Few Body Problems In Physics 02

In this Supplement we have collected the invited and contributed talks pre sented at the XVIII European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, organised by the Jozef Stefan Institute and the University of Ljubljana, Slove nia. The Conference, sponsored by the European Physical Society, took place at the lakeside resort of Bled from 8 to 14 September, 2002. This meeting was a part of the series of European Few-Body Conferences, previously held in Evora/Portugal (2000), Autrans/France (1998), Peniscola/Spain (1995), ... Our aim was to emphasise, to a larger extent than at previous Conferences, the interdisciplinarity of research fields of the Few-Body community. To pro mote a richer exchange of ideas, we therefore strived to avoid parallel sessions as much as possible. On the other hand, to promote the participation of young scientists who we feel will eventually shape the future of Few-Body Physics, we wished to give almost all attendees the opportunity to speak.

The first Asia-Pacific Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics took place from August 23 to August 28, 1999, at the Noda campus of the Sci ence University of Tokyo in Noda-city and Sawayaka Chiba Kenmin Plaza in Kashiwa-city, a suburb of Tokyo close to the Narita-Tokyo International Air port, with the Frontier Research Center for Computation Sciences (FRCCS) of the Science University of Tokyo as the host institute. The High Energy Accel erator Research Organization (KEK), the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), the Research Center for Nuclear Physics (RCNP)-Osaka University, the Physical Society of Japan, and the Association of Asia Pacific Physical Societies (AAPPS) supported this conference. The conference was initiated in the Asia Pacific area as a counterpart to the successful European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics (APFB99), in addition to the International Few-Body Conference Series and the Few Body Gordon Conference series in North America. The Physics of Few-Body Problems covers, as is well known, systems with finite numbers of particles in contrast to many-body systems with very large numbers of particles. Therefore, it covers such wide fields as mesoscopic, atom-molecular, exotic atom, nucleon, hyperon, and quark-gluon physics, plus their applications.

The sixteenth European Conference on Few Body Problems in Physics has taken place from June 1 to June 6, 1998, in Autrans, a little village in the mountains, close to Grenoble. The Conference follows those organized in Peniscola (1995), Amsterdam (1993), Elba (1991), Uzhgorod (1990) ... The present one has been organized by a group of physicists working in different fields at the University Joseph Fourier of Grenoble who find in this occasion a good opportunity to join their efforts. The core of the organizing committee was nevertheless located at the Institut des Sciences Nucleaires, whose physicists, especially in the group of theoretical physics, have a long tradition in the domain. The Few Body Conference has a natural tendency to be a theoretical one - the exchange about the methods used in different fields is the common point to most participants. It also has a tendency to be a hadronic physics one - the corresponding physics community, perhaps due to the existence of experimen tal facilities devoted to the study of few body systems, is better organized. In preparing the scientific program, we largely relied on the advices of the Inter national Advisory Committee, while avoiding to follow these trends too closely.

Few-body physics covers a rich and wide variety of phenomena, ranging from the very lowest energy scales of atomic and molecular physics to high-energy particle physics. The papers contained in the present volume provide an apercu of recent progress in the field from both the theoretical and experimental perspectives and are based on work presented at the “22nd International Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics”. This book is geared towards academics and graduate students involved in the study of systems which present few-body characteristics and those interested in the related mathematical and computational techniques.

This book collects all of the invited papers and contributions to the Discussion Sessions, presented at the 13th European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, and is addressed to senior and young researchers and students interested in the field of few-body problems in elementary particle and nuclear physics, as well as in atomic and molecular physics. The volume contains a survey of recent, and not yet published results on theoretical and experimental investigations of the structure of hadrons and hadronic systems, novel theoretical methods suitable for an accurate treatment of the few-body problems in different fields, present status and future developments in muon catalysed fusion. A detailed illustration of the few-body physics programs of running (MIT-Bates, CEBAF, CERN, HERA, Mainz, NIKHEF, SATURNE, Saskatchewan, SLAC , TRIUMF) and proposed (European Electron Facility Project, Indiana cooler beam) experimental facilities represents a valuable feature of the book.