Pre-requisites: PHY-203, 301, 302, 304

PART A

1. Nuclear Properties

• Constitution of the nucleus
• Quarks, hadrons and leptons
• Measurements of nuclear mass and charge radii:
  • electron scattering
  • muonic atoms
• Mirror nuclei
• Coulomb displacement energy
• Semi-empirical mass formula
• Mass defect
• Binding energy: Binding energy curve
• Semi-empirical mass formula
• Angular momentum: Spin, parity and symmetry
• Magnetic dipole moment and electric moments
• Electromagnetic moments: hyperfine structure.
• Nuclear deformation
• Mirror Nuclei
• Coulomb energy
• Nuclear forces
• Liquid drop model and Shell model

2. Radioactivity

• Nuclear stability
• Natural and artificial radioactivity
• Radioactive decay law
• Successive radioactive transformations
• Radioactive equilibrium
• Radiometric dating
• Types of decay

3. Mechanisms of Nuclear Decay

• 𝛂 decay:
  • Alpha decay properties
  • Condition of alpha decay
  • Fine structure
  • Measurement of alpha-particle energies
  • 𝐆𝐞𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐫-𝐍𝐮𝐭𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐥 law and theory of alpha decay
• 𝛃 decay:
  • Introduction
  • Conservation of energy
  • Conservation of angular momentum
  • Neutrino hypothesis
  • Measurement of disintegration energies
  • Fermi theory of beta decay and selection rules
• 𝛄 decay:
  • 𝛄 decay of excited states:Properties of gamma rays
  • Interaction and absorption of gamma rays
  • multipolarity
  • selection rules and decay probabilities
  • measurements of gamma-ray energies and life-times of excited states Internal conversion
  • Photon interactions - photoelectric effect
  • Compton scattering
  • pair production and annihilation

PART B

4. Nuclear Reactions

• Nuclear and chemical reactions, Reaction dynamics
• The Q value equation and threshold energy
• Neutron and neutron flux
• Reaction cross sections,
  • Resonances
  • Optical potential
  • Direct and compound-nuclear mechanisms
• Fission and fusion reactions
• Fission energy and thermonuclear energy

5. Stopping and Detecting Nuclear Radiations

• Stopping power, range and strangling for charged nuclear particles
• Stopping of neutrons
• Gas-filled counters - ionization chambers, proportional and Geiger-Müller counter
• Solid state counter
• Scintillators - properties of different phosphors
• Semiconductor detectors: silicon, germanium, 𝑯𝑷𝑮𝒆 detector
• Neutron detection
• Counting statistics
• Neutron scattering and absorption
• Attenuation and shielding

6. Accelerators and Sources of Atomic Particles

• Van de Graff accelerator
• Cyclotron
• Betatron
• Proton synchrotron
• Neutron sources
• Standard Model of Particle Physics, Three generations of particles
• Flavours and flavour mixing, Quark model with three flavours, Heavy-quark hadrons, CP violation, The origin (s) of mass