I am a mathematics student who is doing an introductory course in Nuclear Physics and since the course is rather elementary a lot of the definitions/derivations are skipped which makes it quite tough to understand a lot of stuff. So here are some questions which I don't understand:

1. We are studying scattering experiments on the nucleus by using probes like electrons and neutrons. If I am not mistaken, the electrons give us information on the charge distribution and neutrons give us information on the matter distribution. However I don't fully understand what we mean by charge/matter distribution?

2. Also in the section on charge distribution they introduce something called a cross section which is not even defined properly. I tried looking it up but I couldn't find a reasonable definition. Could anyone please explain that as well?

3. Finally when deriving the cross section of the scattering of an electron from a nucleus, we start off with the Rutherford cross section and make modifications to that by introducing Spin (which makes it a Mott cross section) and then taking into account the spatial dimension of a nucleus which gives us a Form factor. What exactly is this form factor and how is it related to the minima of the cross section?

Apologies for the lengthy post

I am a mathematics student who is doing an introductory course in nuclear physics and since the course is rather elementary a lot of the definitions/derivations are skipped which makes it quite tough to understand a lot of stuff. So here is a question which I don't understand:

We are studying scattering experiments on the nucleus by using probes like electrons and neutrons. If I am not mistaken, the electrons give us information on the charge distribution and neutrons give us information on the matter distribution. However I don't fully understand what we mean by charge/matter distribution?