This book summarizes the recent development of nuclear science as an important part of mesoscopic physics, the intermediate world between the macroscopic and microscopic. This fast developing area with many practical applications includes complex atoms, molecules (including biological), nuclei, small-scale solid state systems, and future quantum computers. The complexity of the problem appears due to the richness of problems, from the necessity to study individual quantum levels, to the fundamental features of statistics and thermodynamics.

This book presents a comprehensive explanation of the main ideas and principles of atomic and nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. The author invites readers to plunge into the physics of micro-objects and to take a fascinating tour of the world of atoms and nuclei. The main questions under consideration are the structure of atoms, atomic nuclei, the substance and systematics of elementary particles, the processes of the creation of atomic nuclei and the evolution of stars as well as different applied aspects of the physics of micro-objects.

This textbook is a unique and ambitious primer of nuclear physics, which introduces recent theoretical and experimental progresses starting from basics in fundamental quantum mechanics. The highlight is to offer an overview of nuclear structure phenomena relevant to recent key findings such as unstable halo nuclei, superheavy elements, neutron stars, nucleosynthesis, the standard model, lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD), and chiral effective theory. An additional attraction is that general properties of nuclei are comprehensively explained from both the theoretical and experimental viewpoints. The book begins with the conceptual and mathematical basics of quantum mechanics, and goes into the main point of nuclear physics – nuclear structure, radioactive ion beam physics, and nuclear reactions. The last chapters devote interdisciplinary topics in association with astrophysics and particle physics. A number of illustrations and exercises with complete solutions are given. Each chapter is comprehensively written starting from fundamentals to gradually reach modern aspects of nuclear physics with the objective to provide an effective description of the cutting edge in the field.

This volume contains two major articles, one providing a historical retrosp- tive of one of the great triumphs of nuclear physics in the twentieth century and the other providing a didactic introduction to one of the quantitative tools for understanding strong interactions in the twenty-first century. The article by Igal Talmi on “Fifty Years of the Shell Model – the Quest for the Effective Interaction”, pertains to a model that has dominated nuclear physics since its infancy and that developed with astonishing results over the next five decades. Talmi is uniquely positioned to trace the history of the Shell Model. He was active in developing the ideas at the shell model’s inception, he has been central in most of the subsequent initiatives which expanded, cl- ified and applied the shell model and he has remained active in the field to the present time. Wisely, he has chosen to restrict his review to the domin- ing issue: the choice of the effective interactions among valence nucleons that determine the properties of low lying nuclear energy levels. The treatment of the subject is both bold and novel for our series. The ideas pertaining to the effective interaction for the shell model are elucidated in a historical sequence.

The last twenty years have witnessed an enormous development of nuclear physics. A large number of data have accumulated and many experimental facts are known. As the experimental techniques have achieved greater and greater perfection, the theoretical analysis and interpretation of these data have become correspondingly more accurate and detailed. The development of nuclear physics has depended on the development of physics as a whole. While there were interesting speculations about nuclear constitution as early as 1922, it was impossible to make any quantitative theory of even the simplest nucleus until the discovery of quantum mechanics on the one hand, and the development of experimental methods sufficiently sensitive to detect the presence of a neutral particle (the neutron) on the other hand. The further development of our understanding of the nucleus has depended, and still depends, on the development of ever more powerful experimental techniques for measuring nuclear properties and more powerful theoretical techniques for correlating these properties. Practically every "simple," "reasonable," and "plausible" assumption made in theoretical nuclear physics has turned out to be in need of refinement; and the numerous attempts to derive nuclear forces and the properties of nuclei from a more" fundamental" approach than the analysis of the data have proved unsuccessful so far. Nuclear physics is by no means a finished edifice.