PHYSICS 871
Nuclear Physics
Instructor: Simonetta Liuti
Textbook: The Structure of the Nucleon by Anthony W. Thomas and Wolfram Weise
http://www.wileyeurope.com/cda/product/0,,3527402977|desc|2655,00.html
Brief Description and Aim: This course addresses current ideas and experiments in Nuclear Physics, with the aim of providing the student with the basic tools for exploring the many interdisciplinary questions and far-reaching aspects of this field.
Research in Nuclear Physics today probes the properties of nuclei and nucleons in terms of their fundamental constituents, the quarks and gluons. Quarks and gluons are normally confined inside nucleons. However, by colliding heavy ions at energies of 100 GeV per beam experimentalists expect to create a hot, dense plasma of quarks and gluons - the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) - where these become deconfined. The QGP is believed to have existed in the early universe immediately after the Big Bang and recent astronomical observations have even suggested the existence of this state of matter within stars.
Central goals of nuclear physics are both to understand the structure of nucleons within Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) - the universally acclaimed theory of strong interactions - and to unravel the properties of hot nuclear matter, along with many other important questions in astrophysics, from the origin of the elements to the production of neutrinos in the universe.
The course will give a comprehensive overview of
these current areas of research.
It will provide a thorough
introduction to QCD, namely asymptotic freedom and color confinement.
Applications such as inclusive inelastic lepton (
)
scattering
as fundamentals tools to study the structure of hadronic systems
will be thoroughly discussed.
Many theoretical results are derived from first principles and each student should be able to work her/his way through the various problems with a solid mathematical background at the undergraduate level.
General Organization: Homework assignements are given weekly. The final exam involves a take home problem.