Physics, Volume 4, Issue 2 (June 2022) – 22 articles

In recent years, shell model studies have significantly contributed in improving the nuclear input, required in simulations of the dynamics of astrophysical objects and their associated nucleosynthesis. This review highlights a few examples such as electron capture rates and neutrino-nucleus cross sections, important for the evolution and nucleosynthesis of supernovae. For simulations of rapid neutron-capture (r-process) nucleosynthesis, shell model studies have contributed to an improved understanding of half lives of neutron-rich nuclei with magic neutron numbers and of the nuclear level densities and $\gamma$-strength functions that are both relevant for neutron capture rates. Full article

In light of the recent Jefferson Laboratory (JLab) data for the nuclear ${}^{12}\mathrm{C}(e,e^{\prime }p)$ transparencies, calculations, obtained in a relativistic multiple scattering Glauber approximation, are discussed. The shell-separated ${}^{12}$C transparencies are shown and it is concluded that the p-shell nucleons are 75% more transparent than the s-shell ones. The presented comparisons between the calculations made here and the current ${}^{12}\mathrm{C}(e,e^{\prime }p)$ data show no clear indication for the onset of color transparency when implemented within the color diffusion model with standard parameters. Full article

The present paper reports on the methods of the systematic analysis of the high-energy collision distributions—in particular, those adopted by Jean Cleymans. The analysis of data on high-energy collisions, using non-extensive statistics, represents an important part of Jean Cleymans scientific activity in the last decade. The methods of analysis, developed and employed by Cleymans, are discussed and compared with other similar methods. As an example, analyses of a set of the data of proton-proton collisions at the center-of-mass energies, $\sqrt{s}=0.9$ and 7 TeV, are provided applying different methods and the results obtained are discussed. This line of research has the potential to enlarge our understanding of strongly interacting systems and to be continued in the future. Full article

Based on the novel prescription for the power function, ${(x+iy)}^m$, the new expression for $\Psi (x,y|m)$, the eigenfunction of the operator of the third component of the angular momentum, ${\widehat{M}}_z$, is presented. These functions are normalizable, single valued and, distinct to the traditional presentation, ${(x+iy)}^m={\rho }^m{e}^{im\varphi }$, are invariant under the rotations at $2\pi$ for any, not necessarily integer, m—the eigenvalue of ${\widehat{M}}_z$. For any real m the functions $\Psi (x,y|m)$ form an orthonormal set, therefore they may serve as a quantum mechanical eigenfunction of ${\widehat{M}}_z$. The eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of the angular momentum operator squared, ${\widehat{M}}^2$, derived for the two different prescriptions for the square root, ${\left(m^2\right)}^{1/2}$, ${\left(m^2\right)}^{1/2}=\left|m\right|$ and ${\left(m^2\right)}^{1/2}=\pm m$, are reported. The normalizable eigenfunctions of ${\widehat{M}}^2$ are presented in terms of hypergeometric functions, admitting integer as well as non-integer eigenvalues. It is shown that the purely integer spectrum is not the most general solution but is just the artifact of a particular choice of the Legendre functions as the pair of linearly independent solutions of the eigenvalue problem for the ${\widehat{M}}^2$. Full article

The color transparency (CT) of a hadron, propagating with reduced absorption in a nucleus, is a fundamental property of QCD (quantum chromodynamics) reflecting its internal structure and effective size when it is produced at high transverse momentum, Q. CT has been confirmed in many experiments, such as semi-exclusive hard electroproduction, $eA\to e^{\prime }\pi X$, for mesons produced at $Q^2>3{\mathrm{GeV}}^2$. However, a recent JLab (Jefferson Laboratory) measurement for a proton electroproduced in carbon $e\mathrm{C}\to e^{\prime }pX$, where X stands for the inclusive sum of all produced final states, fails to observe CT at $Q^2$ up to 14.2 GeV${}^2$. In this paper, the onset of CT is determined by comparing the $Q^2$-dependence of the hadronic cross sections for the initial formation of a small color-singlet configuration using the generalized parton distributions from holographic light-front QCD. A critical dependence on the hadron’s twist, $\tau$, the number of hadron constituents, is found for the onset of CT, with no significant effects from the nuclear medium. This effect can explain the absence of proton CT in the present kinematic range of the JLab experiment. The proton is predicted to have a “two-stage” color transparency with the onset of CT differing for the spin-conserving (twist-3, $\tau =3$) Dirac form factor with a higher onset in $Q^2$ for the spin-flip Pauli (twist-4) form factor. In contrast, the neutron is predicted to have a “one-stage” color transparency with the onset at higher $Q^2$ because of the dominance of its Pauli form factor. The model also predicts a strong dependence at low energies on the flavor of the quark current coupling to the hadron. Full article

