Vernon W. Hughes – författare

This volume comprises a collection of invited papers presented at the interna­ tional symposium "The Future of Muon Physics", May 7-9 1991, at the Ruprecht­ Karls-Universitat in Heidelberg. In the inspiring atmosphere of the Internationales Wissenschaftsforum researchers working worldwide at universities and at many inter­ national accelerator centers came together to review the present status of the field and to discuss the future directions in muon physics. The muon, charged lepton of the second generation, was first oberved some sixty years ago~ Despite many efforts since, the reason for its existence still remains a secret to the scientific community challenging both theorists and experimentalists. In modern physics the muon plays a key role in many topics of research. Atomic physics with negative muons provides excellent tests of the theory of quantum electrodynamics and of the electro-weak interaction and probes nuclear properties. The. purely leptonic hydrogen-like muonium atom allows tests of fun­ damental laws in physics and the determination of precise values for fundamental constants. New measurements of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon will probe the renormalizability of the weak interaction and will be sensitive to physics beyond the standard model. The muon decay is the most carefully studied weak process. Searches for rare decay modes of muons and for the conversion of muonium to antimuonium examine the lepton number conservation laws and new speculative theories. Nuclear muon capture addresses fundamental questions like tests of the CPT theorem.

This book contains the proceedings of the Gregory Breit Centennial Symposium. The legacy of Breit to atomic, nuclear and particle physics is discussed vis-à-vis modern developments in these fields. Among other subjects, the present status of the Breit interaction in atomic physics and of the nucleon-nucleon interaction are reviewed. The second part of the book contains a more in-depth presentation of the status of modern nuclear physics, from relativistic heavy ion physics to nuclear structure physics and nuclear astrophysics. The recently confirmed discovery of supersymmetry in nuclei is also discussed.

The topic of the internal spin structure of the nucleon has become an unusually active subfield of particle and nuclear physics, together with the relevant technologies. This volume presents up-to-date coverage.All the talks given at the symposium can be found in the volume. In addition, selected articles are reprinted, including two early papers which record initial thinking about the topic, all experimental papers giving data on nucleon spin structure functions determined from polarized lepton-nucleon scattering, and two valuable previously unpublished papers.

This book reviews the major physics results from the meson factories, surveys the status of the relevant fields (including pion physics, hadron physics, and electroweak physics), and explores prospects for further progress.