Strangeness nuclear physics bears a broad impact on contemporary physics. This set of extensive lectures presents a balanced theoretical and experimental introduction to, and survey of, the field. It addresses topics such as the production and spectroscopy of strange nuclear systems, modern approaches to the hyperon-nucleon interaction, and weak decays of hypernuclei. This burgeoning research field is well served by this tutorial primer.
The unique role of strangeness in nuclear physics has recently attracted much attention, from both the theoretical and experimental viewpoints. This is due not only to the broad spectrum of possible hadron many-body systems with strangeness, but also to the fact that strangeness gives us an opportunity to study fundamental baryon-baryon interactions in a new perspective. Our knowledge of this subject has widened as the scope of hypernuclear experiments has expanded from strangeness exchange and the associated production reactions to hypernuclear weak decays, ? decays, cascade hypernuclei, double-? events, electroproduction of strangeness, etc. This trend will be accelerated by the full operation of new laboratories such as TJLab, COSY, DAèNE, JHF, MAMI, and others. Various aspects of those important and exciting topics are discussed in this book in order to get a perspective of this fast developing area of nuclear physics.
With a New Afterword "Our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann."--Richard Feynman Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way. Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York's East 14th Street, Gell-Mann's prodigious talent was evident from an early age--he entered Yale at 15, completed his Ph.D. at 21, and was soon identifying the structures of the world's smallest components and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe. Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour-de-force of both science writing and biography.
Dramatic progress has been made in all branches of physics since the National Research Council's 1986 decadal survey of the field. The Physics in a New Era series explores these advances and looks ahead to future goals. The series includes assessments of the major subfields and reports on several smaller subfields, and preparation has begun on an overview volume on the unity of physics, its relationships to other fields, and its contributions to national needs. Nuclear Physics is the latest volume of the series. The book describes current activity in understanding nuclear structure and symmetries, the behavior of matter at extreme densities, the role of nuclear physics in astrophysics and cosmology, and the instrumentation and facilities used by the field. It makes recommendations on the resources needed for experimental and theoretical advances in the coming decade.
In recent years, the main research areas were photonuclear reactions and meson productions by using the first high-duty tagged photon beam and the TAGX spectrometer. Although this field is developing quite rapidly, the synchrotron was closed in 1999 after 37 years of operation, and these activities continue at new facilities. It was therfore a good time to discuss the present status and future directions of this field at this occasion. The Symposium was attended by 85 physicists and 35 talks were presented. This book contains the papers presented in the scientific program of the Symposium. aspects of kaon photoproduc
A fascinating tour of particle physics from Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman. At the root of particle physics is an invincible sense of curiosity. Leon Lederman embraces this spirit of inquiry as he moves from the Greeks' earliest scientific observations to Einstein and beyond to chart this unique arm of scientific study. His survey concludes with the Higgs boson, nicknamed the God Particle, which scientists hypothesize will help unlock the last secrets of the subatomic universe, quarks and all--it's the dogged pursuit of this almost mystical entity that inspires Lederman's witty and accessible history.
Electric dipole moments (EDMs) have interested physicists since 1950, when it was first suggested that there was no experimental evidence that nuclear forces are symmetric under parity (P) transformation. This question was regarded as speculative because the existence of an EDM, in addition to P violation, requires a violation of time-reversal (T) symmetry. In 1964 it was discovered that the invariance under CP transformation, which combines charge conjugation (C) with parity, is violated in K-meson decays. This provided a new incentive for EDM searches. Since the combined operations of CPT are expected to leave a system invariant, breakdown of CP invariance should be accompanied by a violation of time-reversal symmetry. Thus there is a reason to expect that EDMs should exist at some level. The original neutron EDM experiments were later supplemented with checks of T invariance in atoms and molecules. These investigations are pursued now by many groups. Over the years, the upper limit on the neutron EDM has been improved by seven orders of magnitude, and the upper limit on the electron EDM obtained in atomic experiments is even more strict.
Strangeness nuclear physics bears a broad impact on contemporary physics. This set of extensive lectures presents a balanced theoretical and experimental introduction to, and survey of, the field. It addresses topics such as the production and spectroscopy of strange nuclear systems, modern approaches to the hyperon-nucleon interaction, and weak decays of hypernuclei. This burgeoning research field is well served by this tutorial primer.
The original edition of Introduction to Nuclear and Particle Physics was used with great success for single-semester courses on nuclear and particle physics offered by American and Canadian universities at the undergraduate level. It was also translated into German, and used overseas. Being less formal but well-written, this book is a good vehicle for learning the more intuitive rather than formal aspects of the subject. It is therefore of value to scientists with a minimal background in quantum mechanics, but is sufficiently substantive to have been recommended for graduate students interested in the fields covered in the text.In the second edition, the material begins with an exceptionally clear development of Rutherford scattering and, in the four following chapters, discusses sundry phenomenological issues concerning nuclear properties and structure, and general applications of radioactivity and of the nuclear force. This is followed by two chapters dealing with interactions of particles in matter, and how these characteristics are used to detect and identify such particles. A chapter on accelerators rounds out the experimental aspects of the field. The final seven chapters deal with elementary-particle phenomena, both before and after the realization of the Standard Model. This is interspersed with discussion of symmetries in classical physics and in the quantum domain, bringing into full focus the issues concerning CP violation, isotopic spin, and other symmetries. The final three chapters are devoted to the Standard Model and to possibly new physics beyond it, emphasizing unification of forces, supersymmetry, and other exciting areas of current research.The book contains several appendices on related subjects, such as special relativity, the nature of symmetry groups, etc. There are also many examples and problems in the text that are of value in gauging the reader's understanding of the material.
University Physics is a three-volume collection that meets the scope and sequence requirements for two- and three-semester calculus-based physics courses. Volume 1 covers mechanics, sound, oscillations, and waves. Volume 2 covers thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, and Volume 3 covers optics and modern physics. This textbook emphasizes connections between between theory and application, making physics concepts interesting and accessible to students while maintaining the mathematical rigor inherent in the subject. Frequent, strong examples focus on how to approach a problem, how to work with the equations, and how to check and generalize the result. The text and images in this textbook are grayscale.
