The anomalous behaviour of nuclear structure functions revisited

The anomalous behaviour of the nuclear structure functions is discussed in the framework of a simple statistical parton model, where the nucleus is treated as a bag of uncorrelated partons. We show that the model reproduces correctly the main features of the effect and, to some extent, it is even successful at the numerical level. The characteristic prediction of the model (to be tested experimentally) is a saturation law: for largeA (=nuclear mass number) the anomalous nuclear behaviour of the structure functions is described by a universal (i.e.A-independent) function of the Bjorken variable.