This book focuses on the ideas to embed nuclear physics in the larger context of hadronic physics by stressing and deepening its widening overlap with particle, astroparticle and condensed matter physics and to emphasize the unity of the two facets not only of nuclear, but of the whole physics; the theoretical and the experimental ones. Counteracting the ominous trend of enlarging the gap between the two, the danger being of depriving experimental physics of ideas promoting experiments and of transforming theoretical physics into metaphysics. The reader will find modern conceptions on nuclear structure, how atomic nuclei are probed through the scattering of high energy electrons and how they interact when accelerated at ultra-relativistic energies. The item connects to the quest for the quark-gluon plasma, perhaps the central theme of the contemporary hadronic physics, whose unraveling requires a vast and profound knowledge of both nuclear and particle physics, in particular QCD.

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.

The principal goals of the study were to articulate the scientific rationale and objectives of the field and then to take a long-term strategic view of U.S. nuclear science in the global context for setting future directions for the field. Nuclear Physics: Exploring the Heart of Matter provides a long-term assessment of an outlook for nuclear physics. The first phase of the report articulates the scientific rationale and objectives of the field, while the second phase provides a global context for the field and its long-term priorities and proposes a framework for progress through 2020 and beyond. In the second phase of the study, also developing a framework for progress through 2020 and beyond, the committee carefully considered the balance between universities and government facilities in terms of research and workforce development and the role of international collaborations in leveraging future investments. Nuclear physics today is a diverse field, encompassing research that spans dimensions from a tiny fraction of the volume of the individual particles (neutrons and protons) in the atomic nucleus to the enormous scales of astrophysical objects in the cosmos. Nuclear Physics: Exploring the Heart of Matter explains the research objectives, which include the desire not only to better understand the nature of matter interacting at the nuclear level, but also to describe the state of the universe that existed at the big bang. This report explains how the universe can now be studied in the most advanced colliding-beam accelerators, where strong forces are the dominant interactions, as well as the nature of neutrinos.

Understanding of protons and neutrons, or "nucleons"â€"the building blocks of atomic nucleiâ€"has advanced dramatically, both theoretically and experimentally, in the past half century. A central goal of modern nuclear physics is to understand the structure of the proton and neutron directly from the dynamics of their quarks and gluons governed by the theory of their interactions, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and how nuclear interactions between protons and neutrons emerge from these dynamics. With deeper understanding of the quark-gluon structure of matter, scientists are poised to reach a deeper picture of these building blocks, and atomic nuclei themselves, as collective many-body systems with new emergent behavior. The development of a U.S. domestic electron-ion collider (EIC) facility has the potential to answer questions that are central to completing an understanding of atoms and integral to the agenda of nuclear physics today. This study assesses the merits and significance of the science that could be addressed by an EIC, and its importance to nuclear physics in particular and to the physical sciences in general. It evaluates the significance of the science that would be enabled by the construction of an EIC, its benefits to U.S. leadership in nuclear physics, and the benefits to other fields of science of a U.S.-based EIC.

A semi-popular account of stars and gaseous nebulae, treating topics such as stellar evolution, the origin of elements, supernovae and cosmic rays.

A whole decades research collated, organised and synthesised into one single book! Following a 60-page review of the seminal treatises of Misner, Thorne, Wheeler and Weinberg on general relativity, Glendenning goes on to explore the internal structure of compact stars, white dwarfs, neutron stars, hybrids, strange quark stars, both the counterparts of neutron stars as well as of dwarfs. This is a self-contained treatment and will be of interest to graduate students in physics and astrophysics as well as others entering the field.

The interdisciplinary field of Astrobiology constitutes a joint arena where provocative discoveries are coalescing concerning, e.g. the prevalence of exoplanets, the diversity and hardiness of life, and its increasingly likely chances for its emergence. Biologists, astrophysicists, biochemists, geoscientists and space scientists share this exciting mission of revealing the origin and commonality of life in the Universe. The members of the different disciplines are used to their own terminology and technical language. In the interdisciplinary environment many terms either have redundant meanings or are completely unfamiliar to members of other disciplines. The Encyclopedia of Astrobiology serves as the key to a common understanding. Each new or experienced researcher and graduate student in adjacent fields of astrobiology will appreciate this reference work in the quest to understand the big picture. The carefully selected group of active researchers contributing to this work and the expert field editors intend for their contributions, from an internationally comprehensive perspective, to accelerate the interdisciplinary advance of astrobiology.

Most elements are synthesized, or "cooked", by thermonuclear reactions in stars. The newly formed elements are released into the interstellar medium during a star's lifetime, and are subsequently incorporated into a new generation of stars, into the planets that form around the stars, and into the life forms that originate on the planets. Moreover, the energy we depend on for life originates from nuclear reactions that occur at the center of the Sun. Synthesis of the elements and nuclear energy production in stars are the topics of nuclear astrophysics, which is the subject of this book. It presents nuclear structure and reactions, thermonuclear reaction rates, experimental nuclear methods, and nucleosynthesis in detail. These topics are discussed in a coherent way, enabling the reader to grasp their interconnections intuitively. The book serves both as a textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, with worked examples and end-of-chapter excercises, but also as a reference book for use by researchers working in the field of nuclear astrophysics.

Effective field theories have been widely used in nuclear physics. This volume is devoted to exploring the intricate structure of compact-star matter inaccessible directly from QCD. It is principally anchored on hidden symmetries and topology presumed to be encoded in QCD. It differs from standard effective field theory and energy density functional approaches in that it exploits renormalization-group flow in the complex 'vacuum' sliding with density inferred from topology change identified as a manifestation of baryon-quark continuity in dense matter. It makes a variety of predictions that drastically differ from the conventional treatments that could be tested by upcoming terrestrial and astrophysical experiments.This monograph recounts how to go, in one unique field theoretic formalism in terms of hadronic degrees of freedom, from finite nuclei to dense compact-star matter that could be explored in RIB-type machines in nuclear physics as well as in LIGO-type gravity waves in astrophysics.

With the exception of positron emission tomography (PET), the field of low energy positron science produces relatively few academic articles each year compared to more accessible fields. Though much has been achieved since the publication of two related volumes earlier in this series: Positron Solid State Physics (1981) and Positron Spectroscopy of Solids (1993), only the first steps have been made towards 'physics with many positrons': physical situations where the interactions of positrons with positrons can be observed. This 2009 "Enrico Fermi School" aims to stimulate the field o.