Determination of quark-nucleon inclusive cross section from leptoproduction of hadrons in nuclear targets

The A dependence of hadron leptoproduction from nuclear targets is interpreted as a measurement of inclusive inelastic and possibly also quasielastic quark-nucleon cross sections. The formulas which allow us to extract these cross sections from the data are derived and discussed. Numerical estimates indicate that the measurement of the total inelastic quark-nucleon cross section is perfectly feasible. Measurement of differential inclusive cross sections of the reaction quark + nucleon{→}quark + anything is possible as well but requires experiments with rather high statistics. Implications of our calculations for the process of heavy-lepton pair production from nuclear targets are also briefly discussed.