Imaging shapes of atomic nuclei in high-energy nuclear collisions

From this very cool paper:

" In an ironic twist, this effectively realizes Richard Feynman’s analogy of the seemingly impossible task of ‘figuring out a pocket watch by smashing two together and observing the flying debris’. "

In a rhyme with the uncertainty principle, you can either have your watch but have only a poor idea of what it even looks like, or momentarily observe the real shape that it once had.

Am one of the authors cited in the paper. I think the real opportunity for this type of inverse problem estimation work is resolving the shape and fluctuations of the nucleon.

It's discussed in this Nature podcast

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03646-1

One of the investigators on this project is a guest on this segment. He does a nice job of describing it in an understandable way

The pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.06625