Background: Isolating nuclear structure properties from knock-out reactions in a process-independent manner requires a controlled factorization, which is always to some degree scale and scheme dependent. Understanding this dependence is important for robust extractions from experiment, to correctly use the structure information in other processes, and to understand the impact of approximations for both.Purpose: We seek insight into scale dependence by exploring a model calculation of deuteron electrodisintegration, which provides a simple and clean theoretical laboratory.Methods: By considering various kinematic regions of the longitudinal structure function, we can examine how the components-the initial deuteron wave function, the current operator, and the final state interactions (FSI)-combine at different scales. We use the similarity renormalization group (SRG) to evolve each component.Results: When evolved to different resolutions, the ingredients are all modified, but how they combine depends strongly on the kinematic region. In some regions, for example, the FSI are largely unaffected by evolution, while elsewhere FSI are greatly reduced. For certain kinematics, the impulse approximation at a high RG resolution gives an intuitive picture in terms of a one-body current breaking up a short-range correlated neutron-proton pair, although FSI distort this simple picture. With evolution to low resolution, however, the cross section is unchanged but a very different and arguably simpler intuitive picture emerges, with the evolved current efficiently represented at low momentum through derivative expansions or low-rank singular value decompositions.
Conclusions:The underlying physics of deuteron electrodisintegration is scale dependent and not just kinematics dependent. As a result, intuition about physics such as the role of short-range correlations or D-state mixing in particular kinematic regimes can be strongly scale dependent. Understanding this dependence is crucial in making use of extracted properties.