Principal Components of Nuclear Mass Model Residuals

Abstract

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to the residuals of six widely used nuclear mass models to uncover systematic deviations and identify missing physical effects in theoretical nuclear mass predictions. By analyzing the principal components of nuclear mass model residuals, this study reveals that no single dominant pattern governs the discrepancies across models. Instead, the residual structures are largely uncorrelated, indicating that current nuclear mass models fail to capture underlying nuclear residual effects in distinct and model-specific ways. These findings suggest that improvements to nuclear mass models should be guided by model-specific residual analyses rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.