Combining elastic and inelastic processes with transfer reactions, this two-part volume explores how these events affect heavy ion collisions. Special attention is given to processes involving the transfer of two nucleons, which are specific for probing pairing correlations in nuclei. This novel treatment provides, together with the description of surface vibration and rotations, a unified picture of heavy ion reactions in terms of the elementary modes of nuclear excitation. Heavy Ion Reactions is essential reading for beginning graduate students as well as experienced researchers.

This book is based on Valery Zagrebaev's original papers and lecture materials on nuclear physics with heavy ions, which he prepared and extended through many years for the students of nuclear physics specialties. Thе book outlines the main experimental facts on nuclear reactions involving heavy ions at low energies. It focuses on discussions of nuclear physics processes that are a subject of active, modern research and it gives illustrative explanations of these phenomena in the framework of up-to-date theoretical concepts. This textbook is intended for students in physics who have completed a standard course of quantum mechanics and have basic ideas of nuclear physics processes. It is designed as a kind of lifeboat that, at the end of the course, will allow students to navigate the modern scientific literature and to understand the goals and objectives of current, on-going research.

Major developments have taken place during the last few years in the study of the nuclear paradigm as a result of recent detector and accelerator developments, and of improved theoretical models.The active use of 4-π detectors to measure the gamma decay of excited nuclei has been instrumental in exploring the consequences of extremely high rotational frequencies and excitation energies in the nuclear structure. The identification of superdeformed bands, of limiting temperature for the detection of giant resonances, and of rotational damping, are conspicuous examples of this novel type of research. Studies of the disassembling of the nucleus have been systematically carried out, and the results interpreted in terms of transport models.At even higher temperatures one expects to have a completely new regime of hot dense matter, where the hadronic properties become strongly renormalized by the medium.Furthermore, studies of the properties of the nucleon as a many-body system of quarks and gluons displaying collective degrees of freedom which are damped by couplings to more complicated states, are providing a detailed and consistent picture of the nuclear paradigm.Important progress is also taking place in situations essentially opposite to the scenarios described above, namely in the study of correlations in nuclear matter at very low temperature and density.