AN INTRODUCTION TO NUCLEAR PHYSICS - SECOND EDITION,
W.N. Cottingham & D.A. Greenwood, Cambridge University Press, 2001; pp: 266, ISBN 0-521-65733-2 (pbk), 0-521-65149-2 (hc), Price: $29.95/$90.00.

This book presents the basic principles of nuclear physics at the advanced undergraduate level. The necessary preparation is a first course in quantum mechanics, to the level of solving the Schrodinger equation for a 3-dimensional potential well. The authors start by placing nuclear physics in the context of the modern understanding of particle physics, with a brief, mostly qualitative description in the first three chapters, of leptons, nucleons and mesons, and the gauge bosons that mediate the fundamental interactions. The nuclear physics proper starts in Chapter 4 with a thorough discussion of nuclear sizes and masses, leading to the liquid drop model and the semi-empirical mass formula. Following this is a discussion of the shell model and electromagnetic moments of nuclei in Chapter 5. Alpha decay and spontaneous fission are discussed in Chapter 6, excited nuclear states and gamma decay in Chapter 7, and nuclear reactions in Chapter 8. Power from fission, nuclear fusion, and nucleosynthesis in stars are the subjects of Chapters 9, 10 and 11. The first 11 chapters may be viewed as the core material for an introductory course. Chapter 12 is at a somewhat higher level than the preceding chapters, and presents the quantum theories of beta- and gamma-decay. Chapter 13 discusses neutrino physics and the solar neutrino problem. Chapter 14 treats the interaction of radiation with matter, and finally, Chapter 15 briefly treats the subject of radiation and its effects on life. Four appendices cover cross sections, density of states, the quantum theory of angular momentum, and unstable states and resonances. Each chapter has a number of useful problems for the student, with answers at the back of the book.

All this is packed into a slim book of only 266 pages. This certainly keeps the price down; the paperback costs only $29.95, which makes it attractive to the budget-conscious student. However, to some degree, "you get what you pay for," and this brings me to my main criticism of this book. The writing style is terse and to-the-point, almost painfully so, and the whole book has the feeling of a set of dry lecture notes. The authors convey none of the excitement of researchers working at the frontiers of the field; indeed, there is scant mention of any of the frontier problems at all, or of the elegant experiments underway to explore the frontiers. There is no mention of making quark-gluon plasma at RHIC, no mention of measuring astrophysically-important nuclear reactions with accelerated radioactive ion beams, no mention of the transition from nucleon to quark degrees of freedom being explored at intermediate-energy accelerators, not even a picture of one of the large underground neutrino detectors in the chapter on neutrino physics. The authors miss many golden opportunities to make nuclear physics relevant to the real world, by failing to point out the important applications of nuclear physics to medicine, biology, and archaeology. For example, nuclear magnetic dipole moments are not merely a test of the nuclear shell model; what is more important to most people is that they are the basis of magnetic resonance imaging in hospitals, and elucidation of molecular structure via NMR spectroscopy for chemists! I fear that a student reading this book as his/her only source could hardly be inspired to consider nuclear physics as being either interesting or relevant.

In summary, this slim, low-cost volume could usefully form the reference backbone of a one-semester course in nuclear physics, but only if the instructor "fleshes out" the subject with additional material, and presents it in the lectures in a pedagogically more appealing way.

Stanley Yen
TRIUMF