Towards a combined analysis of inclusive/exclusive electroproduction

The CLAS experiments have achieved major advances in the study of the $N^*$ region of the electroproduction spectrum. Data on electrocouplings of the many baryon resonances in the mass range up to 1.8 GeV showed consistency between the $N\pi$, $N\eta$ and $N\pi^+\pi^-$ channels.

We present our theoretical studies of structure functions in view of the CLAS12 experiments planned in the near future, which are to study electron scattering observables at a wide $Q^2$ range from 0.05 GeV$^2$ to 12 GeV$^2$, with high precision in $x$. We model the resonant contributions to inclusive electron scattering, using the electrocoupling data as input. Our results are thus not fitted to the inclusive data: instead, we use the reliable extraction of the separate resonance contributions from exclusive reactions.

We combine our resonance model with a non-resonant background based on Regge models, thus for the first time enabling a combined description of the low and high-x regions of the proton structure functions. This is useful for future endeavours on understanding the transition between low and high x regions, strongly related to tests on quark-hadron duality.