New Vistas in Nuclear Dynamics

The 1985 Summer School on Nuclear Dynamics, organized by the Nuclear Physics Division of the Netherlands' Physical Society, was the sixth in a series that started in 1963. This year's topic has been nuclear dynamics rather than nuclear structure as in the foregoing years. This change reflects a shift in focus to nuclear processes at higher energy, or, more generally, to nuclear processes under less traditional circumstances. For many years nuclear physics has been restricted to the domain of the ground state and excited states of low energy. The boundaries between nuclear physics and high-energy physics are rapidly disappearing, however, and the future will presumably show that the two fields of research will contribute to one another. With the advent of a new generation of heavy-ion and electron accelerators research activities on various new aspects of nuclear dynamics over a wide range of energies have become possible. This research focuses in particular on nonnucleonic degrees of freedom and on nuclear matter under extreme conditions, which require the explicit introduction of quarks into the description of nuclear reactions. Mean-field formulations are no longer adequate for the description of nucleus nucleus collisions at high nucleon energies as the nucleon-nucleon collisions begin to dominate. Novel dynamical theories are being developed, such as those based upon the Boltzmann equation or hadrodynamic models. The vitality of nuclear physics was clearly demonstrated by the enthusiastic lecturers at this summer school. They presented a series of clear and thorough courses on the subjects above.