Extracting nuclear charge radii from binding energies: a single-parameter empirical formula with structural corrections
Abstract
Nuclear binding energies and charge radii stem from the same underlying physics: saturation, isospin dependence, shell structure, and deformation. Binding-energy data therefore provide a natural constraint for charge-radius modeling. We propose a one-parameter charge-radius formula () that combines binding-energy correlations with local structural corrections. On a curated set of 893 experimental charge radii, the macroscopic BECR term alone reproduces the leading charge-radius scale with a root-mean-square deviation (RMSD) of 0.0345 fm; adding shell, odd--even, finite-size, and deformation corrections further reduces the RMSD of BECR1p to 0.0138 fm. An anisotropic kernel ridge regression (AKRR) applied to the residuals further lowers the leave-one-out cross-validation RMSD to about 0.0081 fm. We use the formula to predict charge radii for 11205 nuclei across the nuclear chart.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.15064,
title = {Extracting nuclear charge radii from binding energies: a single-parameter empirical formula with structural corrections},
author = {Pengfei Ma and Minghui Hu and Kai Ren and Junlong Tian and Cheng Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.15064},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
15 pages, 5 figures, 1 table