New Developments in Light-Front Nuclear Structure
Motivated by forthcoming high-energy experiments at Jefferson Lab and the Electron-Ion Collider, this dissertation develops a novel relativistic formulation of nuclear structure. While previous scattering models were updated to include nucleon-nucleon short-range correlations (SRCs) to explain cross-section plateaus, modern high-kinematics experiments require a relativistic approach. We reformulate conventional tools into a light-front-quantized framework, utilizing density functional theory and similarity renormalization group techniques. Our calculations successfully reproduce nuclear binding energies, shell structure, and SRC physics. However, we show that a purely nucleonic description fails to fully capture inclusive electron-nucleus data or the plateaus at high Bjorken-$x_B$. This demonstrates the critical importance of inelastic final-state interactions currently omitted by standard SRC phenomenology.