https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-025-01679-2
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Angular structure of many-body correlations in atomic nuclei
From nuclear deformations to diffractive vector meson production in 
collisions
1
Institut de Physique Théorique, Université Paris Saclay, CEA, CNRS, 91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
2
Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, 1211, Genève 23, Switzerland
a
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Received:
23
April
2025
Accepted:
26
August
2025
Published online:
29
September
2025
Abstract
There is growing evidence that high-energy scattering processes involving nuclei can offer unique insights into the many-body correlations present in nuclear ground states, in particular those of deformed nuclei. These processes involve, for instance, the collective anisotropic flows in heavy-ion collisions, or the diffractive production of vector mesons in photo-nuclear () interactions. In this paper, we use a classical approximation and simple analytical models in order to exhibit characteristic and universal features of ground-state correlation functions that result from the presence of a deformed intrinsic state. In the case of a small axial quadrupole deformation, we show that the random rotation of the intrinsic density of the nucleus leads to a specific quadrupole modulation of the lab-frame two-body density as a function of the relative azimuthal angle. As a phenomenological, albeit academic application, we analyze the diffractive production of vector mesons in high-energy 
Be collisions. This demonstrates with the simplest deformed nucleus how the two-body correlations impact the |t| dependence of the incoherent cross sections.
CERN-TH preprint number: CERN-TH-2025-057.
Communicated by Thomas Duguet.
© The Author(s) 2025
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