scholarly journals Recent Developments in Nuclear Physics

1993 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Torleif EO Ericson

Nuclei exhibit features that are described in superficially contradictory terms according to the different degrees of freedom that are excited by probes of different scale in space and in time. After giving some examples I concentrate on the hadron degrees of freedom such as the nucleon, the pion and the .6. isobar. These are the effective degrees of freedom on the level of intermediate resolution: about 0�5-1 fm in distance and correspondingly in time. A prime example is the deuteron :which has a nearly model-independent description in terms of pion physics to very high precision. In nuclear matter the pion propagates in close analogy to the propagation of light in a dielectric. This permits the explanation of a number of features in nuclei related to the chiral symmetry limit in which the pion mass vanishes. A consequence of this description is the analogy of the equations for the pion and its effective field with the Maxwell equations for a dielectric. A pionic collective mode should appear strongly and with characteristic properties for a well chosen probe. It is difficult to explore its properties directly and in particular physical pions are not useful for this purpose. I will discuss different alternatives involving 'virtual pion beams'. There is recent evidence for such a collective state in forward charge exchange reactions throughout the periodic system.

2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 279-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.E. Lynn ◽  
I. Tews ◽  
S. Gandolfi ◽  
A. Lovato

In recent years, the combination of precise quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods with realistic nuclear interactions and consistent electroweak currents, in particular those constructed within effective field theories (EFTs), has led to new insights in light and medium-mass nuclei, neutron matter, and electroweak reactions. For example, with the same chiral interactions, QMC calculations can reproduce binding energies and radii for light nuclei, n–α scattering phase shifts, and the neutron matter equation of state. This compelling new body of work has been made possible both by advances in QMC methods for nuclear physics, which push the bounds of applicability to heavier nuclei and to asymmetric nuclear matter, and by the development of local chiral EFT interactions up to next-to-next-to-leading order and minimally nonlocal interactions including Δ degrees of freedom. In this review, we discuss these recent developments and give an overview of the exciting results for nuclei, neutron matter and neutron stars, and electroweak reactions.


2015 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 1560045 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Lee

Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET) is an effective field theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) for processes where there are energetic, nearly lightlike degrees of freedom interacting with one another via soft radiation. SCET has found many applications in high-energy and nuclear physics, especially in recent years the physics of hadronic jets in e+e-, lepton-hadron, hadron-hadron, and heavy-ion collisions. SCET can be used to factorize multi-scale cross sections in these processes into single-scale hard, collinear, and soft functions, and to evolve these through the renormalization group to resum large logarithms of ratios of the scales that appear in the QCD perturbative expansion, as well as to study properties of nonperturbative effects. We overview the elementary concepts of SCET and describe how they can be applied in high-energy and nuclear physics.


Universe ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 373
Author(s):  
Hoa Dinh Thi ◽  
Chiranjib Mondal ◽  
Francesca Gulminelli

A Bayesian analysis of the possible behaviors of the dense matter equation of state informed by recent LIGO-Virgo as well as NICER measurements reveals that all the present observations are compatible with a fully nucleonic hypothesis for the composition of dense matter, even in the core of the most massive pulsar PSR J0740+6620. Under the hypothesis of a nucleonic composition, we extract the most general behavior of the energy per particle of symmetric matter and density dependence of the symmetry energy, compatible with the astrophysical observations as well as our present knowledge of low-energy nuclear physics from effective field theory predictions and experimental nuclear mass data. These results can be used as a null hypothesis to be confronted with future constraints on dense matter to search for possible exotic degrees of freedom.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fayez Abu-Ajamieh ◽  
Spencer Chang ◽  
Miranda Chen ◽  
Markus A. Luty

Abstract A primary goal of present and future colliders is measuring the Higgs couplings to Standard Model (SM) particles. Any observed deviation from the SM predictions for these couplings is a sign of new physics whose energy scale can be bounded from above by requiring tree-level unitarity. In this paper, we extend previous work on unitarity bounds from the Higgs cubic coupling to Higgs couplings to vector bosons and top quarks. We find that HL-LHC measurements of these couplings compatible with current experimental bounds may point to a scale that can be explored at the HL-LHC or a next-generation collider. Our approach is completely model-independent: we assume only that there are no light degrees of freedom below the scale of new physics, and allow arbitrary values for the infinitely many couplings beyond the SM as long as they are in agreement with current measurements. We also extend and clarify the methodology of this analysis, and show that if the scale of new physics is above the TeV scale, then the deviations can be described by the leading higher-dimension gauge invariant operator, as in the SM effective field theory.


