The aims of this course are to develop our physics intuition of nuclear systems using a theoretical approach where we describe data in terms of the motion of individual nucleons and their mutual interactions.

How our theoretical pictures and models can be used to interpret data is in essence what this course is about. Our narrative will lead us along a path where we start with single-particle models and end with the theory of the nuclear shell-model. The latter will be used to understand and analyze excitation spectra and decay patterns of nuclei, linking our theoretical understanding with interpretations of experiment. The way we build up our theoretical descriptions and interpretations follows what we may call a standard reductionistic approach, that is we start with what we believe are our effective degrees of freedom (nucleons in our case) and interactions amongst these and solve thereafter the underlying equations of motions. This defines the nuclear many-body problem, and mean-field approaches like Hartree-Fock theory and the nuclear shell-model represent different approaches to our solutions of Schroedinger's equation.