functions for a wide kinematical region of $x$ and $Q^2$. We develop a model which takes into account a number of different nuclear corrections from nuclear shadowing, Fermi motion and nuclear binding, nuclear pions and off-shell effect in bound nucleon structure functions. Within this approach we perform a statistical analysis of available data on the ratio of the nuclear structure functions $F_2$ for different nuclei in the range from Deuterium to ${}^{207}$Pb. We treat the off-shell effect in the bound nucleon structure functions and, partially, nuclear shadowing effect phenomenologically. To this end we introduce a few general (i.e. same for all nuclei) parameters which are extracted from nuclear data. As a result we obtain an excellent overall agreement between our calculations and data in the entire kinematical region of $x$ and $Q^2$. We discuss a number of applications of our model which include the calculation of the deuteron structure functions, nuclear valence and sea quark distributions and nuclear structure functions for neutrino charged-current scattering.