951 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 derives a fluctuation-dissipation relation for an energetic light quark in a non-perturbative thermal gluon plasma by connecting the longitudinal drag coefficient to longitudinal and transverse diffusion coefficients and the thermal gluon condensate through complex-valued transport functions and contour-integration techniques.
This paper presents a new lattice QCD determination of the tetraquark binding energy using relativistic heavy-quark actions, yielding results of approximately $-79$ MeV that are consistent with prior NRQCD findings but exhibit reduced magnitude due to the exclusive use of symmetric correlation matrices with local four-quark operators.
This paper challenges the widely accepted value of nuclear matter compressibility ( MeV) by demonstrating that microscopic Energy Density Functionals with enhanced flexibility can yield significantly lower values (around 160 MeV) while still reproducing experimental data, thereby suggesting a new methodology for determining this property and implying a lower quark onset density for neutron stars.
Using lattice-derived quark-antiquark potentials, this study demonstrates that strong magnetic fields induce anisotropic confinement that significantly lowers the masses of radially excited quarkonium states, particularly for longitudinal spin eigenstates, thereby offering a distinct signature for future lattice verification.
This paper establishes a fully relativistic framework for slowly rotating two-fluid neutron stars that reveals intrinsic collective rotational eigenmodes and demonstrates that the preservation or breakdown of rotational-tidal universality depends on dark-sector microphysics rather than simply the presence of an additional gravitationally coupled component.
Using a soft-wall holographic QCD model calibrated to reproduce the physical pion mass and pseudocritical temperature, this study demonstrates that while chiral symmetry restoration is clearly signaled by the degeneracy of chiral partner meson screening masses near , the restoration of axial symmetry occurs at a distinctly higher temperature ( GeV), highlighting a qualitative limitation of the model in describing the axial anomaly compared to Lattice QCD.
This study demonstrates that reaction-rate enhancements in r-process nucleosynthesis are primarily driven by the specific alignment of low-lying pygmy dipole strength with the neutron separation threshold, rather than the total low-energy strength, thereby highlighting the critical need for accurate microscopic descriptions of dipole strength near the neutron threshold.
This paper presents new measurements of , K, and p production in high-multiplicity proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV that reveal mass-dependent spectral hardening and enhanced baryon-to-meson ratios similar to heavy-ion collisions, suggesting that particle production scales with charged-particle multiplicity rather than system size or collision energy, while highlighting that current Monte Carlo models fail to consistently describe all observed features.
Using the full LHC Run 2 dataset, this ALICE study reports the first measurements of event-by-event correlations between elliptic flow and mean transverse momentum in pp, p-Pb, and Pb-Pb collisions, revealing non-monotonic trends and system-consistent values at low multiplicity that challenge current theoretical models and provide new constraints on the origin of collectivity in small collision systems.
Using dispersion theory to account for strong pion-pion final-state interactions, this study demonstrates that the substructure near the threshold in decays can be reproduced without invoking an extra resonance, attributing the observed dip primarily to a helicity-flip amplitude rather than the virtual exchange of the state.