Nuclear Physics: A Course Given by Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago

perhaps the most valuable book ever bought by me and I am certainly going to come one day to new mexico since I am a nuclear physicist.

I loved it.

As I'm very interested in geometries of the nucleus, I ordered a copy of this notes of a lecture given by Enrico Fermi summarized by some of his students. It introduces into shell-, gas-, and liquid drop-theory of nuclei. It gets really complicated in the interaction of different radiations with matter. But I learned what a well is, how to apply QM to the nucleus. All kind of decays are explained in detail with respect to the experiment. The book also covers the theory of mesons, which are the particles of the strong-force interaction. The last chapter is about cosmic rays.

These are the notes of the Fermi lectures on nuclear physics at Chicago. As a book on nuclear physics they are, of course, too dated. However, I strongly recommend this book for he who wants to see a great master solving problems of various kinds. Besides the usual topics of alpha and beta-decays, nuclear models, scattering, etc, there are beautiful treatments of passage of radiation through matter, origin of cosmic rays and action of the Earth's magnetic field on incoming charged particles. The book is a monumental collection of very good exercises of quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, relativity, etc. In this sense , it will never become obsolete.

The text was written with expertise about the nature of the atom, of nuclear decay rates, and of the nature of radiation beyond Plank. It is very mathematically based (as all good physics books are), however, it was beyond me mathematically at times, and took about ten reads to comprehend the basic mathematical structure and implications.It is excellent if one already has a background in nuclear physics, and is a wonderful reference.