Theoretical Aspects of Science with Radioactive Nuclear Beams

Physics of radioactive nuclear beams is one of the main frontiers of nuclear science today. Experimentally, thanks to technological developments, we are on the verge of invading the territory of extreme N/Z ratios in an unprecedented way. Theoretically, nuclear exotica represent a formidable challenge for the nuclear many-body theories and their power to predict nuclear properties in nuclear terra incognita. It is important to remember that the lesson learned by going to the limits of the nuclear binding is also important for normal nuclei from the neighborhood of the beta stability valley. And, of course, radioactive nuclei are crucial astrophysically; they pave the highway along which the nuclear material is transported up in the proton and neutron numbers during the complicated synthesis process in stars.Comment: 26 ReVTeX pages, 11 Postscript figures, uses epsf.sty, to be published in: Theme Issue on Science with Beams of Radioactive Nuclei, Philosophical Transactions, ed. by W. Gelletl

Cmu-Hep93-04 Doe/er/40682-29

A recent general analysis of light-baryon isospin splittings is updated and extended to charmed baryons. The measured \Sigma c and \Xi c splittings stand out as being difficult to understand in terms of two-body forces alone. We also discuss heavy-light mesons; though the framework here is necessarily less general, we nevertheless obtain some predictions that are not strongly model-dependent. 13.40.Dk, 12.40.Aa, 14.20.-c, 12.70.+q Typeset using REVT E X I. BARYONS Mass splittings among baryons and mesons containing different valence quarks provide a good probe of hadronic structure and of the forces that determine this structure [1]. Recently, results were reported for a general class of models in which the baryon octet and decuplet splittings were assumed to arise solely from two-body interactions [2]. It was found that the central masses of isospin multiplets could be fitted with a model error of 8.9 MeV. A similar parametrization of isospin splittings, also with a small model err..