Zakopane 2026 Conference on Nuclear Physics

For six decades, Jerzy Dudek has made seminal contributions to the study of the rich variety of shapes and symmetries in atomic nuclei at the extremes of angular momentum, excitation energy, deformation, isospin and mass. Throughout this incredibly exciting period, the interplay between experiment and theory has been an exhilarating demonstration of the power of the scientific method, with...

At high temperatures, quantum shell effects in atomic nuclei diminish. Nuclear stability is then described by classical surface tension and Coulomb repulsion. As angular momentum increases, Coriolis and centrifugal forces drive shape transitions. Historically, similar phenomena were predicted for rotating stellar objects. These include the Jacobi instability (oblate to triaxial ellipsoid...

Atomic nuclei are strongly-interacting quantum many-body systems and are characterized by a set of good quantum numbers such as angular momentum and parity. Such quantum numbers imply that the nuclear Hamiltonian conserves fundamental symmetries such as invariance by rotation, translation, reflection, etc. Yet, many of the regular patterns observed in the excitation spectrum of nuclei are most...

The research project presented in this contribution combines the well established achievements elaborated already during the preceding century and the more recent ones mainly related to the exotic nuclear shape symmetries. It focuses on the realistic applications of the phenomenological nuclear mean field theory in low energy nuclear structure phenomena. This involved in particular the physics...