Particles and Nuclei: An Introduction to the Physical Concepts

This introductory textbook gives a uniform presentation of nuclear and particle physics from an experimental point of view. The first part, "Analysis", is devoted to disentangling the substructure of matter. This part shows that experiments designed to uncover the substructures of nuclei and nucleons have a similar conceptual basis, and lead to the present picture of all matter being built out of a small number of elementary building blocks and a small number of fundamental interactions. The second part, "Synthesis", shows how the elementary particles may be combined to build hadrons and nuclei. The fundamental interactions which are responsible for the forces in all systems become less and less evident in increasingly complex systems. Such systems are in fact dominated by multi-body phenomena. In this second edition, a chapter on nuclear matter at high temperatures has been added, thus linking the field of nuclear and particle physics with the field of modern astrophysics and cosmology.