Neutron magnetic form factor GnM(Q2) from quasielastic inclusive scattering data on D and 4He -: art. no. 014003

We analyze cross sections for quasielastic inclusive scattering of electrons on nuclei and show that the observed isolated peaks for relatively low Q(2) are unique for the lightest targets. Focusing, in particular, on D and He-4, we investigate in two ways to what measure the above peaks can be allocated to nucleon-elastic processes. We first compute approximate upper limits for the nucleon-inelastic background in the quasielastic region due to inclusive Delta excitation, and find those to be small. Far more precise is a semiphenomenological approach, where the dominance of nucleon-elastic processes is translated into a set of stringent requirements. We show that those are very well fulfilled for recent D data, and to a somewhat lesser extent for older D and He-4 data. With knowledge of G(E,M)(p) and information on G(E)(n), we then extract G(M)(n) and find agreement with values obtained by alternative methods. We discuss the sensitivity of the extraction method and mention future applications.