Atomic nuclei are complex strongly interacting systems and their exact theoretical description is a long-standing challenge. An approximate description of nuclei can be achieved by separating its short and long range structure. This separation of scales stands at the heart of the nuclear shell model and effective field theories that describe the long-range structure of the nucleus using a meanfield approximation. We present here an effective description of the complementary short-range structure using contact terms and stylized two-body asymptotic wave functions. The possibility to extract the nuclear contacts from experimental data is presented. Regions in the two-body momentum distribution dominated by high-momentum, close-proximity, nucleon pairs are identified and compared to experimental data. The amount of short-range correlated (SRC) nucleon pairs is determined and compared to measurements. Non-combinatorial isospin symmetry for SRC pairs is identified. The obtained one-body momentum distributions indicate dominance of SRC pairs above the nuclear Fermi-momentum.

The general nuclear contact matrices are defined, taking into consideration all partial waves and finite-range interactions, extending Tan's work for the zero range model. The properties of these matrices are discussed and the relations between the contacts and the one-nucleon and two-nucleon momentum distributions are derived. Using these relations, a new asymptotic connection between the one-nucleon and two-nucleon momentum distributions, describing the two-body short-range correlations in nuclei, is obtained. Using available numerical data, we extract few connections between the different contacts and verify their relations to the momentum distributions. The numerical data also allows us to identify the main nucleon momentum range affected by two-body short-range correlations. Utilizing these relations and the numerical data, we also verify a previous independent prediction connecting between the Levinger constant and the contacts. This work provides an important indication for the relevance of the contact formalism to nuclear systems, and should open the path for revealing more useful relations between the contacts and interesting quantities of nuclei and nuclear matter.

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