General Introduction

Heavy ion physics is a very vast, developed and fastly developing field and this book is a study on this subject. Here we have attempted to review the very recent developments in the field of superheavy elements, the related phenomena of fission and cluster radioactivity and the physics of nuclei at its extremities, like the proton and neutron drip-lines, the astrophysical nuclear processes and the new matter in the third dimension of “strangeness”, called strange matter or hyper matter. Both the experimental and theoretical aspects are included to an almost equal extent…