Nuclear-geometry-tagging events in high-energy Ne--Ne collisions
Abstract
Nucleon-nucleon interactions within atomic nuclei give rise to collective properties such as deformation and nuclear clustering. Ultrarelativistic nucleon-nucleon collisions offer a novel way to probe the many-body correlations of the incoming nuclei, as the nuclear structure is reflected in the initial geometry of the produced system. State-of-the-art low-energy nuclear theory calculations predict highly deformed 20Ne nuclei with a characteristic α+16O bowling-pin-like shape. Since such nuclei have recently been collided at the LHC, investigating methods to maximise the sensitivity to the nuclear structure is pertinent. In this paper, we investigate whether body--body and tip--tip configurations of 20Ne nuclei can be identified in Monte--Carlo Glauber simulations using geometry-sensitive observables: the eccentricity, ε2, and the transverse compactness, d⊥. The nuclear configurations are obtained from nuclear lattice effective field theory calculations within the framework of Nuclear Lattice Effective Field Theory (NLEFT) and ab initio Projected Generator Coordinate Method (PGCM). We utilise a Fisher linear discriminant to select body--body and tip--tip configurations based on the ε2-d⊥ correlation. With classifier thresholds chosen to retain 30% of the target class in a validation sample, the two-variable Fisher selection obtains purities in NLEFT (PGCM) of $0.201$ ($0.156$) and $0.573$ ($0.540$) for body--body and tip--tip events, respectively.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{hansen2026nucleargeometrytagging,
title = {{Nuclear-geometry-tagging events in high-energy Ne--Ne collisions}},
author = {Joachim Carlo Kristian Bjerg Hansen and Emil Gorm Dahlbæk Nielsen},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.40724},
eprint = {2610.40724},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40724},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Nuclear-geometry-tagging events in high-energy Ne--Ne collisions
AU - Joachim Carlo Kristian Bjerg Hansen
AU - Emil Gorm Dahlbæk Nielsen
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/29
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.40724
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40724
AB - Nucleon-nucleon interactions within atomic nuclei give rise to collective properties such as deformation and nuclear clustering. Ultrarelativistic nucleon-nucleon collisions offer a novel way to probe the many-body correlations of the incoming nuclei, as the nuclear structure is reflected in the initial geometry of the produced system. State-of-the-art low-energy nuclear theory calculations predict highly deformed ^20Ne nuclei with a characteristic α+^16O bowling-pin-like shape. Since such nuclei have recently been collided at the LHC, investigating methods to maximise the sensitivity to the nuclear structure is pertinent. In this paper, we investigate whether body--body and tip--tip configurations of ^20Ne nuclei can be identified in Monte--Carlo Glauber simulations using geometry-sensitive observables: the eccentricity, ε_2, and the transverse compactness, d_⊥. The nuclear configurations are obtained from nuclear lattice effective field theory calculations within the framework of Nuclear Lattice Effective Field Theory (NLEFT) and ab initio Projected Generator Coordinate Method (PGCM). We utilise a Fisher linear discriminant to select body--body and tip--tip configurations based on the ε_2-d_⊥ correlation. With classifier thresholds chosen to retain 30% of the target class in a validation sample, the two-variable Fisher selection obtains purities in NLEFT (PGCM) of $0.201$ ($0.156$) and $0.573$ ($0.540$) for body--body and tip--tip events, respectively.
ER -