Universe ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 253
Author(s):  
David R. Junior ◽  
Luis E. Oxman ◽  
Gustavo M. Simões

In this review, we discuss the present status of the description of confining flux tubes in SU(N) pure Yang–Mills theory in terms of ensembles of percolating center vortices. This is based on three main pillars: modeling in the continuum the ensemble components detected in the lattice, the derivation of effective field representations, and contrasting the associated properties with Monte Carlo lattice results. The integration of the present knowledge about these points is essential to get closer to a unified physical picture for confinement. Here, we shall emphasize the last advances, which point to the importance of including the non-oriented center-vortex component and non-Abelian degrees of freedom when modeling the center-vortex ensemble measure. These inputs are responsible for the emergence of topological solitons and the possibility of accommodating the asymptotic scaling properties of the confining string tension.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong Du ◽  
Hao-Lin Li ◽  
Jian Tang ◽  
Sampsa Vihonen ◽  
Jiang-Hao Yu

Abstract The Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) provides a systematic and model-independent framework to study neutrino non-standard interactions (NSIs). We study the constraining power of the on-going neutrino oscillation experiments T2K, NOνA, Daya Bay, Double Chooz and RENO in the SMEFT framework. A full consideration of matching is provided between different effective field theories and the renormalization group running at different scales, filling the gap between the low-energy neutrino oscillation experiments and SMEFT at the UV scale. We first illustrate our method with a top- down approach in a simplified scalar leptoquark model, showing more stringent constraints from the neutrino oscillation experiments compared to collider studies. We then provide a bottom-up study on individual dimension-6 SMEFT operators and find NSIs in neutrino experiments already sensitive to new physics at ∼20 TeV when the Wilson coefficients are fixed at unity. We also investigate the correlation among multiple operators at the UV scale and find it could change the constraints on SMEFT operators by several orders of magnitude compared with when only one operator is considered. Furthermore, we find that accelerator and reactor neutrino experiments are sensitive to different SMEFT operators, which highlights the complementarity of the two experiment types.


2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (35) ◽  
pp. 2131-2137 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. POLLOCK

The hidden sector of the E8×E′8 heterotic superstring theory of Gross et al. can in principle contain additional "shadow" matter, interacting only gravitationally with the real world in which we live. The SU (3)′ C × SU (2)′ L × U (1)′ Y shadow configuration symmetric to the standard model has been ruled out by Kolb et al. from nucleosynthesis arguments, combined with the existence of three light neutrinos. In the absence of inflation and of entropy enhancement by the out-of-equilibrium decay of an unstable particle, the same exclusion applies to the unbroken E′8 hidden gauge group, assuming thermodynamical equilibrium with the observable sector E6 group, and consequently all breaking chains E′8→ G1×G2×⋯, since they can only reduce the effective number of four-dimensional degrees of freedom g eff . The hidden sector would then appear to be in its vacuum state, which implies the absence of all condensates as well, if their potentials are positive semi-definite. In this case, and if there is no anomalous U(1) symmetry in the observable sector, the QCD axion is the model-independent axion, whose decay constant [Formula: see text] (where [Formula: see text] is the strong-interaction coupling parameter) requires a fine-tuning of the initial value of this axion field to ai/fa≲3×10-3, in order not to overclose the Universe today, supersymmetry being broken by gauge mediation. Vice versa, if ai/fa~1, then hidden-sector gaugino condensation is necessary for there to be a sufficiently massive gravitino, whose decay can increase the entropy. Astronomical microlensing observations may help to discriminate between these two cases.


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