1104 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 presents recent ALICE measurements from July 2025 LHC runs involving proton-oxygen, oxygen-oxygen, and neon-neon collisions, detailing charged-particle pseudorapidity densities, flow coefficients, and neutral pion suppression to advance the understanding of particle production and collective phenomena in small collision systems.
This paper presents a symmetry-preserving approximation for computing light meson spectra that incorporates fully-dressed quark-gluon vertices and demonstrates significantly improved agreement with experimental masses compared to the traditional rainbow-ladder approximation.
This chapter reviews the ab initio theoretical frameworks and many-body methods used to describe nuclear giant resonances from first principles, providing a critical comparison of their predictions for benchmark nuclei like O and Ca against experimental observables.
This paper demonstrates that the parity-transfer reaction serves as a highly selective probe for isovector excitations in nuclei, as evidenced by the clear observation and forward-peaked angular distributions of the known state and potential new structures in the excitation spectrum.
This paper presents a systematic calculation of finite quantum fluctuation energies for quarks over a spatially inhomogeneous chiral soliton background by employing a Schwinger-based level summation scheme, solving the resulting Dirac equation to determine scattering phase shifts, and applying Born subtraction renormalization to numerically evaluate the energies across different parities and grand spins.
This paper calculates next-to-leading order nuclear matrix elements for two-neutrino double-beta decay to excited states in key isotopes using the nuclear shell model, finding that while NLO corrections are typically small, they can become significant due to leading-order cancellations, and that nuclear deformation and seniority structure critically influence the predicted half-lives.
This paper investigates methods to extend the validity of proper time expansions for modeling early-time glasma dynamics in heavy ion collisions, successfully increasing the reliable calculation time from approximately 0.05 fm/c to 0.08 fm/c.
This paper presents a new elementary operator for kaon photoproduction on nucleons and nuclei, developed within a Feynman diagrammatic framework and fitted to experimental data across six isospin channels, which incorporates numerous baryon resonances and is formulated in Pauli space to facilitate nonrelativistic nuclear applications.
This paper identifies a double pole singularity, or exceptional point, associated with the doublet of resonances in Be using the Gamow shell model, demonstrating its existence through the coalescence of wave functions, spectral functions, and the singular behavior of spectroscopic factors and electromagnetic transitions.
This paper challenges established views on hot QCD by demonstrating that an intermediate phase exhibits emergent chiral spin symmetry with persistent mesonic excitations, and proposes that thermal quantum field theories are fundamentally composed of non-perturbative "thermoparticles" rather than perturbative degrees of freedom.