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In 1930 Einstein argued against consistency of the time-energy uncertainty relation by discussing a thought experiment involving a measurement of mass of the box which emitted a photon. Bohr seemingly triumphed over Einstein by arguing that…
In Europe (e.g., in Italy), and in the States, the opinion is widely spreading that the negative consequences of modern progress are the fault of "Science". A lively debate on this topic took place among the famous writer Leonardo Sciascia…
We consider theoretically ionization of an atom by neutrino impact taking into account electromagnetic interactions predicted for massive neutrinos by theories beyond the Standard Model. The effects of atomic recoil in this process are…
A revolution in nuclear physics is underway. If you know hadron physics you also know that it will last long, as most past developments in nuclear physics have shown. It will take many decades of dedicated efforts of theorists and…
Atomic nuclei are quantum many-body systems of protons and neutrons held together by strong nuclear forces. Under the proper conditions, nuclei can break into two (sometimes three) fragments which will subsequently decay by emitting…
This manuscript originated from the discussion at the workshop on the "Future of Few-body Low Energy Experimental Physics" (FFLEEP), which was held at the University of Trento on December 4-7, 2002 and has been written in its present form…
The quest to comprehend how nuclear processes influence astrophysical phenomena is driving experimental and theoretical research programs worldwide. One of the main goals in nuclear astrophysics is to understand how energy is generated in…
An International Working Group has been meeting to discuss ideas for a new Nuclear Reactor Neutrino Experiment at meetings in May 2003 (Alabama), October 2003 (Munich) and plans for March 2004 (Niigata). This White Paper Report on the…
On October 22, 1934, in a famous experiment, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues discovered that a significant increase in induced radioactivity can be obtained when neutrons are slowed down by means of hydrogen atoms. This discovery and its…
We present quantitative measurements on a classic experiment proposed for the first time in 1947 to illustrate the phenomenon of a chain reaction in nuclear fission. The experiment involves a number of mousetraps loaded with solid balls.…
Bethe's view-point on the global energy problems is presented. Bethe claimed that the nuclear power is a necessity in future. Nuclear energetic must be based on breeder reactors. Bethe considered the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons as…
Back in 1964, the theoretical physicists Francois Englert and Robert Brout, as well as Peter Higgs, suggested an explanation for the fact that most elementary particles - such as the electron - have a mass. This scenario predicted a new…
Experiments may not reveal their full import at the time that they are performed. The scientists who perform them usually are testing a specific hypothesis and quite often have specific expectations limiting the possible inferences that can…
The emergence of quantum theory in the early decades of the twentieth century was accompanied by a wide range of popular science books, all of which presented in words and in images new scientific ideas about the structure of the atom. The…
It is very common to introduce quantum physics in an historical context. Though there are advantages to this, it is a problem that many of the stories that have become central to the physics lore are mere pseudo-histories far detached from…
The theory of nuclear forces has made great progress since the turn of the millenium using the framework of chiral effective field theory (ChEFT). The advantage of this approach, which was originally proposed by Weinberg, is that it has a…
During the Manhattan project a simple formula was developed by Bethe and Feynman in 1943 to estimate the yield of a fission-only nuclear explosion of a uniformly-dense bare-sphere of supercritical fissile material. We have not found any…
The extraction of neutrino oscillation parameters requires the determination of the neutrino energy from observations of the hadronic final state. The use of nuclear targets then requires the use of event generators to isolate the…
Over the past five years there have been profound advances in nuclear physics based on effective field theory and the renormalization group. In this brief, we summarize these advances and discuss how they impact our understanding of nuclear…
The electromagnetic properties of neutrinos have attracted considerable attention from researchers for many decades (see [1] for a review). However, until recently, there was no indication in favour of nonzero electromagnetic properties of…