High-resolution probes of low-resolution nuclei

Abstract

Renormalization group (RG) methods used to soften Hamiltonians allow large-scale computational resources to be used to greater advantage in calculations of nuclear structure and reactions. These RG transformations lower the effective resolution of the nuclei, which raises questions about how to calculate and interpret high-momentum transfer probes of nuclear structure. Such experiments are conventionally explained in terms of short-range correlations, but these disappear with the evolution to low-momentum scales. We highlight the important issues and prospects in the context of recent developments in RG technology, with guidance from the analogous extraction of parton distributions.