Publications

摘要

The Physics of the Manhattan Project, by Bruce Cameron Reed. A unique blend of history and physics, this book has undergone a substantial revision with this third edition, which includes four new sections. It provides a clear introduction to fission weapons at the level of an upper-year undergraduate physics student by examining the details of nuclear reactions, their energy release, analytic and numerical models of the fission process, how critical masses can be estimated, how fissile materials are produced, and what factors complicate bomb design. An extensive list of references and a number of exercises for self-study are included, and links are provided to several freely available spreadsheets that readers can use to run many of the calculations for themselves.