Relativistic treatment of low‐energy nuclear phenomena

Because the binding energies of nuclei are very much smaller than their rest masses, one would not have expected relativistic effects to play a significant role in nuclear structure or nuclear scattering at modest energies. Thus the nonrelativistic Schrödinger equation has until recently been the basis for almost all calculations in traditional nuclear physics. But in the past three years, the coming together of precise new data and novel theoretical approaches has made it appear that a fully relativistic treatment is indispensable for the understanding of nuclear phenomena even at low energies.