We investigate the early onset of pionic color transparency ($\pi$CT) observed at Jefferson Laboratory (JLAB) in semi--exclusive pion electroproduction reaction $A(e,e'\pi^+)$ off nuclei. In the present description the primary $\gamma^*p \to \pi^+ n$ interaction is described very well both for the longitudinal and the transverse polarizations. For the final state interactions a coupled--channel treatment of the interactions of transmitted hadrons allows to go beyond the Glauber approximation. We show that a proper distinction between the soft hadronic and hard partonic components of the electroproduction amplitude is essential for a quantitative description of the measured nuclear transparency. The data are well reproduced if one assumes that point--like configurations are produced in the regime of hard deep--inelastic scattering (DIS) off partons and dominate the transverse channel.
Categories: nucl-th