Nuclear deep-inelastic lepton scattering and coherence phenomena

This review outlines our present experimental knowledge and theoretical und erstanding of deep-inelastic scattering on nuclear targets. The emphasis is primarily on nuclear coherence phenomena, such as shadowing, where the key physics issue is the exploration of hadronic and quark-gluon fluctuations of a high-energy virtual photon and their passage through the nuclear mediu m. New developments in polarized deep-inelastic scattering on nuclei are al so discussed, and more conventional binding and Fermi motion effects are su mmarized. The report closes with a brief outlook on vector meson electropro duction, nuclear shadowing at very large Q(2) and the physics of high parto n densities in QCD. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.