Acknowledgments

This textbook stands on the shoulders of the great nuclear physics textbooks that came before it. We owe a particular debt to Kenneth Krane, whose Introductory Nuclear Physics set the standard for clarity and rigor that we aspire to match. We also acknowledge the influence of Samuel Wong, John Lilley, Kris Heyde, Carlos Bertulani, Claus Rolfs and William Rodney, and the many other authors whose work shaped our understanding of how nuclear physics should be taught.

The nuclear data used throughout this book comes from the dedicated work of the nuclear data community: the National Nuclear Data Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Atomic Mass Evaluation collaboration, the Evaluated Nuclear Structure Data File (ENSDF) evaluators, and the international network of nuclear data centers. Without their painstaking efforts to compile, evaluate, and disseminate nuclear data, a book like this would be impossible.

We are grateful to the broader physics community for maintaining the tradition that scientific knowledge should be freely shared. This book is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license because we believe that access to knowledge should not depend on the ability to pay.

Any errors that remain are ours alone. We welcome corrections, suggestions, and contributions from readers and instructors. Nuclear physics is a living science, and we intend this textbook to be a living document.