Frontier Topics In Nuclear Physics

This volume contains the lectures and contributions presented at the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on "Frontier Topics in Nuclear Physics", held at Predeal in Romania from 24 August to 4 September 1993. The ASI stands in a row of 23 Predeal Summer Schools organized by the Institute of Atomic Physics (Bucharest) in Predeal or Poiana-Brasov during the last 25 years. The main topics of the ASI were cluster radioactivity, fission and fusion. the production of very heavy elements, nuclear structure described with microscopic and collective models, weak: interaction and double beta decay, nuclear astrophysics, and heavy ion reactions from low to ultrarelativistic energies. The content of this book is ordered according to these topics. The ASI started with a lecture by Professor Greiner on the "Present and future of nuclear physics", showing the most important new directions of research and the interdisciplinary relations of nuclear physics with other fields of physics. This lecture is printed in the first chapter of the book.

This graduate/research level volume covers a range of the issues in nuclear and astrophysics. Aimed at graduates entering the field, this will also be a valuable reference for established researchers. A volume that libraries covering nuclear physics and astrophysics should not be without.

Nuclear physics deals with the study of atomic nuclei and their constituents. It is a sub-field of physics and is also concerned with the study of many other forms of nuclear matter. It focuses on studying the nuclei under extreme conditions like excitation energy and high spin along with studying the extreme shapes and extreme neutron-to-proton ratios. It primarily aims to study two processes: nuclear fusion and nuclear fission. The process in which two low weighted nuclei come in close contact with each other and merge due to strong forces around them is known as nuclear fusion. Nuclear fission is the process by which a heavy nucleus is broken down into two subsequent nuclei. The field finds its application in areas such as nuclear medicine, radiocarbon dating, magnetic resonance imaging, ion implantation, nuclear power, etc. This discipline is an upcoming field of science that has undergone rapid development over the past few decades. The topics covered in this extensive book deal with the core aspects of nuclear physics. It will serve as a valuable source of reference for those interested in this field.

This textbook is a unique and ambitious primer of nuclear physics, which introduces recent theoretical and experimental progresses starting from basics in fundamental quantum mechanics. The highlight is to offer an overview of nuclear structure phenomena relevant to recent key findings such as unstable halo nuclei, superheavy elements, neutron stars, nucleosynthesis, the standard model, lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD), and chiral effective theory. An additional attraction is that general properties of nuclei are comprehensively explained from both the theoretical and experimental viewpoints. The book begins with the conceptual and mathematical basics of quantum mechanics, and goes into the main point of nuclear physics – nuclear structure, radioactive ion beam physics, and nuclear reactions. The last chapters devote interdisciplinary topics in association with astrophysics and particle physics. A number of illustrations and exercises with complete solutions are given. Each chapter is comprehensively written starting from fundamentals to gradually reach modern aspects of nuclear physics with the objective to provide an effective description of the cutting edge in the field.

The primary objective of the book on "Contemporary Topics in Medium Energy Physics" is to help the reader in exploring important frontier research, as of the year of 1992, in the area of medium energy physics. The book is the result of the multi-pronged efforts by the authors who were invited to speak at the Second German Chinese Symposium on "Medium Energy Physics" (September 7-10, 1992, Bochum, Germany). The premise of the meeting is to investigate primarily how quantum chromo dynamics (QCD), the candidate theory of strong interactions, manifests itself in high energy and nuclear physics. This book is divided into four parts: (i) field-theoretic treatments in QCD; (ii) effective chirally symmetric models and QCD; (iii) electroweak physics in general; and (iv) topological solutions. The focus is more on exposition of new ideas, rather than a comprehensive review of the current status, concerning these subjects, as of the year of 1992. As there are many distinctly different research areas in contemporary intermediate energy physics, we could only choose a few topics of current interest, especially those which are related, directly or indirectly, to the structural studies of the nucleon (proton or neutron). Fortunately, there are in recent years merging trends in these studies: There is a call for an alternative, and more efficient, method to handle problems related to strong interactions (as described by QCD). This is the focus of the papers included in Part I.

This symposium was organized at the B.M. Birla Science Centre, Hyderabad, India, and provided a platform for frontier physicists to exchange ideas and review the latest work and developments on a variety of interrelated topics. A feature of the symposium, as well as the proceedings, is the B.M. Birla Memorial Lecture by Nobel Laureate Professor Gerard 't Hooft. There were participants from the USA, several European countries, Russia and CIS countries, South Africa, Japan, India and elsewhere, of whom some forty scientists presented papers. Spanning a wide range of contemporary issues in fundamental physics from string theory to cosmology, the proceedings present many of these talks and contributions.