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Motivated by QCD-inspired parton flux tubes and electromagnetic resonance phenomena observed in BESIII measurements, each nucleon is represented by a closed double-helix parton flux tube configuration following a toroidal trefoil-knot trajectory and assembling into concentric toroidal shells sharing a common centroid. Within this framework, SRCs arise naturally as nearest-neighbor contacts between adjacent flux tube segments, converting SRC counting into a deterministic consequence of spatial organization rather than a phenomenological input. The resulting\n                    <jats:italic>np<\/jats:italic>\n                    -SRC counts quantitatively reproduce CLAS measurements for C, Al, Fe, and Pb and are consistent with established experimental systematics. The geometry further indicates a set of correlated features of\n                    <jats:italic>np<\/jats:italic>\n                    -SRC dynamics: (i) each nucleon participates in at least one\n                    <jats:italic>np<\/jats:italic>\n                    -SRC pair; (ii) adding neutrons increases the fraction of high-momentum protons; and (iii) adding protons increases the fraction of high-momentum neutrons. These results suggest that short-range nuclear dynamics is governed by an underlying geometric organizing principle, offering a physically transparent mechanism for the emergence of SRCs in nuclei.\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1038\/s41598-026-45765-x","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,8]],"date-time":"2026-04-08T19:14:19Z","timestamp":1775675659000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Geometric close-packing mechanism for predicting short-range correlations in nuclei"],"prefix":"10.1038","volume":"16","author":[{"given":"Jingfeng","family":"Lin","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"45765_CR1","unstructured":"Fomin, N. et al. 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