Introduction

In many cases in physics, one has to deal simultaneously with collective and single-particle excitations of the system. The collective excitations are usually bosonic in nature while the single-particle excitations are often fermionic. One is therefore led to consider a system which includes bosons and fermions. In this book we discuss applications of a general algebraic theory of mixed Bose- Fermi systems to atomic nuclei. The collective degrees of freedom here can be described in terms of a system of interacting bosons as discussed in a previous book (Iachello and Arima, 1987), henceforth referred to as Volume 1. The single-particle degrees of freedom represent the motion of individual nucleons in the average nuclear field. They are described in terms of a system of interacting fermions. The coupling of fermions and bosons leads to the interacting boson-fermion model which has been used extensively in recent years to discuss the properties of nuclei with an odd number of nucleons.

The interacting boson-fermion model was introduced by Arima and one of us in 1975 (Arima and Iachello, 1975). It was subsequently expanded by Iachello and Scholten (1979) and cast into a form more readily amenable to calculations. As in the corresponding case of even-mass systems, the algebra of creation and annihilation operators can be realized in several ways. One of these is the Hoistein-Primakoff realization which leads to a slightly different version of the interacting boson-fermion model called the truncated quadrupole phonon-fermion model (Paar, 1980; Paar and Brant, 1981), based on the boson realization introduced by Janssen, Jolos and Donau in 1974 and discussed in Sect. 1.4.6 of Volume 1.