On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 10:48 PM, Bob Cook <frobertc...@hotmail.com> wrote:
Thanks for making that interesting paper available. I have always assumed > that angular momentum of particles and systems can only change in discrete > small amounts. > This reminds me (somewhat off on a tangent to the topic of this thread) -- for anyone who is still learning about nuclear spin, as I am, there's an important detail that is easy to lose sight of. It is that a nucleus of spin N, where N might be 0, 1/2, 7/2, 3, etc., will not necessarily interact with other particles with the full magnitude of spin. What is important is the projection of the spin onto the axis of travel, which is a function of its orientation. So a particle with spin 3 can potentially behave as a daughter in radioactive decays or in interactions with other particles in the manner of a spin 0, 1, 2, or 3 particle, depending on its relative orientation. Another way to say this is that there are two numbers that are important in an interaction -- the total angular momentum, J, which is a characteristic of the state of the particle, and the angular momentum along the z axis, "m," which is not a characteristic of its state. Eric
