2025/12/21 by Jean-Paul Blaizot, Blaizot, Jean-Paul, Giuliano Giacalone +3
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Nuclear physics research studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.18926
openalex publication_date 2025/12/21 · openalex created_date 2025/12/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
High-energy nuclear collisions have opened a new experimental method to reveal collective behavior in nuclear ground states through the lens of many-body correlations of nucleons. Using ab initio lattice and variational calculations of 20Ne and 16O, we study how emergent phenomena such as deformation or clustering can be identified in these systems from the dependence of their two-body density distributions on the relative azimuthal angle of nucleon pairs. A harmonic analysis of the correlation functions reveals in particular a dominant quadrupole component in 20Ne, consistent with a bowling-pin picture, and a prominent triangular modulation in 16O, possibly indicative of alpha-cluster correlations. Given that such structures can be accurately identified in high-energy collider experiments, these findings open a new paradigm for analyzing emergent collective behavior in atomic nuclei, relating their intrinsic shapes to the harmonic spectrum of microscopic correlations.