Aguilar, A. C. et al, Cieri, L., & Miramontes, A. (2025). Latin American Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructure (III LASF4RI Contribution). Braz. J. Phys., 55(4), 145–17pp.
Abstract: The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a next generation electron-hadron and electron-nuclei scattering facility, will be built at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The wealth of new data will shape research in hadron physics, from nonperturbative QCD techniques to perturbative QCD improvements and global QCD analyses, for the decades to come. With the present proposal, Latin America based physicists, whose expertise lies on the theory and phenomenology side, make the case for the past and future efforts of a growing community, working hand-in-hand towards developing theoretical tools and predictions to analyze, interpret, and optimize the results that will be obtained at the EIC, unveiling the role of the glue that binds us all. This effort is along the lines of various initiatives taken in the USA and supported by colleagues worldwide, such as the ones by the EIC User Group which were highlighted during the Snowmass Process and the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5).
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Morfouace, P. et al, Benlliure, J., Cortina-Gil, D., & Nacher, E. (2025). An asymmetric fission island driven by shell effects in light fragments. Nature, 641, 339–344.
Abstract: Nuclear fission leads to the splitting of a nucleus into two fragments(1,2). Studying the distribution of the masses and charges of the fragments is essential for establishing the fission mechanisms and refining the theoretical models(3,4). It has value for our understanding of r-process nucleosynthesis(5,6), in which the fission of nuclei with extreme neutron-to-proton ratios is pivotal for determining astrophysical abundances and understanding the origin of the elements(7) and for energy applications(8,9). Although the asymmetric distribution of fragments is well understood for actinides (elements in the periodic table with atomic numbers from 89 to 103) based on shell effects(10), symmetric fission governs the scission process for lighter elements. However, unexpected asymmetric splits have been observed in neutron-deficient exotic nuclei(11), prompting extensive further investigations. Here we present measurements of the charge distributions of fission fragments for 100 exotic fissioning systems, 75 of which have never been measured, and establish a connection between the neutron-deficient sub-lead region and the well-understood actinide region. These new data comprehensively map the asymmetric fission island and provide clear evidence for the role played by the deformed Z = 36 proton shell of the light fragment in the fission of sub-lead nuclei. Our dataset will help constrain the fission models used to estimate the fission properties of nuclei with extreme neutron-to-proton ratios for which experimental data are unavailable.
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Caron, S., Dobreva, N., Ferrer Sanchez, A., Martin-Guerrero, J. D., Odyurt, U., Ruiz de Austri, R., et al. (2025). Trackformers: in search of transformer-based particle tracking for the high-luminosity LHC era. Eur. Phys. J. C, 85(4), 460–20pp.
Abstract: High-Energy Physics experiments are facing a multi-fold data increase with every new iteration. This is certainly the case for the upcoming High-Luminosity LHC upgrade. Such increased data processing requirements forces revisions to almost every step of the data processing pipeline. One such step in need of an overhaul is the task of particle track reconstruction, a.k.a., tracking. A Machine Learning-assisted solution is expected to provide significant improvements, since the most time-consuming step in tracking is the assignment of hits to particles or track candidates. This is the topic of this paper. We take inspiration from large language models. As such, we consider two approaches: the prediction of the next word in a sentence (next hit point in a track), as well as the one-shot prediction of all hits within an event. In an extensive design effort, we have experimented with three models based on the Transformer architecture and one model based on the U-Net architecture, performing track association predictions for collision event hit points. In our evaluation, we consider a spectrum of simple to complex representations of the problem, eliminating designs with lower metrics early on. We report extensive results, covering both prediction accuracy (score) and computational performance. We have made use of the REDVID simulation framework, as well as reductions applied to the TrackML data set, to compose five data sets from simple to complex, for our experiments. The results highlight distinct advantages among different designs in terms of prediction accuracy and computational performance, demonstrating the efficiency of our methodology. Most importantly, the results show the viability of a one-shot encoder-classifier based Transformer solution as a practical approach for the task of tracking.
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Syeda, N. K. et al, & Algora, A. (2025). Investigation of the excited states of 114Sn using the GRIFFIN spectrometer at TRIUMF. Nucl. Phys. A, 1059, 123090–5pp.
Abstract: The semi-magic 110-122Sn isotopes display signs of shape coexistence in their excited 0+ states, which, in contrast to the spherical 0+ ground states, are deformed. This paper investigates the nuclear structure of 114Sn using the competing /3+ decay and electron capture of a radioactive beam of 114Sb produced at the TRIUMF-ISAC facility using the GRIFFIN spectrometer. This study will allow for an in-depth understanding of the excited 0+ states in 114Sn, by focusing on their decay patterns. In the present experiment, transitions at 856.2-keV and 1405.0-keV, which were observed in an earlier /3+ decay study but not placed in the 114Sn level scheme, have been Physics, assigned to the level scheme in connection to the 0+3 level at 2156.0-keV. Properly assigning these transitions refines the level scheme and enhances our understanding of the nuclear structure in 114Sn.
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Benso, C., Schwetz, T., & Vatsyayan, D. (2025). Large neutrino mass in cosmology and keV sterile neutrino dark matter from a dark sector. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 04(4), 054–32pp.
Abstract: We consider an extended seesaw model which generates active neutrino masses via the usual type-I seesaw and leads to a large number of massless fermions as well as a sterile neutrino dark matter (DM) candidate in the O(10-100) keV mass range. The dark sector comes into thermal equilibrium with Standard Model neutrinos after neutrino decoupling and before recombination via a U(1) gauge interaction in the dark sector. This suppresses the abundance of active neutrinos and therefore reconciles sizeable neutrino masses with cosmology. The DM abundance is determined by freeze-out in the dark sector, which allows avoiding bounds from X-ray searches. Our scenario predicts a slight increase in the effective number of neutrino species Neff at recombination, potentially detectable by future CMB missions.
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