Nuclear and Plasma Physics

This book reports on the latest developments in the field of superfluidity. The phenomenon has had a tremendous impact on the fundamental sciences as well as a host of technologies. It began with the discovery of superconductivity in mercury in 1911, which was ultimately described theoretically by the theory of Bardeen Cooper and Schriever (BCS) in 1957. The analogous phenomena, superfluidity, was discovered in helium in 1938 and tentatively explained shortly thereafter as arising from a Bose–Einstein Condensation by London. But the importance of superfluidity, and the range of systems in which it occurs, has grown enormously. In addition to metals and the helium liquids the phenomena has now been observed for photons in cavities, excitons in semiconductors, magnons in certain materials, and cold gasses trapped in high vacuum. It very likely exist for neutrons in a neutron star and, possibly, in a conjectured quark state at their centre. Even the Universe itself can be regarded as being in a kind of superfluid state. All these topics are discussed by experts in the respective subfields.

This textbook on nuclear structure takes a unique and complementary approach compared to existing texts on the topic. Avoiding complicated calculations and complex mathematical formalism, it explains nuclear structure by building on a few elementary physical ideas. Even such apparently intricate topics as shell model residual interactions, the Nilsson model, and the random phase approximation analysis of collective vibrations are explained in a simple, intuitive way so that predictions can usually be made without calculations, essentially by inspection. Frequent comparison with data allows the relevance of theoretical approaches to be immediately evident. This edition includes new chapters on exotic nuclei and radioactive beams, and on correlations of collective observables. Completely new discussions are given of isospin, the shell model, nature of collective vibrations, multi-phonon states, superdeformation, bandmixing, geometric collective model, Fermi gas model, basic properties of simple nuclear potentials, the deuteron, and low energy nuclear structure, as well as other topics.

The book is devoted to targets for nuclear fusion by inertial confinement and to the various branches of physics involved. It first discusses fusion reactions and general requirements for fusion energy production. It then introduces and illustrates the concept of inertial confinement fusion by spherical implosion, followed by detailed treatments of the physics of fusion ignition and burn, and of energy gain. The next part of the book is mostly devoted to the underlying physics involved in inertial fusion, and covers hydrodynamics, hydrodynamic stability, radiative transport and equations-of-state of hot dense matter, laser and ion beam interaction with plasma. It discusses different approaches to inertial fusion (direct-drive by laser, indirect-drive by laser or ion beams), including recent developments in fast ignition. The goal of the book is to give an introduction to this subject, and also to provide practical results even when derived on the basis of simplified models.

This book concerns the physics of plasma at high density, which is compressed so strongly that the effects of interparticle interactions, nonideality, govern its behavior. The interest in this non-traditional plasma has emerged during the last few years when states of matter with high concentration of energy, constituting the basis of the modern technologies and facilities, became accessible for impulse experiments. The greatest part of the Universe matter is in this exotic state. In this book, the methods of strongly coupled plasma generation and diagnostics are considered. The experimental results on thermodynamic, kinetic, and optical properties are given, and the main theoretical models of the strongly coupled plasma state are discussed. Particular attention is given to fast developing modern directions of strongly coupled plasma physics, such as metallization of dielectrics and dielectrization of metals, nonneutral plasma, complex (dusty) plasma, and its crystallization.

This book offers a survey of nuclear physics at low energies and discusses similarities to mesoscopic systems. It addresses systems at finite excitations of the internal degrees of freedom where collective motion exhibits features typical of transport processes for small and isolated systems. The importance of quantum aspects is investigated both with respect to the microscopic damping mechanism and to the nature of the transport equations. It is vital to account for nuclear collective motion being self-sustained, which in the end implies a highly nonlinear coupling between internal and collective degrees of freedom, a feature which in the literature all too often is ignored. The book is to be considered self-contained. The first part introduces basic elements of nuclear physics and guides to a modern understanding of collective motion as a transport process. This overview is supplemented in the second part with more advanced approaches to nuclear dynamics. The third part deals with special aspects of mesoscopic systems for which close analogies with nuclear physics are given. In the fourth part, the theoretical tools are discussed in greater detail. These include nuclear reaction theory, thermostatics and statistical mechanics, linear response theory, functional integrals, and various aspects of transport theory.

This book presents a theoretical framework of plasma spectroscopy, in which the observed spectral line intensities or the populations of excited levels of atoms or ions immersed in plasma are interpreted in terms of the characteristics of the plasma. Following a review of important atomic processes in plasma, the rate equation governing the populations in excited levels and the ground state is solved in the collisional-radiative model. In this model, plasmas are classified into the ionizing plasma and the recombining plasma. Various features of these plasmas are examined. Ionization and recombination of atoms and ions are also treated in the model. An emission-line intensity is proportional to the ionization flux or to the recombination flux, and thus the ionization-balance plasma produces less intense emission lines. The recombination continuum intensity continues smoothly to the series lines, originating from levels in local thermodynamic equilibrium, so that the Boltzmann plot of the population of these levels is extended to the continuum-state electrons. Line broadening mechanisms are discussed, including the Stark broadening. Radiation transport gives rise to a modification to the emission line profile and to an effective decrease in the transition probability; the latter problem is treated in two alternative approaches. Phenomena characteristic of dense plasma are discussed, including the excitation and deexcitation processes of ions involving doubly excited levels and a modification to the Saha relationship.