Nuclear Structure and Nuclear Reactions

Atomic nuclei are the essence of the visible universe. Formed in the big bang or in cataclysmic astrophysical explosions, atomic nuclei are a crucial and intriguing part of the world. The basic features of atomic nuclei were understood in terms of the nuclear shell model in the 1963 Nobel Prize winning research of Eugene Paul Wigner, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, and J. Hans de Jensen. Since then, extensive experimental programs have yielded a detailed knowledge of the nucleon-nucleon interaction. This crucial experimental information will be augmented through studies of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) (see section on Cold QCD and Nuclear Forces). More refined descriptions of nuclei and greater predictive power require understanding nuclear structure and reactions in terms of the underlying interactions. Accurate solutions of these strongly interacting quantum many-body problems will yield new insight into the structure of nuclei and the ability to calculate processes that are difficult or impossible to measure experimentally.