Focus on 40 years of research in Journal of Physics G

2015 marks the 40th anniversary of Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics. This editorial provides a brief history of the journal, and introduces a unique collection of invited articles from leading authors to celebrate the occasion.

Nuclear astrophysics is a vibrant field at the intersection of nuclear physics and astrophysics that encompasses research in nuclear physics, astrophysics, astronomy, and computational science. This paper is not a review. It is intended to provide an incomplete personal perspective on current trends in nuclear astrophysics and the specific role of nuclear physics in this field.

Once upon a time, the world was simple: the proton contained three quarks, two ups and a down. How these give the proton its mass and its spin seemed obvious. Over the past 40 years the proton has become more complicated, and how even these most obvious of its properties is explained in a universe of quarks, antiquarks and gluons remains a challenge. That this should be so should come as no surprise. Quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong interaction, is seemingly simple, and its consequences are straightforward in the domain of hard scattering where perturbation theory applies. However, the beauty of the hadron world is its diversity. The existence of hadrons, their properties, and their binding into nuclei do not appear in the Lagrangian of QCD. They all emerge as a result of its strong coupling. Strong coupling QCD creates complex phenomena, much richer than known 40 years ago: a richness that ensures colour confinement and accounts for more than 95% of the mass of the visible Universe. How strong coupling QCD really works requires a synergy between experiment and theory. A very personal view of these fascinating developments in cold QCD is presented.

The goal of nuclear structure theory is to build a comprehensive microscopic framework in which properties of nuclei and extended nuclear matter, and nuclear reactions and decays can all be consistently described. Due to novel theoretical concepts, breakthroughs in the experimentation with rare isotopes, increased exchange of ideas across different research areas, and the progress in computer technologies and numerical algorithms, nuclear theorists have been quite successful in solving various bits and pieces of the nuclear many-body puzzle and the prospects are exciting. This article contains a brief, personal perspective on the status of the field.

More than 80 years after its first postulation in modern form, the existence and distribution of dark matter in our Universe is well established. Dark matter is the gravitational glue that holds together galaxies, galaxy clusters and structures on the largest cosmological scales, and an essential component to explain the observed fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Yet its existence is inferred indirectly, through its gravitational influence on luminous matter, and its nature is not known. A viable hypothesis is that dark matter is made of new, elementary particles, with allowed masses and interaction strengths spanning a wide range. Two well-motivated classes of candidates are axions and weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), and experimental efforts have now reached sensitivities that allow them to test this hypothesis. Axions, produced non-thermally in the early Universe, can be detected by exploiting their predicted couplings to photons and electrons. WIMPs can be detected directly by looking for their collisions with atomic nuclei ultra-low background detectors, or indirectly, through the observation of their annihilation products such as neutrinos, gamma rays, positrons and antiprotons over the astrophysical background. A complementary method is the production of dark matter particles at colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider, where they could be observed indirectly via missing transverse energy, or via associated particle production. I will review the main experimental efforts to search for dark matter particles, and the existing constraints on the interaction cross sections. I will also discuss future experiments, their complementarity and their ability to measure the properties of these particles.

Scientifically based searches for elements beyond uranium started after the discovery of the neutron. Neutrons captured by uranium nuclei and subsequent ${\beta }^{-}$ decay, similarly as most of the elements were produced in nature, was the successful method applied. However, as a first result, Hahn and Strassmann discovered nuclear fission indicating a limit for the existence of nuclei at an increasing number of protons. Eventually, the nuclear shell model allowed for a more accurate calculation of binding energies, half-lives and decay modes of the heaviest nuclei. Theoreticians predicted a region of increased stability at proton number Z = 126, later shifted to 114, and neutron number N = 184. These nuclei receive their stability from closed shells for the protons and neutrons. Later, increased stability was also predicted for deformed nuclei at Z = 108 and N = 162. In this review I will report on experimental work performed on research to produce and identify these super-heavy nuclei (SHN). Intensive heavy ion beams, sophisticated target technology, efficient electromagnetic ion separators, and sensitive detector arrays were the prerequisites for discovery of 12 new elements during the last 40 years. The results are described and compared with theoretical predictions and interpretations. An outlook is given on further improvement of experimental facilities which will be needed for exploration of the extension and structure of the island of SHN, in particular for searching for isotopes with longer half-lives predicted to be located in the south east of the island, for new elements, and last not least, for surprises which, naturally, emerge unexpectedly.

In cosmological scenarios based on grand unification, string theory or braneworlds, many kinds of topological or non-topological defects, including monopoles and cosmic strings, are predicted to be formed in the early Universe. Here we review specifically the physics of composite objects involving monopoles tied to strings. There is a wide variety of these, including for example 'dumbbells' and 'necklaces', depending on how many strings attach to each monopole and on the extent to which the various fluxes are confined to the strings. We also briefly survey the prospects for observing such structures, the existing observational limits, and potential evidence for a cosmological role.