Orateur
Description
The year 2011 marked the centennial of Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic nucleus. We also celebrated the centennial of Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. These two events are closely linked and marked the dawn of a science that would revolutionize physics and change the course of history. To get to this point, it took luck, countless hours of hard work, and genius.
Starting in 1911, a wave of technological innovations and conceptual revolutions gave rise to quantum mechanics and led to the discovery of the proton, the neutron, antimatter, artificial radioactivity, and fission. Since World War II, discoveries have continued, and the nucleus has revealed itself in all its forms: magical, deformed and exotic.
In these lectures, I will briefly retrace the history of nuclear physics and give a glimpse of what is done today in the field of modern nuclear-structure physics.