Accessing zero-point fluctuations in high-energy nuclear collisions
Abstract
Ultracentral high-energy collisions between identical nuclei are very sensitive to the size and shape of the frozen configuration of nucleons at the instant of the collision, an information that is encoded in the ground state wave functions of the colliding nuclei. The relative standard deviation of the size of the colliding system soon after the collision has recently been inferred from event-by-event fluctuations of the momentum per particle in collisions of 208Pb nuclei at the LHC, and since a single collision event produces thousands of particles, this information is very precise. We connect this measurement to the magnitude of the zero-point fluctuations of the radius of the lead nucleus. The value that is extracted from the data is compatible with predictions from nuclear-structure calculations, but is overestimated by classical Glauber-type modeling of high-energy collisions. The role of the Pauli principle in suppressing the fluctuations is underlined. It leads to a distinctive A dependence that could be checked in collisions of smaller systems.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{blaizot2026accessing,
title = {{Accessing zero-point fluctuations in high-energy nuclear collisions}},
author = {Jean-Paul Blaizot and Jean-Yves Ollitrault},
howpublished = {HAL},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.24977},
eprint = {2609.24977},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05781710v1},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Accessing zero-point fluctuations in high-energy nuclear collisions
AU - Jean-Paul Blaizot
AU - Jean-Yves Ollitrault
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/21
PB - HAL
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.24977
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05781710v1
AB - Ultracentral high-energy collisions between identical nuclei are very sensitive to the size and shape of the frozen configuration of nucleons at the instant of the collision, an information that is encoded in the ground state wave functions of the colliding nuclei. The relative standard deviation of the size of the colliding system soon after the collision has recently been inferred from event-by-event fluctuations of the momentum per particle in collisions of ^208Pb nuclei at the LHC, and since a single collision event produces thousands of particles, this information is very precise. We connect this measurement to the magnitude of the zero-point fluctuations of the radius of the lead nucleus. The value that is extracted from the data is compatible with predictions from nuclear-structure calculations, but is overestimated by classical Glauber-type modeling of high-energy collisions. The role of the Pauli principle in suppressing the fluctuations is underlined. It leads to a distinctive A dependence that could be checked in collisions of smaller systems.
ER -