New Scaling Relations for Nucleons in Three-Nucleon Short-Range Correlations
Abstract
The search for three nucleon short range correlations~(3N- SRCs) in nuclei is one of the intensive areas of research in high density nuclear physics. It is in part motivated by the prediction of the above two-solar mass neutron stars based on 3N short-range forces and the subsequent observation of such stars. The 3N-SRCs serve as a "laboratory" for probing the dynamics of largely unknown irreducible 3N-forces. However, the identification of 3N-SRCs in high energy nuclear processes is still elusive making the prospects of their investigation problematic. In this work we introduced new dynamical parameters for 2N- and 3N- SRCs, β2N and β3N respectively, which characterize the strength of SRCs beyond combinatorial counting of nucleons in SRCs. For 2N-SRCs the introduction of β2N parameter resulted in a previously known and experimentally verified relation for proton and neutron momentum distributions in 2N-SRCS. For 3N-SRCs the β3N parameter allowed to factorize momentum distributions of nucleons in the correlation resulting in a prediction of a new scaling relation between proton and neutron momentum distributions in 3N SRCs. This relation, if valid gives a new venue for identification of 3N-SRCs in electro-nuclear processes. Even though the obtained scaling relation is relevant in the relativistic domain, the possibility of separating center of mass motion of SRCs on the light-front allows to check the validity of predicted scaling using non-relativistic ab-initio wave functions. We found surprisingly reasonable confirmation of our prediction analyzing ab-initio wave functions of nuclei in the range 3≤ A≤ 12. This indicates the robustness of the scaling relation and opens up a new direction in searching for 3N-SRCs experimentally.
Related
- Nucleon Correlations in Unstable Nuclei via Knockout Reactions
- Nucleon parton distribution functions from boosted correlations in the Coulomb gauge
- Constraining three-nucleon forces in nuclear lattice effective field theory
- Nucleon decays into three leptons plus a kaon
- Equal-response probing with replicate calibration identifies scaling relations from noisy observations of complex systems
BibTeX
@misc{sargsian2026scaling,
title = {{New Scaling Relations for Nucleons in Three-Nucleon Short-Range Correlations}},
author = {Misak M. Sargsian and Ilay Wischnevsky Shlush},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.01093},
eprint = {2611.01093},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01093},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - New Scaling Relations for Nucleons in Three-Nucleon Short-Range Correlations
AU - Misak M. Sargsian
AU - Ilay Wischnevsky Shlush
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.01093
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01093
AB - The search for three nucleon short range correlations~(3N- SRCs) in nuclei is one of the intensive areas of research in high density nuclear physics. It is in part motivated by the prediction of the above two-solar mass neutron stars based on 3N short-range forces and the subsequent observation of such stars. The 3N-SRCs serve as a "laboratory" for probing the dynamics of largely unknown irreducible 3N-forces. However, the identification of 3N-SRCs in high energy nuclear processes is still elusive making the prospects of their investigation problematic. In this work we introduced new dynamical parameters for 2N- and 3N- SRCs, β_2N and β_3N respectively, which characterize the strength of SRCs beyond combinatorial counting of nucleons in SRCs. For 2N-SRCs the introduction of β_2N parameter resulted in a previously known and experimentally verified relation for proton and neutron momentum distributions in 2N-SRCS. For 3N-SRCs the β_3N parameter allowed to factorize momentum distributions of nucleons in the correlation resulting in a prediction of a new scaling relation between proton and neutron momentum distributions in 3N SRCs. This relation, if valid gives a new venue for identification of 3N-SRCs in electro-nuclear processes. Even though the obtained scaling relation is relevant in the relativistic domain, the possibility of separating center of mass motion of SRCs on the light-front allows to check the validity of predicted scaling using non-relativistic ab-initio wave functions. We found surprisingly reasonable confirmation of our prediction analyzing ab-initio wave functions of nuclei in the range 3≤ A≤ 12. This indicates the robustness of the scaling relation and opens up a new direction in searching for 3N-SRCs experimentally.
ER -