Science and its evolution are based on complex epistemological structures. Two of the pillars of such a construction definitively are enthusiasm and skepticism, both being ingredients without which solid knowledge is hardly achieved and certainly not guaranteed. Our friend and colleague Jean Willy André Cleymans (1944–2021), with his open personality, high and longstanding interest for innovation, and recognized leadership in high-energy physics, constitutes a beautiful example of the former. Recently, Joseph I. Kapusta has generously and laboriously offered an interesting illustration of the latter pillar, in the very same field of physics, concerning the very same theoretical frame, namely, nonextensive statistical mechanics and the nonadditive q-entropies on which it is based. I present here a detailed analysis, point by point, of Kapusta’s 19 May 2021 talk and, placing the discussion in a sensibly wider and updated perspective, I refute his bold conclusion that indices q have no physical foundation. Full article

I review the physics of the phase boundary between hadronic matter and quark matter from several different points of view. These include thermodynamics, statistical physics, and chemical kinetics. In particular, the review focuses on the role of the chemical freeze-out line and its relation to the concept of valence-quark percolation. The review ends with some recollections of Jean Cleymans. Full article

Color transparency, the reduction of initial-state or final-state interactions in coherent nuclear processes, is a natural prediction of QCD (quantum chromodynamics) provided that small-sized or point-like configurations (PLCs) are formed in high-momentum transfer, high-energy, semi-exclusive processes. I use the Frankfurt-Miller-Strikman criteria for the existence of PLCs to show that the wave functions of light-front holographic QCD, as currently formulated, do not contain a PLC. Full article

Fourty years after its introduction, the phenomenon of color transparency remains a domain of controversial interpretations of experimental data. In this review, present evidence for or against color transparency manifestation in various exclusive hard scattering reactions is presented. The nuclear transparency experiments reveal whether short-distance processes dominate a scattering amplitude at some given kinematical point. We plead for a new round of nuclear transparency measurements in a variety of experimental set-ups, including near-forward exclusive reactions related to generalized parton distribution (GPD) physics and near-backward exclusive reactions related to transition distribution amplitudes (TDA) physics. Full article

The Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) is a hadron-accelerator facility that aims to provide secondary beams of kaons, pions, neutrinos, muons, and others together with the primary proton beam for investigating a wide range of science projects. High-energy hadron physics can be studied by using high-momentum beams of unseparated hadrons, which are essentially pions, and also primary protons. In this report, possible experiments are explained on color transparency and generalized parton distributions (GPDs). These projects are complementary to lepton-scattering experiments at Jefferson Laboratory (JLab), COMPASS/AMBER, and future electron-ion colliders. Thank to hadron-beam energies up to 30 GeV, J-PARC is a unique facility to investigate the transition region from the hadron degrees of freedom to the quark-gluon degrees of freedom. It is suitable for finding mechanisms of the olor transparency. Such color-transparency studies are also valuable for clarifying the factorization of hadron production processes in extracting the GPDs from actual measurements. These studies will lead to the understanding of basic high-energy hadron interactions in nuclear medium and to clarifications on the origins of hadron spins, masses, and internal pressure mechanisms. Full article

Despite more than two decades of intensive research, ion implantation in group III nitrides is still not established as a routine technique for doping and device processing. The main challenges to overcome are the complex defect accumulation processes, as well as the high post-implant annealing temperatures necessary for efficient dopant activation. This review summarises the contents of a plenary talk, given at the Applied Nuclear Physics Conference, Prague, 2021, and focuses on recent results, obtained at Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal), on ion implantation into non-conventional GaN structures, such as non-polar thin films and nanowires. Interestingly, the damage accumulation is strongly influenced by the surface orientation of the samples, as well as their dimensionality. In particular, basal stacking faults are the dominant implantation defects in c-plane GaN films, while dislocation loops predominate in a-plane samples. Ion implantation into GaN nanowires, on the other hand, causes a much smaller density of extended defects compared to thin films. Finally, recent breakthroughs concerning dopant activation are briefly reviewed, focussing on optical doping with europium and electrical doping with magnesium. Full article

Applications of configuration-mixing methods for nuclei near the proton and neutron drip lines are discussed. A short review of magic numbers is presented. Prospects for advances in the regions of four new “outposts” are highlighted: ${}^{\mathrm{28}}$O, ${}^{42}$Si, ${}^{60}$Ca and ${}^{78}$Ni. Topics include shell gaps, single-particle properties, islands of inversion, collectivity, neutron decay, neutron halos, two-proton decay, effective charge, and quenching in knockout reactions. Full article

