Advances In Nuclear Physics

This graduate-level text collects and synthesizes a series of ten lectures on the nuclear quantum many-body problem. Starting from our current understanding of the underlying forces, it presents recent advances within the field of lattice quantum chromodynamics before going on to discuss effective field theories, central many-body methods like Monte Carlo methods, coupled cluster theories, the similarity renormalization group approach, Green’s function methods and large-scale diagonalization approaches. Algorithmic and computational advances show particular promise for breakthroughs in predictive power, including proper error estimates, a better understanding of the underlying effective degrees of freedom and of the respective forces at play. Enabled by recent improvements in theoretical, experimental and numerical techniques, the state-of-the art applications considered in this volume span the entire range, from our smallest components – quarks and gluons as the mediators of the strong force – to the computation of the equation of state for neutron star matter. The lectures presented provide an in-depth exposition of the underlying theoretical and algorithmic approaches as well details of the numerical implementation of the methods discussed. Several also include links to numerical software and benchmark calculations, which readers can use to develop their own programs for tackling challenging nuclear many-body problems.

The ?eld of nuclear physics is entering the 21st century in an interesting and exciting way. On the one hand, it is changing qualitatively since new experim- tal developments allow us to direct radioactive and other exotic probes to target nuclei as well as to sparko? extremely energetic nuclear collisions. In parallel, detector systems are of an impressive sophistication. It is di?cult to envisage all the discoveries that will be made in the near future. On the other hand, the app- cations of nuclear science and technology are broadening the limits in medicine, industry, art, archaeology, and the environmental sciences, etc. This implies that the public perception of our ?eld is changing, smoothly but drastically, in c- trast to former times where nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants were the dominant applications perceived by citizens. Both aspects, scienti?c dynamism and popular recognition, should lead the ?eld to an unexpected revival. One of the consequences of the former could be that many brilliant students consider nuclear physics as an excellent ?eld in which to acquire professional expertise. Therefore, one of the challenges of the international nuclear physics community is to try to make the ?eld attractive. That means simply being pedagogic and enthusiastic. Thus, as organisers of an already established summer school, our contribution was to put an emphasis in this session on pedagogy and enthusiasm.

The aim of Advances in Nuclear Physics is to provide review papers which chart the field of nuclear physics with some regularity and completeness. We define the field of nuclear physics as that which deals with the structure and behavior of atomic nuclei. Although many good books and reviews on nuclear physics are available, none attempts to provide a coverage which is at the same time continuing and reasonably complete. Many people have felt the need for a new series to fill this gap and this is the ambition of Advances in Nuclear Physics. The articles will be aimed at a wide audience, from research students to active research workers. The selection of topics and their treatment will be varied but the basic viewpoint will be pedagogical. In the past two decades the field of nuclear physics has achieved its own identity, occupying a central position between elementary particle physics on one side and atomic and solid state physics on the other. Nuclear physics is remarkable both by its unity, which it derives from its concise boundaries, and by its amazing diversity, which stems from the multiplicity of experimental approaches and from the complexity of the nucleon-nucleon force. Physicists specializing in one aspect of this strongly unified, yet very complex, field find it imperative to stay well-informed of the other aspects. This provides a strong motivation for a comprehensive series of reviews.

This volume comprises select peer-reviewed papers from the Indo-French Workshop on Multifragmentation, Collective Flow, and Sub-Threshold Particle Production in Heavy-Ion Reactions held at the Department of Physics, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India in February, 2019. The contents highlight latest research trends in intermediate energy nuclear physics and emphasize on the various reaction mechanisms which take place in heavy-ion collisions. The chapters contribute to the understanding of interactions that govern the dynamics at sub-nucleonic level. The book includes contributions from global experts hailing from major research facilities of nuclear physics, and provides a good balance between experimental and theoretical model based studies. Given the range of topics covered, this book can be a useful reference for students and researchers interested in the field of heavy-ion reactions.

In both the present volume of Advances in Nuclear Physics and in the next volume, which will follow in a few months' time, we have stretched our normal pattern of reviews by including articles of more major proportions than any we have published before. As a result we have only three review articles in Volume 5. From the beginning of this series it has been our aim, as editors, to achieve variation in the scope, style, and length of individual articles sufficient to match the needs of the individual topic, rather than to restrain authors within rigid limits. It has not been our experience that this flexibility has led to unnecessary exuberance on the part of the authors. We feel that the major articles now entering the series are entirely justified. The article by Professor Delves on "Variational Techniques in the Nuclear Three-Body Problem" is an authoritative, definitive article on a subject which forms a cornerstone of nuclear physics. If we start with two body interactions, then the three-nucleon system is, perhaps, the only many nucleon system whose exact description may lie within the scope of human ingenuity. In recent years some new techniques of scattering theory, origi nating mostly in particle physics, have led to a great deal of new interest in the nuclear three-body problem. In this series we have had two articles (by Mitra and by Duck) on the new approaches.