Topical issue on the intersection of low-energy nuclear structure and high-energy nuclear collisions

Abstract

High-energy heavy-ion physics and low-energy nuclear structure physics have historically been disconnected fields. The hydrodynamic description of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) requires input from nuclear structure to model the initial states of the colliding nuclei. Advances in both theory and experiment now show that the hydrodynamic evolution of the QGP is sensitive to the detailed features of the colliding nuclei, with remarkable consequences for experimental observables. The topical collection represents a joint effort between the low- and high-energy nuclear communities, reflecting the growing recognition that precision modeling of nuclear structure is essential for interpreting high-energy collision data. This new experimental approach opens outstanding opportunities to deepen our understanding of strong-interaction matter. Indeed, by probing many-body correlations of nucleons directly in the nuclear ground state, high-energy collisions provide a unique way to "image" nuclei, fully complementary to the techniques of low-energy experiments, where nuclear collectivity is usually inferred from spectroscopic information on excited states. Do emergent many-body QCD phenomena in nuclei manifest consistently across experiments and energy scales? Addressing this question requires synergy between collider data and state-of-the-art nuclear structure calculations. In view of the rapid progress of ab initio methods based on low-energy effective field theories of QCD, the implications are far-reaching: heavy-ion collisions can probe nuclear forces, while nuclear structure insights refine our understanding of QGP dynamics.