B015858 - INTRODUCTION TO NUCLEAR AND SUBNUCLEAR PHYSICS

Italian

Nuclear physics: Nuclear mass and nuclear radius. Static properties of nuclei.
The Nuclear Liquid Drop Model. The deuteron. Radioactive decay.
Alpha decay.

Particle physics:
The leptons and the weak interaction
Quarks and hadrons
Parity and conjugation of charge
The quark model of hadrons
The weak interactions of quarks and leptons
Physics at LEP

K.S. Krane
Introductory Nuclear Physics
WILEY 1988

B.R. Martin e G. Shaw, Particle Physics, Fourth Edition, Wiley

S. Braibant, G. Giacomelli e M. Spurio, Particelle e interazioni fondamentali, 2^ edizione, Springer

Knowledge acquired: basic concepts of Sub-atomic Physics and of the relevant phenomenology

Competence acquired: understanding of simple physical models for Subatomic Physics and familiarity with basic phenomenology

Skills acquired (at the end of the course): use of
of basic quantum-mechanical techniques for the quantitative description of some selected and simple study cases of Sub-atomic Physics

Courses required: Mathematical Analysis II, Analytical mechanics, Physics II
Courses recommended: all the preceding courses
in the didactic organization

CFU: 6
Total hours of the course (including the time spent in attending lectures, seminars, private study, examinations, etc...): 140

Office hours: by appointment via e-mail.

Website: on the Moodle Unifi platform
https://e-l.unifi.it/

Oral examination, lasting about one hour. The student should expose and discuss one topic from the nuclear part and one from the subnuclear part of the program. More specific questions could be asked during the exposition, in order to better determine the student level of understanding. The student should use an appropriate language, showing a good enough understanding of the main physical processes and illustrating how it is possible to arrive from the starting hypotheses to the final results. The student understanding of the links between the experimental results and the presented physical models (and their predictions) will also be tested during the examination.

Nuclear physics: Nuclide chart and valley of stability. Nuclear mass and binding energy. Nuclear decay: Q-value.
Charge radius of stable nuclei: electron scattering, constant charge density model, isotopic shift, mirror nuclei.
Matter radius of the nucleus: anomalous Rutherford scattering.
The static properties of the nuclei: total angular momentum, electromagnetic moments (magnetic dipole, electric quadrupole), excitation energy.
Mass spectroscopy and mass systematics: mass spectrograph, doublet method, mass from nuclear reactions, separation energy, Bethe-Weizsacker formula. Liquid drop model. Fermi gas model.
The deuteron and the neutron-proton interaction: characteristics, simple quantum model of the ground state, electromagnetic properties.
Radioactive decay law and its applications: radio-isotope production, age of the earth.
Alpha decay: phenomenology and energetics. Geiger-Nuttal law, simple model based on tunnel effect.

Particle physics:
Fundamental concepts
Natural units.
Elementary particles: Fermions and Bosons; phenomenological description of their interactions.
The discovery of the positron.
Introduction to Feynman diagrams, virtual processes and real processes.
Range of interactions.
The Fermi constant and the coupling constant for weak interactions.
Concept of cross-section in fixed target experiments and at colliders.

The leptons and the weak interaction
The weak interactions of leptons.
Conservation of the leptonic number.
Decays of the muon and of the tau leptons.
Direct detection of electronic antineutrinos with the Reines and Cowan experiment.
Universality of weak interactions.

Quarks and hadrons
The quark composition of hadrons: mesons and baryons.
Quantum numbers conserved by strong interactions.
Strange particles, associated production and their strong and weak decays.
Discovery of new particles: the invariant mass method and the discovery of resonances in the cross section.

Parity and charge conjugation
Spectroscopic classification of hadrons.
Intrinsic parity of a particle.
Parity of a pair of particles in a state of defined angular momentum.
Parity of particles and antiparticles and positronium annihilation.
Parity of mesons and baryons in the quark model.
Parity of charged pions.
Conjugation of charge and C-parity.
Conservation of C-parity in electromagnetic and strong interactions.
Violation of C and P in weak neutrino interactions.
K0L decays in states with two and three pions.
Non-conservation of CP symmetry by weak interactions.

The quark model of hadrons
Introduction to the quark model of hadrons.
Strong isospin and hypercharge.
Classification of the possible baryonic states.
Prediction of light hadrons with the quark model: the mesons nonets, the octet and the baryon decuplet.
First evidence of color.

Weak interactions of quarks and leptons
Quarks-lepton symmetry in weak interactions.
Mixing of quarks and Cabibbo angle.
CKM matrix.
Measurements of the elements of the CKM matrix with the hadron decays and with the decays of the W boson.
The top quark.
The discovery of weak neutral currents and their theoretical interpretation.
GIM mechanism.
The Z0 boson and its properties.

Physics at LEP
Electron-positron collisions.
Two-jet events and quarks properties.
Three-jet events and gluon properties.
The R ratio and the number of colors.
Breit Wigner cross section.
Z0 physics at LEP and precision electroweak measurements.
Invisible width and number of neutrino families.