Nuclear theory paper is now "renowned"

For the past four years, a paper co-written by Argonne physicist Robert Wiringa has been consistently the most-cited nuclear theory paper in the SPIRES-SLAC database, a major online repository for high-energy physics papers. With more than 500 citations, it's entered the database's “renowned” status — the only paper so designated from the nuclear theory Eprint Archives.

SPIRES was the first U.S. database on the World Wide Web. Managed and maintained by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the database is a joint project of SLAC, the Deutsche Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the worldwide high-energy physics community.

The paper, “An Accurate Nucleon-Nucleon Potential with Charge-Independence Breaking,” was published in 1994 by Wiringa, V.G.J. Stoks of the Flinders University of South Australia and R. Schiavilla of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. It describes “Argonne v 18,” a set of calculations used to model the interaction of protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.
Argonne v 18 uses 18 different mathematical terms to model the interaction of protons and neutrons (collectively known as “nucleons”).

“ There are 18 different operator components needed to fit the data. That's how complicated nucleon-nucleon potentials are,” Wiringa said. Characteristics like spin or isospin, angular momentum and several other forces must be modeled for each interacting nucleon. Using v 18, the results fit over 4,000 experimental data extremely well.

“ Over the last 10-15 years, there's been a tremendous amount of work on few-nucleon calculations,” Wiringa said, “which helped boost the number of citations. The v 18 also gets used for calculations of nuclear matter and neutron stars.”

Although several models are available to nuclear theorists, v 18 is one of the most popular, said Argonne physicist Steven Pieper.

“ They worked hard to try and make the model easy to use,” said Pieper, who contributed to the highly cited paper and works with Wiringa on many-body nuclear calculations. Pieper and Wiringa have three other papers in the SPIRES database top 100. (Their Physics Division colleague, Craig Roberts, has five.)