Introductory Nuclear Theory

Description

Dr. Elton's book should prove to be a most useful theoretical introduction to students beginning nuclear physics. It covers a wide range of topics, following the general pattern of Blatt and Weisskopf's Theoretical Nuclear Physics, with the addition of a final chapter describing the main features of the meson theory of nuclear forces.L. R. B. ELTON, Introductory nuclear theory (Pitman & Sons Ltd., London 1959. xi-286 p. 40 s.)The boom in nuclear physics, besides producing great new quantities of physicists, physicslaboratories, and physics journals, has also called into being an expanding variety of new physicscourses that are offered to the students of universities and technical schools . Each institutionfaces its own special problems and solves them with its private recipe of courses, that may rangefrom the purely cultural courses that attempt to describe the intellectual content of modern phy-sics to highly specialized instruction in elementary particle physics, reactor engineering, or nuclearchemistry, etc . This great proliferation in courses has been paralleled by the production of aflood of text books that assist the students and teachers of these new courses .The present text book is intended for final honours physics students (corresponding about tothe beginning of graduate instruction in American universities) ; the student is assumed to have aprevious acquaintance with quantum mechanics but no previous knowledge of the properties ofnuclei . The course is developed with a view to providing exercise in the use of quantum mechanicssimultaneously with the elucidation of the features of the atomic nucleus . This mixture is a fairlycommon and useful one, combining the advantages of giving to the nuclear physics student theessential tools of his trade at as early a stage as is possible, and also motivating the study of quan-tum mechanics with illustrations from a developing and interesting field of study.The difficulties in adopting such a course arise largely from the necessity of finding in each casea method of derivation appropriate to the rather elementary quantal experience of the students.Thus, the present course is at its best in the discussion of scattering and reaction processes. Thequantal formulation of scattering problems is clearly developed in the text, including the separa-tion of centre of mass and relative coordinates, the definitions of the cross sections, the partialwave expansion etc. These general results are then applied to the two nucleon scattering problem(without polarization effects), the continuum theory, resonances, and the optical model.The balance between simplicity, and elegance and generality is less successfully sustained insome other parts of the book, especially in the discussion of beta decay and gammal emission. In thediscussion of the latter problem the author does not permit himself any of the general and powerfultools of the quantal angular momentum calculus (this is true throughout the whole book) butrather confines himself to a derivation of the transition rates for the two lowest multipoles :ail andE1. Thus, a rather long chapter, which starts with a derivation of time dependent perturbationtheory, ends with the single application to the photodisintegration of the deuteron (and theinverse process).The problem sets at the end of each chapter should be quite useful to the students. The problemsare partly mathematical exercises in the techniques developed in the text, and partly examplesof the types of problem that occur in the understanding and analysis of empirical nuclear data.A useful adjoint to these latter exercises is the twenty page table of nuclear data included at theend of the book.Taken all together it would seem that this book should be especially useful to beginning nuclearphysics students who have had only a very elementary course in quantum mechanics . Therelatively low price should help to bring the book within the financial reach of most students,while the small size (286 pages) brings it within the carrying ability of all .B. R. Mottelson