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 presents a lattice QCD calculation of nucleon unpolarized second Mellin moments using four physical-mass ensembles to determine the continuum-limit contributions of quarks and gluons to the proton's momentum, angular momentum, and orbital angular momentum.
Revisiting short-range baryon-baryon potentials within the constituent quark model, this study predicts that specific flavor antidecuplet states and the system possess sufficient attraction to form dibaryon bound states as hadronic molecules, while also comparing these findings with lattice QCD simulations.
This paper derives model-independent expansions to quantify and evaluate the leading corrections to the smoothness and on-shell approximations in femtoscopy and coalescence, finding that for typical LHC collision scenarios, these corrections are generally small (at or below the percent level) and often subdominant to other effects like the equal-time approximation.
This paper derives a nonlocal Time-Energy uncertainty principle and uses Thorium-229 nuclear clock data to establish conservative lower bounds on the nonlocality scale, demonstrating that nuclear clocks can probe non-Planckian nonlocality at energy scales ranging from tens of MeV to the TeV range.
This paper constructs the soft gluon light-cone wave function and the associated unitary evolution operator up to next-to-leading order in pure Yang-Mills theory within the Color Glass Condensate framework, demonstrating how diagonalizing the soft Hamiltonian cancels off-diagonal Fock sector mixing to yield a coherent background field energy proportional to the valence color charge density squared.
This paper computes the viscoelastic and thermal response of nuclear pasta phases at finite baryon density by modeling them as Skyrme model crystals and applying Green-Kubo formulas to their low-energy 1+1 dimensional scalar excitations, with results compared to existing literature.
This study utilizes Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory to demonstrate that the initial octupole deformation of fissioning U and Pu nuclei dictates distinct scission dynamics across asymmetric, near-symmetric, and highly-asymmetric fission modes, thereby determining the total kinetic energy and the specific distribution of excitation energy between the resulting heavy and light fragments.
This review article explores the origins of photons in ultra-peripheral collisions of heavy ions and protons, highlighting their diverse applications in studying nuclear structure at low Bjorken-, probing beyond-standard-model physics, and investigating new quantum mechanical regimes through interferometry.
This study demonstrates that a unified charge-symmetry-breaking functional can simultaneously describe mirror displacement energies and charge-radius differences, revealing a common finite-density response that constrains effective coupling combinations and highlights the necessity of quantifying surface-gradient-sensitive corrections before using mirror charge radii as precise probes of neutron skins.
This study demonstrates that nonlinear collective flow in ultra-central U+U collisions, particularly through the sixth-order harmonic's sensitivity to mode coupling, provides a direct and experimentally accessible signature to isolate the intrinsic hexadecapole deformation () and reveal deviations from the quadrupole--hexadecapole scaling in nuclear structure.