138th International School of Physics "Enrico Fermi" : Unfolding the Matter of Nuclei

The nucleus and its constituents are a challenging problem. The lectures collected in this book present a broad and comprehensive review of the current knowledge about nuclei.They cover topics such as searching for signatures of the quarks in nuclei with electromagnetic probes and, at much higher energies, for signatures of the quark-gluon plasma in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions. The attempts to obtain new nuclei in the laboratory are also discussed, as well as the central role played by nuclear physics in the development of weak interactions. Progress in all these areas rests on a deeper theoretical handling of the nuclear and nucleon’s structure. The latter can also be addressed by relying on numerical solutions of QCD on a discrete space-time lattice. The advancement of computational capabilities has spurred a growing interest in this approach. Finally, the book deals with different paths toward solving non-perturbative QCD.