INTERPLAY OF SOFT AND HARD INTERACTIONS IN NUCLEAR SHADOWING AT HIGH Q(2) AND LOW-X

Nuclear shadowing corrections are known to be dominated by soft intera ctions. They grow as function of 1/x more slowly than the single scatt ering term, which has an essential contribution from hard interactions . Therefore, we predict that nuclear shadowing vanishes eventually at very low x, provided that Q(2) is high and fixed. At the same time, at medium and low Q(2), nuclear shadowing grows with 1/x. Our formalism nicely explains also the recent NMC data on Q(2)-dependence of the nuc lear shadowing. The effect of gluon fusion is found to be of little im portance for the nuclear structure function in the available range of x.