Off-shell effects in quasielastic electron nucleus scattering

Using the Ward-Takahashi identity, on-shell condition, bound Dirac equation and off-shell expansion, a reduced version of half off-shell virtual photon nucleon vertex has been suggested. The vertex are decomposed into several different order terms: the on-shell terms, first and second off-shell terms. The off-shell behaviour of the form factors is discussed in the one meson loop model. Using the reduced vertex and parametrized off-shell form factors the quasielastic response functions are calculated for several nuclei at ¦q¦–k_f and for⁵⁶Fe at large ¦q¦ up to 1.14 GeV/c and at ?q²=0.9 (GeV/c)². The Coulomb sums are evaluated and a comparison of the theoretical prediction with data is given. The off-shell electron nucleon cross section is calculated and compared with the “cc1” off-shell extrapolation.