With the appearance of Volume 3 of our series the review articles them- selves can speak for the nature of the series. Our initial aim of charting the field of nuclear physics with some regularity and completeness is, hopefully, beginning to be established. We are greatly indebted to the willing coopera- tion of many authors which has kept the series on schedule. By means of the "stream" technique on which our series is based - in which articles emerge from a flow of future articles at the convenience of the authors-the articles appear in this volume without any special coordination of...

In both the present volume of Advances in Nuclear Physics and in the next volume, which will follow in a few months' time, we have stretched our normal pattern of reviews by including articles of more major proportions than any we have published before. As a result we have only three review articles in Volume 5. From the beginning of this series it has been our aim, as editors, to achieve variation in the scope, style, and length of individual articles sufficient to match the needs of the individual topic, rather than to restrain authors within rigid limits. It has not been our experience...

In the present volume and in the preceding one we have stretched our normal pattern of reviews by including articles of more major proportions than any we have published before. As a consequence each of these two vol- umes contains only three review articles. From the beginning of this series it has been our aim, as editors, to achieve variation in the scope, style, and length of individual articles sufficient to match the needs of the individual topic, rather than to restrain the authors within rigid limits. We feel that the two major articles of Vols. 5 and 6 are entirely justified and do...

As much by chance as by design, the present volume comes closer to having a single theme than any of our earlier volumes. That theme is the properties of nuclear strength functions or, alternatively, the problem of line spreading. The line spreading or strength function concepts are essential for the nucleus because of its many degrees of freedom. The description of the nucleus is approached by using model wave functions-for example, the shell model or the collective model-in which one has truncated the number of degrees of freedom. The question then is how closely do the model wave functions...

The aim of Advances in Nuclear Physics is to provide review papers which chart the field of nuclear physics with some regularity and completeness. We define the field of nuclear physics as that which deals with the structure and behavior of atomic nuclei. Although many good books and reviews on nuclear physics are available, none attempts to provide a coverage which is at the same time continuing and reasonably complete. Many people have felt the need for a new series to fill this gap and this is the ambition of Advances in Nuclear Physics. The articles will be aimed at a wide audience, from...