1634 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 proposes that pre-enriched inflow, potentially originating from cosmological fluctuations or primordial black hole formation in the early Universe, could explain the unexpectedly high heavy element abundances observed in extremely metal-poor stars, offering an alternative to standard neutron star merger models.
This study utilizes UrQMD simulations to compare pair-source and correlation-function based Lévy analyses of pion sources in central Ar+Sc collisions at SPS energies, establishing a hadronic baseline for NA61/SHINE femtoscopy research by examining non-Gaussian features as functions of transverse mass and collision energy.
This study utilizes a light-front quark model incorporating quark-meson coupling effects to demonstrate that the internal structure of pseudoscalar mesons, specifically their distribution amplitudes and parton distribution functions, undergoes significant medium-induced modifications in nuclear matter, characterized by suppressed intermediate- distributions and enhanced Gegenbauer coefficients that qualitatively resemble the EMC effect.
This paper develops and validates two microscopic shell-model interactions incorporating isospin-symmetry breaking effects to successfully describe Coulomb displacement energies, triplet displacement energies, and mirror/triplet energy differences in $sd$-shell nuclei, offering a physically motivated alternative to phenomenological models despite slightly larger discrepancies due to fewer adjustable parameters.
By developing and optimizing a new chiral interaction (NLO) with low-energy constants fitted to few- and many-body data, the authors demonstrate using ab-initio methods that the neutron two-neutron dripline in calcium extends to Ca, resolving previous discrepancies between effective field theory predictions and nuclear density functionals.
Using covariant density functional theory and Gaussian-process emulators, this study demonstrates a strong correlation between the surface energy coefficient and fission barrier heights in Pu and U, identifying the isoscalar-vector derivative coupling constant as the primary factor governing the outer barrier height.
This paper introduces and validates two fast neural inference methods (TSNPE+MIS and A-NET+IS) and a novel Green-function Evidence Network (EN) that significantly accelerate Bayesian updating of the neutron-star equation of state while maintaining accuracy comparable to traditional nested sampling tools like UltraNest.
This paper derives the neutrino emissivity for -direct-Urca processes in dense neutron star matter, demonstrating that once kinematically allowed, these processes contribute cooling rates comparable to standard nucleonic-direct-Urca mechanisms.
This paper predicts that Ni is a unique doubly-magic nucleus with a neutron halo due to the occupation of the shallowly bound orbit, offering a clear system for studying halo reaction mechanisms through calculated proton elastic scattering cross sections.
This paper investigates the longitudinal momentum distributions and structure functions of the deuteron using a relativistic light-front framework, while also analyzing the EMC effect arising from nuclear binding and Fermi motion through the ratio.