A book on nuclear forces as comprehensive as this could not have appeared much before now. Although of course much research must yet be done, the boundaries of the field are now established; its ideal internal consistency is being approached asymptotically. The author does not claim for this field the same formal completeness attributed to classical crystallography, for example, but he does assert in the foreword of this book that “The nature of the weak interactions of nucleons with electrons and neutrinos has been investigated extensively and is very nearly one of the (in principle) closed fields of physics. The properties of strong interactions between nucleons have been established over a wide area as a result of scattering experiments at low and high energies and extensive polarization experiments. The exact relation between nuclear forces and mesons also seems to be nearing clarification.
“The purpose of this book is to serve as an introduction to those methods that provide us with a unified view of the interactions of nuclear particles. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with nonrelativistic quantum theory and the principles of the theory of differential equations. The emphasis is on the currently used methods of theoretical physics, so that only limited use is made of the older literature. The detailed application of the results to the problems of individual nuclei has also been avoided in order to focus attention on the unified structure of nuclear-physical problems.”
Contents
I. Two-Nucleon Systems: The Problem of Scattering • Neutron-Proton Scattering at Low Energies • Proton-Proton Scattering at Low Energies • Exchange Operators • Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering at Intermediate and High Energies • The Deuteron • II. Single-Particle Problems: Radii of Atomic Nuclei • Reciprocal Independence of Nucleon States • The Oscillator Potential • Other Single-Particle Potentials • Single-Particle Model • III. Many-Body Problems: The Hartree-Fock Approximation • Creation and Annihilation Operators • Perturbation Theory • The Optical Potential • Giant Resonances • Pairing Energy and Quasi-Particles • Deformed Nuclei • Binding Energy of the Nucleus • Surface Oscillations • Rotational States • The Density of Energy States • IV. Nuclear Reactions: Potential Scattering and Resonance Scattering • Direct Reactions and Compound-Nucleus Reactions • The Optical Model • Alpha Decay • V. Interactions Between Nucleons and Other Elementary Particles: Relativistic Fields • Electrons and Neutrinos • Beta Transitions • Electromagnetic Interactions • Strong Interactions • Appendix: Constants and Units • References • Index
