Nuclear waste cleanup is challenged by the handling of feed stocks that are both unknown and complex. Plasma filtering, operating on dissociated elements, offers advantages over chemical methods in processing such wastes. The costs incurred by plasma
mass filtering for nuclear waste pretreatment, before ultimate disposal, are similar to those for chemical pretreatment. However, significant savings might be achieved in minimizing the waste mass. This advantage may be realized over a large range of chemical waste compositions, thereby addressing the heterogeneity of legacy nuclear waste.
Parity-violating deep inelastic scattering (PVDIS) has been proposed as an important new tool to extract the flavor and isospin dependence of parton distributions in the nucleon. We discuss finite-Q^2 effects in PVDIS asymmetries arising from sublead
ing kinematical corrections and longitudinal contributions to the photon-Z interference. For the proton, these need to be accounted for in order to accurately extract the d/u ratio at large x; for the deuteron they are important to consider when searching for evidence of charge symmetry violation in parton distributions or signals for physics beyond the standard model. We further explore the dependence of PVDIS asymmetries for polarized targets on the u and d helicity distributions at large x.
We derive mass corrections for semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering of leptons from nucleons using a collinear factorization framework which incorporates the initial state mass of the target nucleon and the final state mass of the produced hadron
. The formalism is constructed specifically to ensure that physical kinematic thresholds for the semi-inclusive process are explicitly respected. A systematic study of the kinematic dependencies of the mass corrections to semi-inclusive cross sections reveals that these are even larger than for inclusive structure functions, especially at very small and very large hadron momentum fractions. The hadron mass corrections compete with the experimental uncertainties at kinematics typical of current facilities, and will be important to efforts at extracting parton distributions or fragmentation functions from semi-inclusive processes at intermediate energies.
