Ebook: Introductory Nuclear Theory

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, physics
laboratories, and physics journals, has also called into being an expanding variety of new physics
courses that are offered to the students of universities and technical schools . Each institution
faces its own special problems and solves them with its private recipe of courses, that may range
from 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 nuclear
chemistry, etc . This great proliferation in courses has been paralleled by the production of a
flood 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 to
the beginning of graduate instruction in American universities) ; the student is assumed to have a
previous acquaintance with quantum mechanics but no previous knowledge of the properties of
nuclei . The course is developed with a view to providing exercise in the use of quantum mechanics
simultaneously with the elucidation of the features of the atomic nucleus . This mixture is a fairly
common and useful one, combining the advantages of giving to the nuclear physics student the
essential 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 case
a 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. The
quantal 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 partial
wave 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 in
some other parts of the book, especially in the discussion of beta decay and gammal emission. In the
discussion of the latter problem the author does not permit himself any of the general and powerful
tools of the quantal angular momentum calculus (this is true throughout the whole book) but
rather confines himself to a derivation of the transition rates for the two lowest multipoles :ail and
E1. Thus, a rather long chapter, which starts with a derivation of time dependent perturbation
theory, ends with the single application to the photodisintegration of the deuteron (and the
inverse process).
The problem sets at the end of each chapter should be quite useful to the students. The problems
are partly mathematical exercises in the techniques developed in the text, and partly examples
of 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 the
end of the book.
Taken all together it would seem that this book should be especially useful to beginning nuclear
physics students who have had only a very elementary course in quantum mechanics . The
relatively 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