Related papers: Teaching About Nature's Nuclear Reactors
Solar neutrinos, generated abundantly by thermonuclear reactions in the solar interior, offer a unique tool for studying astrophysics and particle physics. The observation of solar neutrinos has led to the discovery of neutrino oscillation,…
Supernovae are nature's grandest explosions and an astrophysical laboratory in which unique conditions exist that are not achievable on Earth. They are also the furnaces in which most of the elements heavier than carbon have been forged.…
The attempts to find the right (underlying) theory for the nuclear force have a long and stimulating history. Already in 1953, Hans Bethe stated that "more man-hours have been given to this problem than to any other scientific question in…
In the first lecture of this volume, we will present the basic fundamental ideas regarding nuclear processes occurring in stars. We start from stellar observations, will then elaborate on some important quantum-mechanical phenomena…
The quest for the origin of the chemical elements, which we find in our body, in our planet (Earth), in our star (Sun), or in our galaxy (Milky Way) could only be resolved with a thorough understanding of the nuclear physics properties of…
The Introduction in this paper underlines the present general situation for energy and the environment using the words of the US Secretary of Energy. A short presentation is made of some major nuclear power plants used to study one…
Understanding where elements were formed has been a key goal in astrophysics for nearly a century, with answers involving cosmology, stellar burning, and cosmic explosions. Since 1957, the origin of the heaviest elements (formed via the…
J.M. Herndon in 90-s proposed a natural nuclear fission georeactor at the center of the Earth with a power output of 3-10 TW as an energy source to sustain the Earth magnetic field. R.S. Raghavan in 2002 y. pointed out that under certain…
Nuclear reactors have served as the antineutrino source for many fundamental physics experiments. The techniques developed by these experiments make it possible to use these very weakly interacting particles for a practical purpose. The…
The origin of the elements is a fascinating question that scientists have been trying to answer for the last seven decades. The formation of light elements in the primordial universe and heavier elements in astrophysical sources occurs…
When Enrico Fermi discovered slow neutrons, he accounted for their great efficiency in inducing radioactivity by merely mentioning the well-known scattering cross-section between neutrons and protons. He did not refer to capture…
A century ago, nuclear physics entered astrophysics, giving birth to a new field of science referred to as "Nuclear Astrophysics". With time, it developed at an impressive pace into a vastly inter- and multidisciplinary discipline bringing…
The neutrino is the most elusive particle that we know and for many years physicists doubted that neutrinos might never be revealed. Today we know and we reveal neutrinos produced by different astrophysical objects and by interactions of…
Reactor neutrinos have been an important tool for both discovery and precision measurement in the history of neutrino studies. Since the first generation of reactor neutrino experiments in the 1950s, the detector technology has been greatly…
Nuclear Physics has had its ups and downs. However in recent years, bucked up by some new and often puzzling data, it has become a potentially very rich field. We review some of these exciting developments in a few important sectors of…
The recent evidence for neutrino oscillations opens a new and exciting era in neutrino physics. The next generation of accelerator based neutrino oscillation experiments are expected to confirm the nature of the oscillations, and begin to…
We introduce neutrino astronomy starting from the observational fact that Nature accelerates protons and photons to energies in excess of 10^{20} and 10^{13} eV, respectively. Although the discovery of cosmic rays dates back a century, we…
Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard worked together at Columbia in 1939-40, just after nuclear fission was discovered, to ascertain the feasibility of a nuclear chain reaction, and then on the construction of the first nuclear reactor. Szilard…
For the better part of a century the field of nuclear astrophysics has aimed to answer fundamental questions about nature, such as the origin of the elements and the behavior of high-density, low-temperature matter. Sustained and concerted…
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…