Nuclear Physics: the Core of Matter, the Fuel of Stars

Abstract

Dramatic progress has been made in all branches of physics since the National Research Council's 1986 decadal survey of the field. The Physics in a New Era series explores these advances and looks ahead to future goals. The series includes assessments of the major subfields and reports on several smaller subfields, and preparation has begun on an overview volume on the unity of physics, its relationships to other fields, and its contributions to national needs. Nuclear Physics is the latest volume of the series. The book describes current activity in understanding nuclear structure and symmetries, the behavior of matter at extreme densities, the role of nuclear physics in astrophysics and cosmology, and the instrumentation and facilities used by the field. It makes recommendations on the resources needed for experimental and theoretical advances in the coming decade. Nuclear physics addresses the nature of matter making up 99.9 percent of the mass of our everyday world. It explores the nuclear reactions that fuel the stars, including our Sun, which provides the energy for all life on Earth. The field of nuclear physics encompasses some 3,000 experimental and theoretical researchers who work at universities and national laboratories across the United States, as wellmore » as the experimental facilities and infrastructure that allow these researchers to address the outstanding scientific questions facing us. This report provides an overview of the frontiers of nuclear physics as we enter the next millennium, with special attention to the state of the science in the United States.The current frontiers of nuclear physics involve fundamental and rapidly evolving issues. One is understanding the structure and behavior of strongly interacting matter in terms of its basic constituents, quarks and gluons, over a wide range of conditions - from normal nuclear matter to the dense cores of neutron stars, and to the Big Bang that was the birth of the universe. Another is to describe quantitatively the properties of nuclei, which are at the centers of all atoms in our world, in terms of models derived from the properties of the strong interaction. These properties include the nuclear processes that fuel the stars and produce the chemical elements. A third active frontier addresses fundamental symmetries of nature that manifest themselves in the nuclear processes in the cosmos, such as the behavior of neutrinos from the Sun and cosmic rays, and in low-energy laboratory tests of these symmetries. With recent developments on the rapidly changing frontiers of nuclear physics the Committee on Nuclear Physics is greatly optimistic about the next ten years. Important steps have been taken in a program to understand the structure of matter in terms of quarks and gluons.« less