Relativity plays an important role in atomic nuclei, and, since the early 1970s, there has been increasing interest in, and literature on, the nucleus as a relativistic system. In fact, the relativistic treatment provides a powerful method to describe nuclear structure and reactions. It is thus an ideal time to collect and review the important landmarks in this book. Directed to advanced students and researchers, it explains both the underlying relativistic theory and compares predictions with actual experiments.

This book describes baryon models constructed from quarks, mesons and chiral symmetry. The role of chiral symmetry and of quark model structure with SU(6) spin-flavor symmetry are discussed in detail, starting from a pedagogic introduction. Emphasis is placed on symmetry aspects of the theories. As an application, the chiral bag model is studied for nucleon structure, where important methods of theoretical physics, mostly related to the semiclassical approach for a system of strong interactions, are demonstrated. The text is more practical than formal; tools and ideas are explained in detail while solving actual problems. By checking each step of the computations, readers can learn not only the calculational techniques but also the essential ideas behind them.

Relativity plays an important role in atomic nuclei, and, since the early 1970s, there has been increasing interest in, and literature on, the nucleus as a relativistic system. In fact, the relativistic treatment provides a powerful method to describe nuclear structure and reactions. It is thus an ideal time to collect and review the important landmarks in this book. Directed to advanced students and researchers, it explains both the underlying relativistic theory and compares predictions with actual experiments.

The main aim of this book is to provide a broad overview of nuclear physics in terms of both hadron-meson dynamics and quark-lepton dynamics. It covers topics such as elastic and inelastic scattering, spin-isospin responses and charge exchange reactions, giant resonances, nuclear clusters, and nuclear physics with strange flavour. All subjects are presented from an experimental point of view, and sufficient prerequisite material is included for the book to be accessible to graduate students. An important feature is a discussion of the prevailing questions that emerge from recent research.

Focusing on recent developments and current priorities in various areas of physics, this book presents advances in high temperature superconductivity and super fluidity, physics of low dimensional systems, Bose-Einstein condensation, quantum dots, collective modes in finite systems, coherent correlations of particles, coherence of atomic levels under extreme conditions, tensor correlations in nuclei, super-heavy nuclei, the effect of relativity in nuclear structure, molecular dynamics and phase transitions in solids, nuclei and quarks and QCD dynamics for hadrons and hadronic matter.