Inclusive electron scattering in the resonance region off a hydrogen target with CLAS12

Inclusive electron scattering cross sections off a hydrogen target at a beam energy of 10.6 GeV have been measured with data collected from the CLAS12 spectrometer at Jefferson Laboratory. These first absolute cross sections from CLAS12 cover a wide kinematic area in invariant mass W of the final state hadrons from the pion threshold up to 2.5 GeV for each bin in virtual photon four-momentum transfer squared Q2 from 2.55 to 10.4 GeV2 owing to the large scattering angle acceptance of the CLAS12 detector. Comparison of the cross sections with the resonant contributions computed from the CLAS results on the nucleon resonance electroexcitation amplitudes has demonstrated a promising opportunity to extend the information on their Q2 evolution up to 10 GeV2. Together these results from CLAS and CLAS12 offer good prospects for probing the nucleon parton distributions at large fractional parton momenta x for W < 2.5 GeV, while covering the range of distances where the transition from the strongly coupled to the perturbative regimes is expected.