Introduction
| Nucleus the central part of an atom contains almost entire mass of the atom consists of two principal elementary particles, namely, proton and neutron. Proton is a positively charged particle, while neutron has zero electrical charge. The negative counterpart of proton, i.e. electrons revolves round the nucleus in some specific quantized orbits. Due to very small dimension (order of Fermi, i.e. 10 -13 cm) of the nucleus and interaction between nucleons, nucleus has very high binding energy (order of ~8MeV/nucleon). Going deeper into the structure, one finds subnucleon particles known as quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, which give rise to a strong interaction force to bind the entire nucleus. Nucleons consist of different combination of quarks. In this lecture we will learn some important basic properties of a nucleus. | ||
| Let us first look into some interesting basic properties of the nucleus. |