The temporal evolution of pandemics described by the susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR)-compartment model is sensitively determined by the time dependence of the infection ($a\left(t\right)$) and recovery ($\mu \left(t\right))$ rates regulating the transitions from the susceptible to the infected and from the infected to the recovered compartment, respectively. Here, approximated SIR solutions for different time dependencies of the infection and recovery rates are derived which are based on the adiabatic approximation assuming time-dependent ratios, $k\left(t\right)=\mu \left(t\right)/a\left(t\right)$, varying slowly in comparison with the typical time characteristics of the pandemic wave. For such slow variations, the available analytical approximations from the KSSIR-model, developed by us and valid for a stationary value of the ratio k, are used to insert a posteriori the adopted time-dependent ratio of the two rates. Instead of investigating endless different combinations of the time dependencies of the two rates $a\left(t\right)$ and $\mu \left(t\right)$, a suitably parameterized reduced time, $\tau$, dependence of the ratio $k\left(\tau \right)$ is adopted. Together with the definition of the reduced time, this parameterized ratio $k\left(\tau \right)$ allows us to cover a great variety of different time dependencies of the infection and recovery rates. The agreement between the solutions from the adiabatic approximation in its four different studied variants and the exact numerical solutions of the SIR-equations is tolerable providing confidence in the accuracy of the proposed adiabatic approximation. Full article

Five case studies are reported on the use of neutron and photon activation analysis (NAA and PAA, respectively), X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis, ion beam analysis (IBA), and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) for the elemental characterization or dating of various objects of cultural heritage, such as building materials, pottery, metallic artefacts, ancient decorations, or the remains of historical personalities. The use of the individual techniques or their combination proved a useful, frequently indispensable tool for revealing the provenance of the artefacts, the method and time of their manufacturing, the elucidation of ancient human activities, or the verification of various hypotheses or legends related to the artefacts. Full article

After the successful detection of cosmic high-energy neutrinos, the field of multiwavelength photon studies of active galactic nuclei (AGN) is entering an exciting new phase. The first hint of a possible neutrino signal from the blazar TXS 0506+056 leads to the anticipation that AGN could soon be identified as point sources of high-energy neutrino radiation, representing another messenger signature besides the established photon signature. To understand the complex flaring behavior at multiwavelengths, a genuine theoretical understanding needs to be developed. These observations of the electromagnetic spectrum and neutrinos can only be interpreted fully when the charged, relativistic particles responsible for the different emissions are modeled properly. The description of the propagation of cosmic rays in a magnetized plasma is a complex question that can only be answered when analyzing the transport regimes of cosmic rays in a quantitative way. In this paper, therefore, a quantitative analysis of the propagation regimes of cosmic rays is presented in the approach that is most commonly used to model non-thermal emission signatures from blazars, i.e., the existence of a high-energy cosmic-ray population in a relativistic plasmoid traveling along the jet axis. It is shown that in the considered energy range of high-energy photon and neutrino emission, the transition between diffusive and ballistic propagation takes place, significantly influencing not only the spectral energy distribution, but also the lightcurve of blazar flares. Full article

Forgeries exist in many fields. Money, goods, and works of art have been imitated for centuries to deceive and make a profit. In the field of Cultural Heritage, nuclear techniques can be used to study art forgeries. Ion beam analysis (IBA), as well as ¹⁴C accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), are now established techniques, and the purpose of this paper is to report on their capacity to provide information on ancient, as well as modern, forgeries. Two case studies are presented: the production of silver counterfeit coins in the 16th century and the detection of recent forgeries of 20th century paintings. For the counterfeit coins, two silvering processes were identified by IBA: mercury silvering (also called amalgam silvering or fire silvering) and pure silver plating. The discovery of 14 mercury silvered coins is an important finding since there are very few known examples from before the 17th century. In the detection of recent forgeries, among the five paintings examined, ¹⁴C dating showed that three of them are definitely fakes, one is most likely a fake, and one remains undetermined. These results were obtained by using the bomb peak calibration curve to date canvas and paint samples. Full article

