LAUSR

40 Nuclear Physics News, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2017 A new Springer book, The Discovery of Isotopes: A Complete Compilation, by Michael Thoennessen, represents an incredible amount of effort to unravel and organize the published information of an important part of nuclear physics and its history. In over 400 pages the book presents the discovery experiments of 3,211 isotopes of 118 elements. It covers the time period from the early days of nuclear physics up to the end of 2015. The book is composed of 17 chapters and includes altogether 1,551 references to original works. In addition, as a separate section, it includes a comprehensive and detailed list of isotopes discovered together with information on the laboratory, the reference to the original article, and the fi rst author of the article. With the help of his undergraduate students, Thoennessen has compiled and published most of the information of the book fi rst in the journal Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables. Using these series of papers, instead of following the order of isotope chains for each proton number, the text part of the book has been organized using a different approach. It starts fi rst from historical description of the early research on isotopes and related discoveries in nuclear physics until the Second World War and then continues more in the order based on the reaction mechanisms and detection methods used in the discoveries. The book presents a nicely ordered description and related original references of the early days of the isotope research as part of the history of nuclear physics. The defi nition of the concept of the isotope was fi rst introduced by Soddy (1913) who originally drew attention to the existence of isotopes or “nuclides with similar chemical behavior,” in the radioactive series. It is remarkable that, only in 1932, following the discovery of the neutron by Chadwick, the concept of the isotope fi nally reached its full understanding. This was then followed by a series of discoveries of artifi cial radioactive isotopes starting with experiments of Jolie and Curie in 1934. Since then the fi eld developed in a straightforward way, largely due to various ingenious developments in accelerators and associated research techniques. The number of discovered new isotopes per year reached its maximum number of about 55 between the early 1950s and 1970s followed by a more regular number of about 20 per year until these days. High-energy nuclear fragmentation is now the dominating reaction mechanism coupled with large spectrometers and has been covered by the leading facilities at GSI, GANIL, NSCL, and RIKEN, to be followed by the FRIB and Super-FRS of FAIR, which are under construction in the United States and Germany, respectively. As a whole this book presents a carefully written piece of literature and deserves a place in the book shelf of a nuclear physicist. It is written with a good style with very few typos. It also offers a useful source of information for students and teachers, as well as for non-experts. It is highly recommended reading as support material for nuclear physics classes in high school and universities. For continuous updates of the Discovery of Nuclides Project, see https:// people.nscl.msu.edu/~thoennes/iso topes/.