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 demonstrates through a new analysis of the Coulomb breakup of 11Be on 208Pb that reaction cross sections are insensitive to spectroscopic factors, thereby proving that these factors cannot be reliably inferred from such breakup measurements.
This paper demonstrates that electromagnetic probes, specifically direct photons and dileptons, serve as sensitive indicators of the interplay between hard minijets and the quark-gluon plasma by revealing measurable effects from minijet-induced modifications to the spacetime evolution of the medium that are otherwise obscured in hadronic observables.
This paper presents the latest results from the MUSES collaboration using the 3+1D relativistic viscous hydrodynamics code CCAKE, enhanced with numerical improvements like "glass" initial conditions and adaptive smoothed particle hydrodynamics, to dynamically probe the QCD critical point and quantify its interplay with beam energy and rapidity range within the context of STAR's Beam Energy Scan II data.
This paper utilizes an effective Lagrangian approach combined with transport simulations to predict that the J-PARC E16 experiment can observe a signal of - mixing, indicative of partial chiral symmetry restoration, with approximately 2.5 significance using planned Run2 statistics.
This paper introduces a resummed hydrodynamic scheme that enforces non-linear causality conditions to constrain viscous stress tensors within tunable limits, demonstrating through event-by-event simulations of Pb+Pb and p+Pb collisions that this approach quantifies theoretical uncertainties in final-state flow observables while recovering standard second-order theories in the small-viscosity limit.
This paper presents an AI-assisted framework for local infrared subtraction that combines EFT matching with neural network or analytic constructions to enable efficient, slicing-parameter-free higher-order QCD calculations, successfully reconstructing NLO results for multi-jet production and demonstrating feasibility on modest hardware.
This paper utilizes unique scaling function properties and an improved chiral order parameter to directly estimate the chiral phase transition temperature and universal critical parameters from (2+1)-flavor QCD simulations, while quantitatively analyzing finite-volume effects and deviations from universal scaling as a function of the light-to-strange quark mass ratio.
This paper reviews the theoretical and experimental progress over the last 25 years in understanding artificial atoms and molecules as finite quantum analogs of Wigner crystals, demonstrating how the many-body Schrödinger equation explains their emergent behaviors—such as spectral quenching and rovibrational spectra—to advance both fundamental physics and quantum information technologies.
This paper employs semiclassical periodic orbit theory to demonstrate that the systematic evolution of nuclear hexadecapole shapes from positive to negative values within single-particle shells is driven by the bifurcations of specific periodic orbits, thereby explaining the strong quadrupole-hexadecapole correlation and the predominance of prolate nuclear shapes.
This paper investigates how initial orbital angular momentum influences elliptic flow in off-central heavy-ion collisions by modeling a simultaneously expanding and rotating fireball, finding that while rotation alone is insufficient, the combination of anisotropic expansion and rotation enhances elliptic flow by 2–10% depending on collision energy.