1148 papers
Nuclear theory sits at the fascinating intersection of particle physics and the forces that hold our universe together. This field explores how protons and neutrons bind inside atomic nuclei, seeking to understand the fundamental interactions that govern matter at its most dense and energetic levels. While the mathematics involved can be incredibly complex, the core questions are deeply human: how does the universe function at its smallest scales, and what happens when we push matter to its limits?
At Gist.Science, we make these cutting-edge discoveries accessible by processing every new preprint published in this category on arXiv. Our team transforms dense academic manuscripts into clear, plain-language summaries alongside detailed technical overviews, ensuring that both experts and curious readers can grasp the latest breakthroughs without getting lost in the jargon. Below are the latest papers in nuclear theory, distilled and ready for you to explore.
This paper refines the theoretical upper bound on the central pressure-to-energy density ratio in neutron stars to approximately 0.385 by combining causality constraints with mass-sphere stability conditions within the IPAD-TOV framework, establishing a robust, EOS-insensitive probe for the microphysics of cold superdense matter.
This paper presents newly measured and revisited prompt fission neutron spectra for 233U, 235U, 239Pu, and 240Pu using double time-of-flight techniques, demonstrating that current evaluated data libraries are inadequate and highlighting the challenges in modeling these spectra across a wide range of incident neutron energies.
This paper investigates high-energy photon production in a quark-gluon plasma by deriving analytical expressions for both leading-logarithmic and beyond-leading-logarithmic contributions to the photon production rate using two-loop photon self-energies in thermal QCD, confirming consistency with kinetic theory calculations.
This paper argues that phenomena in high-energy nuclear collisions, previously attributed to quark-gluon plasma formation, are instead comprehensively explained by few-gluon interactions and multipole radiation without requiring a dense medium or hydrodynamic theory.
This paper presents a unified holographic QCD framework that resums even-spin gluonic exchanges, anchored by lattice QCD gravitational form factors, to accurately describe exclusive heavy quarkonium photoproduction across the full energy range from near-threshold to high energies while revealing the limitations of fixed-spin approximations for extracting gravitational form factors.
This paper derives analytic and approximate solutions for the energy-momentum tensor of classical gluon fields in the weak-field limit of heavy-ion collisions, demonstrating that the system's large-time behavior is universal across different gluon distribution models and providing explicit closed-form solutions for the McLerran-Venugopalan model and series expansions for an improved Gaussian model.
This paper proposes a three-flavor chiral quark-diquark model where the parity doublet structure and chiral-invariant mass of baryons originate from scalar and pseudoscalar diquarks bound via gluon dynamics, successfully reproducing the baryon spectrum and predicting a distinctive inverted mass hierarchy for nucleons and hyperons as a signature of chiral symmetry restoration.
This study employs a Bayesian analysis of charged-particle nuclear modification factors across four collision systems (O+O, Ne+Ne, Xe+Xe, and Pb+Pb) to determine that parton energy loss in the quark-gluon plasma scales with an effective path-length exponent of , decisively favoring a radiative mechanism over collisional or strong-coupling scenarios and confirming a universal energy-loss regime from small to large systems.
This paper reviews the current multimessenger constraints on the neutron star equation of state, outlines the ongoing challenges in determining the microscopic composition of stellar cores, and highlights recent advances from SQM2026 and the MUSES Calculation Engine toward a unified description of strongly interacting matter across astrophysical and heavy-ion collision environments.
This paper presents an improved formula for the Wigner function and spin polarization of fermions emitted from a decoupling relativistic fluid by introducing a new expansion method that captures geometric dependencies in the spin-shear term, naturally excludes normal space-time gradients to justify the isothermal condition, and extends the framework to particles of arbitrary spin.