Linking chiral nuclear forces to light-ion collisions: a global sensitivity analysis
Abstract
Ultrarelativistic 16O+16O and 20Ne+20Ne collisions recently performed at the Large Hadron Collider have imaged quadrupole and octupole correlations between nucleons through the collective flow of emitted hadrons. We establish a quantitative link between these correlations and the low-energy constants (LECs) that enter chiral inter-nucleon interactions. Emulators built using the subspace-projected coupled-cluster method enable a global sensitivity analysis of the ground-state quadrupole mean-square eccentricity, revealing that quadrupole correlations respond linearly and additively to all 16 LECs at next-to-next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion. The sensitivities differ markedly in 16O and 20Ne, and are complementary to those of the binding energy and charge radius, the bulk observables to which nuclear interactions are typically calibrated. In particular, 20Ne collisions dominantly probe the spin-orbit part of two-nucleon interactions. Soft-particle correlations in light-ion collisions thus constitute a new type of data to study nuclear forces and their emergence from quantum chromodynamics.
Related
- Spin-induced lateral acoustic forces on chiral and achiral particles
- Constraining three-nucleon forces in nuclear lattice effective field theory
- Accessing zero-point fluctuations in high-energy nuclear collisions
- Charge separation measurements in Au+Au collisions at = 7.7−200 GeV in search of the chiral magnetic effect*
- Probing nuclear deformation through global Λ polarization in U+U collisions at HIAF
BibTeX
@misc{duguet2026linking,
title = {{Linking chiral nuclear forces to light-ion collisions: a global sensitivity analysis}},
author = {Thomas Duguet and Andreas Ekström and Giuliano Giacalone and Gaute Hagen and Takayuki Miyagi and Alexander Tichai},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.08122},
eprint = {2611.08122},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08122},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Linking chiral nuclear forces to light-ion collisions: a global sensitivity analysis
AU - Thomas Duguet
AU - Andreas Ekström
AU - Giuliano Giacalone
AU - Gaute Hagen
AU - Takayuki Miyagi
AU - Alexander Tichai
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/05
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.08122
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08122
AB - Ultrarelativistic ^16O+^16O and ^20Ne+^20Ne collisions recently performed at the Large Hadron Collider have imaged quadrupole and octupole correlations between nucleons through the collective flow of emitted hadrons. We establish a quantitative link between these correlations and the low-energy constants (LECs) that enter chiral inter-nucleon interactions. Emulators built using the subspace-projected coupled-cluster method enable a global sensitivity analysis of the ground-state quadrupole mean-square eccentricity, revealing that quadrupole correlations respond linearly and additively to all 16 LECs at next-to-next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion. The sensitivities differ markedly in ^16O and ^20Ne, and are complementary to those of the binding energy and charge radius, the bulk observables to which nuclear interactions are typically calibrated. In particular, ^20Ne collisions dominantly probe the spin-orbit part of two-nucleon interactions. Soft-particle correlations in light-ion collisions thus constitute a new type of data to study nuclear forces and their emergence from quantum chromodynamics.
ER -