  The main goal of the research presented in this dissertation was to develop a
theoretical model for relativistic nuclear spectral functions at high missing
momenta and removal energies based on the multi-nucleon short-range correlation
(SRC) model. The nuclear spectral functions are necessary for the description
of high energy nuclear processes currently being studied at different labs such
as JLAB, LHC and FNAL. The model followed the effective Feynman diagrammatic
approach in order to account for the relativistic effects important in the SRC
domain. In addition to the two-nucleon (2N) SRC with center of mass motion
contribution, the contribution of the three-nucleon SRCs to the spectral
functions was also derived. The latter was modeled based on the assumption that
the 3N SRCs are a product of two sequential short range nucleon-nucleon (NN)
interactions. The nuclear spectral functions models were derived from two
theoretical frameworks for evaluating covariant Feynman diagrams: In the first,
referred to as the virtual nucleon approximation, the Feynman diagrams were
reduced to the time ordered non-covariant diagrams by evaluating the nucleon
spectators in the SRC at their positive energy poles, neglecting explicitly the
contribution from vacuum diagrams. In the second approach, referred to as the
light-front approximation, the boost invariant nuclear spectral function was
formulated in the light-front reference frame in which case the vacuum diagrams
are kinematically suppressed and the bound nucleon is described by its
light-front variables such as momentum fraction, transverse momentum and
invariant mass. On the basis of the derived nuclear spectral functions, the
corresponding computational models were developed from which the numerical
estimates of the SRC spectral functions, the SRC momentum distributions, and
the SRC density matrices were obtained.
