From Pauli Principle to Hypernucleus, Neutron Star, and . . .

Proposed by Wolfgang Pauli more than 80 years ago, the exclusion principle has been proven to have a far-reaching consequence, from femtoscopic world to macroscopic, super-dense, and fully relativistic physics. Starting from this principle, we discuss two interesting research topics, which have currently drawn considerable attention in the nuclear-and astrophysics communities; the hypernuclear and neutron star physics. Special attention is given to the electromagnetic production of the hypertriton and the consequences of the neutrino electromagnetic properties in dense matter. We also touch on the new arena which could also be fascinating for physicists; the econophysics. Most of us started to be acquainted with the Pauli exclusion principle at high-school, when we learned about atomic shells in the chemistry or in the physics course. Probably, many of us are ignorant that the discovery of the exclusion principle is in fact intimately related to the conception of the electron spin and the development of quantum mechanics. If we try to comprehend the motivation of Wolfgang Pauli behind this great discovery, for which he was awarded with the Nobel Prize in 1945, then we will find that it was to answer the problem of explaining the observed atomic spectra and the " anomalous Zeeman effect " [1]. At that time these transitions were particularly confusing, because some of them (e.g., the Sodium atom) exhibit doublet transitions, whereas some others (e.g., the Magnesium atom) show either singlet or triplet transitions [2]. Furthermore, the anomalous Zeeman effect yields a doublet splitting, contrary to the what was hitherto known by the spectroscopists as triplet splitting. Another disturbing fact to Pauli was the question as to why all electrons for an atom in its ground state were not bound in the innermost shell, a problem which had been emphasized even by Niels Bohr as his fundamental problem. Before 1924, Arnold Sommerfeld, Alfred Landé, and Pauli himself realized that the answer to these problems was the existence of a new (the fourth, after n, ℓ and m, to be more precise) quantum number. Sommerfeld and Landé considered this number as an intrinsic property of the atomic core, without specifying whether it is the nucleus or the nucleus plus inner electrons. This point of view was then considered by Pauli as rather orthodox. In 1924 Pauli published an objection to this argument [4]. Instead of considering the properties of the atomic core, Pauli proposed a new quantum property of …