The paper proposes to study the onset of color transparency in hard exclusive reactions in the backward regime. Guided by the encouraging Jefferson Laboratory (JLab) results on backward $\pi$ and $\omega$ electroproduction data at moderate virtuality $Q^2$, which may be interpreted as the signal of an early scaling regime, where the scattering amplitude factorizes in a hard coefficient function convoluted with nucleon to meson transition distribution amplitudes, the study shows that investigations of these channels on nuclear targets opens a new opportunity to test the appearance of nuclear color transparency for a fast-moving nucleon. Full article

In this paper, the earlier studies by us on the production of hadrons in a nuclear environment are reviewed. A string-breaking model for the initial production of hadrons and a quantum-kinetic Giessen-Boltzmann-Uehling-Uhlenbeck (GiBUU) transport model are used to describe the final state interactions of the newly formed (pre)hadrons. The latter are determined both by the formation times and by the time-development of the hadron–hadron cross section. First, it is shown that only a linear time dependence is able to describe the available hadronizatin data. Then, the results are compared with detailed data from HERMES and Jefferson Laboratory (JLAB) experiments; a rather good agreement is reached for all reactions, studied without any tuning of parameters. Predictions of spectra for pions and kaons for JLAB experiments at 12 GeV are also repeated. Finally, the absence of color transparency (CT) effects in the recent experiment on proton transparencies in quasi-elastic (QE) scattering events on nuclei is discussed. We propose to look instead for CT effects on protons in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (SIDIS) events. Full article

This essay is about superluminal motion. It is generally believed that special relativity prohibits movements faster than the speed of light. It is explained which motion is actually forbidden by special relativity and why. Tachyons are breafly discussed and it is explained that, due to internal instability, tachyon fields cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light. However, as John Stuart Bell remarked, “what is proved by the impossibility proofs is lack of imagination”. Inspired by the Frenkel–Kontorova model of crystal dislocations, we demonstrate the way to overcome the light speed barrier by introducing elvisebrions. Elvisebrions are defined as objects that can exist in the case when some hidden sectors, very weakly interacting with the visible sector, are either not Lorentz invariant, or Lorentz invariant but with different limiting velocities. In this case, elvisebrions can move in a superluminal manner without violating our existing physical models. Full article

The study of the effects of the radiation dose on devices and materials is a topic of high interest in several fields, including radiobiology, space missions, microelectronics, and high energy physics. In this paper, a new method, based on radiochromic film dosimetry, is proposed for real-time dose assessment in radiation hardness assurance tests. This method allows for correlating the radiation dose at which devices are exposed to the radiation effects (malfunctioning and/or breakdown). In previous studies, it has already been demonstrated that a system, based on optical fibers and a spectrometer, allows for the real-time dose assessment of radiochromic films. The current study not only validates our previous results, but shows that it is possible to apply the new method to an actual radiation environment for the real-time measurement of the dose delivered to a device in radiation hardness assurance tests. This new dosimeter can be used in different radiation environments for a wide dose range, from a few Gy to a few MGy. This high sensitivity can be reached by changing the radiochromic film type and/or the parameters used for the analysis. Full article

In this paper, the effects of wave–wave interactions of the lowest order, i.e., three-wave interactions, on parallel-propagating Alfvén wave spectra on a closed magnetic field line are considered. The spectra are then used to evaluate the transport parameters of energetic particles in a coronal loop. The wave spectral density is the main variable investigated, and it is modelled using a diffusionless numerical scheme. A model, where high-frequency Alfvén waves are emitted from the two footpoints of the loop and interact with each other as they pass by, is considered. The wave spectrum evolution shows the erosion of wave energy starting from higher frequencies so that the wave mode emitted from the closer footpoint of the loop dominates the wave energy density. Consistent with the cross-helicity state of the waves, the bulk velocity of energetic protons is from the loop footpoints towards the loop apex. Protons can be turbulently trapped in the loop, and Fermi acceleration is possible near the loop apex, as long as the partial pressure of the particles does not exceed that of the resonant waves. The erosion of the Alfvén wave energy density should also lead to the heating of the loop. Full article

Ion implantation has played a significant role in semiconductor device fabrication and is growing in significance in the fabrication of Si photonic devices. In this paper, recent progress in the growth and characterization of Si and Ge quantum dots (QDs) for photonic light-emitting devices is reviewed, with a focus on ion implantation as a synthetic tool. Light emissions from Si and Ge QDs are compared with emissions from other optically active centers, such as defects in silicon oxide and other thin film materials, as well as rare-earth light emitters. Detection of light in silicon photonics is performed via the integration of germanium and other elements into detector structures, which can also be achieved by ion implantation. Novel techniques to grow SiGe- and SiGeSn-on-Si structure are described along with their application as detectors for operation in the short-wave infrared range. Full article