Does Deep Inelastic Scattering Reveal the True Nature of Baryons?

[Glenn G]

Hi,
There's a pic on wiki page (Feynman type) showing deep inelastic scattering where a fast lepton interacts with a quark in a baryon by a virtual photon (clearly that doesn't change particle type) then there's an arrow labelled X that I guess is maybe a stream of other hadrons (mesons mostly I guess provided conservation laws hold). It then goes on to talk about the target being shattered by the interaction ? I can't see what is meant by this if the original quark components of the target remain the same?

I get the idea that DES is a step up from Rutherford in that it got to penetrate the nucleus and that it apparently from analysing the angles made it clear that there were 3 charge centres in the baryon. But it then goes to talk about high energy electron means small wavelength and using that line of argument to discuss being able to probe small distances ... now I don't get why that argument tallies with what it said in the rest of the discussion ( I have read about de Broglie in connection with electron diffraction that I'm now happy with)

Any help graciously received.
G.

 

[DrClaude]

Hi,
There's a pic on wiki page

Which page?

 

[Glenn G]

 

[mfb]

If it is inelastic, X is not the initial hadron (alone) by definition. It can be the initial hadron plus something else (mesons dominate, but baryon/antibaryon pairs are also possible), it can be an excited state of the baryon, but it can also be a completely different baryon (always with the option to have additional hadrons). All those things are summarized as DIS, so "X" is used to show that we don't look at a specific final state here.