English

Extracting nuclear charge radii from binding energies: a single-parameter empirical formula with structural corrections

Nuclear Theory 2026-07-16 v1

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 (BECR1p\mathrm{BECR}_\mathrm{1p}) 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