Introduction to Nuclear and Particle Physics (Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics)

This textbook fills the gap between the very basic and the highly advanced volumes that are widely available on the subject. It offers a concise but comprehensive overview of a number of topics, like general relativity, fission and fusion, which are otherwise only available with much more detail in other textbooks. Providing a general introduction to the underlying concepts (relativity, fission and fusion, fundamental forces), it allows readers to develop an idea of what these two research fields really involve. The book uses real-world examples to make the subject more attractive and encourage the use of mathematical formulae. Besides short scientists' biographies, diagrams, end-of-chapter problems and worked solutions are also included.

Intended mainly for students of scientific disciplines such as physics and chemistry who want to learn about the subject and/or the related techniques, it is also useful to high school teachers wanting to refresh or update their knowledge andto interested non-experts.

Saverio D'Auria graduated from the University of Bologna, where he also obtained his PhD in particle physics. He has worked at a number of particle physics laboratories: CERN, DESY and FNAL, both on detector research and development and on data analysis for particle physics research. He was a member of the ZEUS and CDF collaborations and is presently conducting research with the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC. He has worked at the INFN Trieste, Italy and the University of Glasgow, U.K., teaching at graduate and undergraduate level. His research topics are solid-state particle detector development; the interaction between accelerator and detectors; the search for associate production of the Higgs boson; and the search for resonances decaying to top-anti-top pairs.