Customer Reviews

Introductory Nuclear Physics

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Wong has updated his first edition extensively. The text is directed at the senior undergraduate level or graduate level in physics. Unlike freshman texts in many fields, the style of the book is still akin to traditional physics texts. Inasmuch as it eshews the use of colour diagrams or coloured textual sections. But within the "plain" nature of the text is a huge amount of detailed descriptions. Both of theory and experimental results. At least one full year of quantum mechanics is needed as background. Especially in time dependent perturbation theory. The text is of equal value whether you plan to major in theory or experiment.

Also useful is the context in which Wong sets nuclear physics, relative to other branches of physics. You get some appreciation of interdisciplinary issues.

The problem sets in each chapter are nontrivial and worthy of your attention.

Though its a good introductory book, it doesn't get as deep into theoretical nuclear physics as I would like, though it is perfect for the Nuclear experimentalist. This book is a graduate level book, so I would recommend Krane for an undergrad instead of this book. The nice feature of this book is the fact that the author tries to fill in the gap between particle physics and nuclear physics with some success and there is a chapter on Nuclear astrophysics which is nice!!