EPJA Topical Collection: Intersection of Low-Energy Nuclear Structure and High-Energy Nuclear Collisions

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Published on 10 February 2026

Guest Editors: Thomas Duguet, Giuliano Giacalone, Vittorio Somà, You Zhou

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, but until 2015 or so, most phenomenological studies have relied on simplified nuclear models, assuming spherical charge distributions and ignoring features like neutron skins or deformations. 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.

This was first realized by Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) data on ²³⁸U+²³⁸U collisions (2015). The anomalous enhancement of the elliptic flow of ²³⁸U+²³⁸U collisions with respect to the baseline given by ¹⁹⁷Au+¹⁹⁷Au collisions is immediately explained by the deformed shape of ²³⁸U. Similarly, data on xenon-129 collisions (2018) from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been compared to data from collisions of spherical lead-208 nuclei to reveal the deformation of ¹²⁹Xe. Furthermore, ⁹⁶Ru+⁹⁶Ru and ⁹⁶Zr+⁹⁶Zr collisions at RHIC (2021) indicates remarkable differences in the anisotropic flow of these two collision systems, resulting not only from their different deformations but also from neutron skin effects. The 2025 LHC light-ion run of ¹⁶O+¹⁶O and ²⁰Ne+²⁰Ne collisions has already given evidence of the highly deformed geometry of ²⁰Ne.

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 \textit{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.

All articles are available here and are freely accessible until 3 April 2026. For further information, read the Editorial.