Part VII: Particle Physics Connections and Frontiers
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" — Isaac Asimov (attributed)
Nuclear physics does not exist in isolation. The nuclear force is a consequence of quantum chromodynamics — the theory of quarks and gluons that is one of the pillars of the Standard Model of particle physics. The weak interaction that drives beta decay is the same force responsible for neutrino interactions and CP violation. And some of the deepest open questions in all of physics — Is the neutrino its own antiparticle? What is dark matter? Why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe? — are being probed with nuclear physics experiments.
In these three chapters, we connect nuclear physics to its foundations in particle physics and survey the frontiers of the field. Chapter 31 describes how the nuclear force emerges from QCD at low energies, the role of effective field theories as a bridge between fundamental and nuclear physics, and what we know about the internal structure of the nucleon. Chapter 32 examines how nuclei serve as precision laboratories for testing fundamental symmetries: parity violation, CP violation searches, electric dipole moment measurements, and the extraordinary sensitivity of neutrinoless double beta decay experiments to the neutrino mass. Chapter 33 surveys the open questions that define the frontier of nuclear physics today — the drip lines, the nuclear equation of state, the island of stability, the origin of the heavy elements, and the future facilities and experiments that will address them.
Nuclear physics is not a completed science. It is a field with a brilliant past and a vibrant, unsettled future.
Chapters in Part VII: - Chapter 31: The Standard Model and Nuclear Physics — quarks, gluons, and the strong force - Chapter 32: Fundamental Symmetries Tested with Nuclei — parity, CP, and beyond - Chapter 33: The Frontiers of Nuclear Physics — what we don't know and where we're looking