The present status of the nuclear shell model

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Abstract
The nuclear shell model is the central idea of nuclear structure. Theorists work either backwards from it (by this I mean they try to justify and derive its properties by stating a basic many‐body Hamiltonian) or they work forward from it (they assume it is true and try to derive and justify the wide variety and complexity of nuclear properties including the well known phenomenon of nuclear collective motion). The shell model lurks somewhere in every paper on nuclear structure. The intense interest in the shell model among experimentalists for the last fifteen years has been due to the kinds of experiments that became possible during this time. It has been an era of direct reactions that characteristically excite simple degrees of freedom of the nucleus—just those most easily explained by the shell model. Without the possibility of these experiments and their analysis, the shell model might have been left mainly to the theorists, and they would have found it a very dry subject, without the wealth of experimental data they now have.