Theoretical Nuclear And Subnuclear Physics



By John Dirk Walecka

* Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
* Number Of Pages: 628
* Publication Date: 2004-09-30
* Sales Rank: 1880339
* ISBN / ASIN: 9812387951
* EAN: 9789812387950

Book Description: )

This book is a revised and updated version of the most comprehensive text on nuclear and subnuclear physics, first published in 1995. It maintains the original goal of providing a clear, logical, in-depth, and unifying treatment of modern nuclear theory, ranging from the nonrelativistic many-body problem to the standard model of the strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions. In addition, new chapters on the theoretical and experimental advances made in nuclear and subnuclear physics in the past decade have been incorporated.

Four key topics are emphasized: basic nuclear structure, the relativistic nuclear many-body problem, strong-coupling QCD, and electroweak interactions with nuclei. New chapters have been added on the many-particle shell model, effective field theory, density functional theory, heavy-ion reactions and quark-gluon plasma, neutrinos, and electron scattering.

This book is designed to provide graduate students with a basic understanding of modern nuclear and hadronic physics needed to explore the frontiers of the field. Researchers will benefit from the updates on developments and the bibliography.

Review:

Very readable discussion

There are many difficult problems in physics, but there are two that certainly stand out in the sheer amount of resources and intellectual power that have been exerted to resolve them. These are the many-body problem in condensed matter physics, and the bound-state problem in the physics of the strong interaction. In this book one will see different manifestations of both of these problems. Since an atomic nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons that interact not only electromagnetically but also via the strong interaction, one has to deal with both the many-body and the bound-state problem. The analysis of a strongly bound state between a proton and a neutron is difficult enough. To deal with a typical uranium-235 atom, that contains 92 protons and 143 neutrons is a problem of enormous difficulty.

The author has to address both of these problems in this book, along with many other issues that arise in nuclear and subnuclear physics. The experimental and theoretical techniques that are used to study nuclear systems are impressive, considering the relatively small amount of time that nuclear physics has been around. Some of these techniques are discussed in this book, and some are only mentioned but with pointers to the literature for further reading. The book of course is targeted to the physicist reader, such as a graduate student in physics or perhaps a physicist in another field who is curious about the current state of nuclear physics. The history, experimental techniques, and theoretical formalism are included in the book, and the informal writing style assists non-experts (such as this reviewer) in assimilating the contents rather quickly.

One of the hottest topics currently in nuclear physics is the existence of the quark-gluon plasma. The heavy-ion collision experiments have been conducted to try and produce this plasma, and the author spends a short chapter discussing these experiments in the book. The details of the experiments and relevant relativistic transport theory he leaves to the references. As expected, the computational schemes, such as lattice gauge theory, have been stymied in their attempts to describe the quark-gluon plasma at high baryon density. The author however devotes a chapter in the book to phase transitions in quantum chromodynamics (the gauge theory of the strong interaction) wherein he calculates a phase transition from a hadronic phase to a quark-gluon phase at both low temperature and high baryon density and at high temperature but very low baryon density. This calculation involves the conception of `nuclear matter' as consisting of two phases: a baryon-meson phase described using `quantum hadrodynamics' in relativistic mean-field theory, and a quark-gluon phase described by quantum chromodynamics in the asymptotically-free regime. Also crucial to this calculation is the property of confinement of quarks and gluons in the interior of hadrons. The author gives brief discussions of this confinement property in the book, pointing to the work done in lattice gauge theory that shows (at least with the numerical calculations that have been done) that confinement results from the nonlinear strongly interacting gluons. It will be fascinating to see whether future research and calculations support this belief of confinement, for it will shed light on the bound-state problem in quantum chromodynamics.

Indeed, the bound-state problem is one of the major unsolved problems in quantum chromodynamics (and even in "simpler" cases such as quantum electrodynamics), and readers who want detailed discussion of it will be disappointed while reading this book. There is no discussion at all for example of the Schwinger-Dyson equations or other strategies for getting a handle on this important problem. This reviewer knows of no article or book that shows explicitly the formation of a bound state in the context of quantum field theory. It seems as though quantum field theory is a technique for studying scattering events and is unable to address bound states without radical changes to its formalism. To resolve the bound-state problem will therefore be the most important advance in the history of quantum field theory.

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