During the week of June 6-9, 1978, a group of 36 physicists from 15
countries met in Erice, Sicily, for the first specialized seminar on
"Interacting Bosons in Nuclear Physics". The countries represented were
Argentina, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, the Federal Republic of
Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the
United Kingdom, the United States of America and Yugoslavia. The Seminar
was sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Public Education (MPI), the
Italian Ministry of Scientific and Technological Research (MRST), the
North Atlantic Treaty Organiza- tion (NATO) and the Regional Sicilian
Government (ERS). The purpose of the Seminar was to discuss the present
status of the Interacting Boson Model both from the theoretical and
experi- mental point of view. Some of the lectures presented in this
book summarize particular aspects of the model and are based on
previously published work (F. Iachello, R. F. Casten, Z. Sujkowski, L.
Hassel- gren, H. Emling, I. Talmi, T. Otsuka, J. McGrory, A.E.L.
Dieperink and A. Arima). Others are entirely new. In particular, the
lec- tures of O. Scholten and A. Gelberg and V. Kaup present the first
extensive set of calculations based on the proton-neutron boson model,
while the lecture of J.N.Ginocchio describes a fermion model with
properties identical to those of the interacting boson model. Also new
are the le tures of D. R. Bes, R. A. Broglia and P. F.