Carlos A. Bertulani - Böcker

Nuclear Physics in a Nutshell provides a clear, concise, and up-to-date overview of the atomic nucleus and the theories that seek to explain it. Bringing together a systematic explanation of hadrons, nuclei, and stars for the first time in one volume, Carlos A. Bertulani provides the core material needed by graduate and advanced undergraduate students of physics to acquire a solid understanding of nuclear and particle science. Nuclear Physics in a Nutshell is the definitive new resource for anyone considering a career in this dynamic field. The book opens by setting nuclear physics in the context of elementary particle physics and then shows how simple models can provide an understanding of the properties of nuclei, both in their ground states and excited states, and also of the nature of nuclear reactions.It then describes: nuclear constituents and their characteristics; nuclear interactions; nuclear structure, including the liquid-drop model approach, and the nuclear shell model; and recent developments such as the nuclear mean-field and the nuclear physics of very light nuclei, nuclear reactions with unstable nuclear beams, and the role of nuclear physics in energy production and nucleosynthesis in stars. Throughout, discussions of theory are reinforced with examples that provide applications, thus aiding students in their reading and analysis of current literature. Each chapter closes with problems, and appendixes address supporting technical topics.

In this volume, the structure and reactions of radioactive nuclei are described. The relevance of halo nuclei to nuclear astrophysics is stressed in different contributions. Other topics included are: three-body aspects of light neutron-rich nuclei, elastic scattering, charge exchange and Coulomb excitation, fragment moment distribution, mass at half-life measurement and electromagnetism-induced fission.

The J. A. Swieca Summer School series is organized by the Brazilian Physics Society. The VIII school was dedicated to topics in astrophysics, chaos, nuclear structure and reactions, and to QCD in nuclear physics.

Collective excitations in Fermi and Bose systems are key phenomena in understanding the structure and dynamics of many-body systems with the manifestation of different statistics. This volume presents recent developments in atomic and nuclear physics which have revealed intriguing features which are under intense scrutiny by both theorists and experimentalists.