Particles and Nuclei: an Introduction to the Physical Concepts, Third Edition

This introductory textbook gives a uniform presentation of nuclear and particle physics. The first part, "analysis" is devoted to disentangling the substructure of matter, showing that experiments designed to uncover the substructures of nuclei and nucleons have a similar conceptual basis. They lead to the present picture of all matter being built out of a small number of elementary building blocks and a small number of fundamental interactions. The second part, "synthesis", shows how the elementary particles may be combined to build hadrons and nuclei. The fundamental interactions responsible for the forces in all systems become less and less evident in increasingly complex systems. Such systems are in fact dominated by many-body phenomena. In the third edition an added section on neutrino oscillations and one on nuclear matter at high temperatures bridges the fields of modern astrophysics and cosmology. This concise text is well suited for advanced and undergraduate courses.