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Nuclear Theory·nucl-th

Thursday·March 16, 2023

7 papers—2 primary·5 cross-listed

All7Primary2Cross-lists5
  1. 03

    [Submitted on 14 Mar 2023] (cross-list from hep-ph)

    Probing cold nuclear matter with energy correlators

    Kyle Devereaux🇺🇸 · Wenqing Fan🇺🇸 · Weiyao Ke🇺🇸 · Kyle Lee🇺🇸 · Ian Moult🇺🇸

    The future electron-ion collider (EIC) will produce the first-ever high energy collisions between electrons and a wide range of nuclei, opening a new era in the study of cold nuclear matter. Quarks and gluons produced in these collisions will propagate through the dense nuclear matter of nuclei, imprinting its structure into subtle correlations in the energy flux of final state hadrons. In this article, we apply recent developments from the field of jet substructure, namely the energy correlator observables, to decode these correlations and provide a new window into nuclear structure. The energy correlators provide a calibrated probe of the scale dependence of vacuum quantum chromodynamics (QCD), enabling medium modifications to be imaged and interpreted as a function of scale. Using the eHIJING parton shower to simulate electron-nucleus collisions, we demonstrate that the size of the nucleus is imprinted as an angular scale in the correlators, with a magnitude that is visible for realistic EIC kinematics. We can observe the size difference between the proposed EIC nuclear targets He, He, C, Ca, Cu, Au, and U, showing that the energy correlators can image femtometer length scales using asymptotic energy flux. Our approach offers a unified view of jet substructure across collider experiments, and provides numerous new theoretical tools to unravel the complex dynamics of QCD in extreme environments, both hot and cold.

    Comments:
    11 pages, 11 beautiful figures, and appendices
    Subjects:
    High Energy Physics — Phenomenology (hep-ph); High Energy Physics — Experiment (hep-ex); Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
    arXiv:
    2303.08143 [pdf]
    PRC(2025)·55 citations
  2. 04

    [Submitted on 15 Mar 2023] (cross-list from hep-ph)

    Colloquium: Gravitational Form Factors of the Proton

    V. D. Burkert🇺🇸 · L. Elouadrhiri🇺🇸 · F. X. Girod🇺🇸 · C. Lorce🇫🇷 · P. Schweitzer🇺🇸 · P. E. Shanahan🇺🇸

    The physics of the gravitational form factors of the proton, and their understanding within quantum chromodynamics, has advanced significantly in the past two decades through both theory and experiment. This Colloquium provides an overview of this progress, highlights the physical insights unveiled by studies of gravitational form factors, and reviews their interpretation in terms of the mechanical properties of the proton.

    Comments:
    22 pages, 15 figures
    Subjects:
    High Energy Physics — Phenomenology (hep-ph); High Energy Physics — Experiment (hep-ex); High Energy Physics — Lattice (hep-lat); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
    arXiv:
    2303.08347 [pdf]
    RMP(2023)·150 citations
  3. 05

    [Submitted on 15 Mar 2023] (cross-list from hep-ph)

    The effect of non-equal emission times and space-time correlations on (anti-) nuclei production

    M.Kachelriess🇳🇴 · S.Ostapchenko🇩🇪 · J.Tjemsland🇳🇴

    Light (anti-) nuclei are a powerful tool both in collider physics and astrophysics. In searches for new and exotic physics, the expected small astrophysical backgrounds at low energies make these antinuclei ideal probes for, e.g., dark matter. At the same time, their composite structure and small binding energies imply that they can be used in collider experiments to probe the hadronisation process and two-particle correlations. For the proper interpretation of such experimental studies, an improved theoretical understanding of (anti-) nuclei production in specific kinematic regions and detector setups is needed. In this work, we develop a coalescence framework for (anti-) deuteron production which accounts for both the emission volume and momentum correlations on an event-by-event basis. This framework goes beyond the equal-time approximation, which has been commonly assumed in femtoscopy experiments and (anti-) nucleus production models until now. Using PYTHIA~8 as an event generator, we find that the equal-time approximation leads to an error of O(10%) in low-energy processes like decays, while the errors are negligible at LHC energies. The framework introduced in this work paves the way for tuning event generators to (anti-) nuclei measurements.

    Comments:
    12 pages, 5 pdf figures; v2: references and clarifications added, readability of figures improved, accepted for publication in Phys.Rev.C
    Subjects:
    High Energy Physics — Phenomenology (hep-ph); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
    arXiv:
    2303.08437 [pdf]
    PRC(2023)·11 citations
  4. 06

    [Submitted on 15 Mar 2023] (cross-list from hep-ph)

    Probing universal dynamics with topological data analysis in a gluonic plasma

    Daniel Spitz🇩🇪 · Kirill Boguslavski🇦🇹 · Jürgen Berges🇩🇪

    We study nonequilibrium dynamics of SU(2) lattice gauge theory in Minkowski space-time in a classical-statistical regime, where characteristic gluon occupancies are much larger than unity. In this strongly correlated system far from equilibrium, the correlations of energy and topological densities show self-similar behavior related to a turbulent cascade towards higher momentum scales. We employ persistent homology to infer topological features of the gluonic plasma via a hierarchy of simplicial and cubical complexes. All topological observables under investigation are also manifestly gauge invariant and are shown to exhibit self-similar evolution, which relate the spatial and temporal properties of the plasma in terms of universal scaling exponents and functions. The findings may help to understand the early stages of heavy-ion collisions in the limit of high energies, and our methods can also facilitate the topological analysis of other complex systems such as encountered in experiments with ultracold quantum gases.

    Comments:
    17 pages, 11 figures
    Subjects:
    High Energy Physics — Phenomenology (hep-ph); High Energy Physics — Lattice (hep-lat); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
    arXiv:
    2303.08618 [pdf]
    PRD(2023)·11 citations
  5. 07

    [Submitted on 15 Mar 2023] (cross-list from hep-lat)

    Nucleon Sigma Terms with O()-improved Wilson fermions

    Andria Agadjanov🇩🇪 · Dalibor Djukanovic🇩🇪 · Georg von Hippel🇩🇪 · Harvey B. Meyer🇩🇪 · Konstantin Ottnad🇩🇪 · Hartmut Wittig🇩🇪

    We present a lattice-QCD based analysis of the nucleon sigma terms using gauge ensembles with flavors of -improved Wilson fermions, with a complete error budget concerning excited-state contaminations, the chiral interpolation as well as finite-size and lattice spacing effects. We compute the sigma terms determined directly from the matrix elements of the scalar currents. The chiral interpolation is based on SU(3) baryon chiral perturbation theory using the extended on-mass shell renormalization scheme. For the pion nucleon sigma term, we obtain MeV, where the error includes our estimate of the aforementioned systematics. The tension with extractions based on dispersion theory persists at the 2.4- level. For the strange sigma term, we obtain a non-zero value, MeV.

    Comments:
    Matches published version
    Subjects:
    High Energy Physics — Lattice (hep-lat); High Energy Physics — Phenomenology (hep-ph); Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)
    arXiv:
    2303.08741 [pdf]
    PRL(2023)·45 citations

Affiliations

first authorsco-authorsvia INSPIRE