1159 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 reviews recent advancements and applications of relativistic chiral nuclear forces, highlighting the construction of a high-precision covariant force up to next-to-next-to-leading order and its successful implementation in describing nucleon-nucleon scattering, nuclear matter, finite nuclei, and hypernuclear systems.
This paper demonstrates that a hadronic quantum hadrodynamics model incorporating , and mesons, along with their interactions, can simultaneously explain nuclear matter properties and astrophysical observations of neutron stars, predicting a peak in the speed of sound at intermediate densities that results in small intermediate-mass stars and a maximum mass of approximately .
This paper derives explicit asymptotic scaling laws for channel-coupling matrix elements in three-body systems with central potentials, demonstrating that short-range interactions decay algebraically to enable efficient channel decoupling at large hyperradii, whereas Coulomb interactions decay only as , leading to persistent coupling and slow convergence.
This study investigates the thermodynamic stability of low-density nuclear matter by incorporating light clusters within a generalized mean-field framework, revealing that a density-dependent infrared momentum cutoff is essential for thermodynamic consistency and can fundamentally alter spinodal instability patterns by driving clusters and nucleons to fluctuate out of phase.
This paper investigates the relationship between effective degrees of freedom and the trace anomaly within the hadron resonance gas model, demonstrating that applying a convexity-based "c-theorem like" condition yields a limiting temperature consistent with lattice QCD predictions and the critical point, whereas a non-decreasing condition results in a significantly higher temperature.
Using time-dependent Hartree-Fock calculations for calcium-induced reactions on ytterbium, this study reveals that while quantum shell effects drive asymmetric quasi-fission toward a heavy fragment with Z~54, they do not induce a transition to symmetric modes in neutron-deficient systems, unlike in the fission of thorium compound nuclei.
This paper employs Bayesian model selection to optimize the energy dependence of parameters in a (3+1)-dimensional hybrid framework for relativistic heavy-ion collisions, subsequently using the resulting posterior distributions to predict various flow observables and quantify systematic uncertainties across different collision systems.
This paper investigates how modeling quark deconfinement in neutron stars via higher-order phase transitions, rather than a traditional first-order transition, influences binary merger dynamics and the interpretation of future gravitational wave observations.
This paper demonstrates that the hypothetical mesonic atom kaonium () manifests as a sharp resonance near 992 MeV in photon-photon collision cross-sections, significantly improving the fit to experimental data for processes like despite its short lifetime and narrow width making direct detection challenging.
This paper presents predictions for the tidal deformability of neutron stars derived from a microscopic equation of state incorporating chiral three-neutron forces, demonstrating that these results align with multimessenger constraints while ruling out stiff equations of state that imply radii larger than 13 km.