Hadron Physics 94

This volume, which is a compilation of lecture notes, seminar talks and contributed material presented at the above conference, discusses the modern approaches to hadronic physics: chiral perturbation theory, effective Lagrangians, models for hadronic structure and nuclear matter properties, method of light front quantization, etc. The lecture notes provide comprehensive pedagogical descriptions of methods and achievements in the corresponding topics, while the seminar talks review recent selected frontier work. The various contributions cover a wide spectrum of research problems in hadronic physics.

Straddling the traditional disciplines of nuclear and particle physics, hadron physics is a vital and extremely active research area, as evidenced by a 2004 Nobel prize and new research facilities, such as that scheduled to open at CERN. Scientifically it is of vital importance in extrapolating our knowledge of quark-gluon physics at the sub-nucleo

The study of QCD in the confinement regime poses some of the most difficult problems of fundamental physics at present. The mechanism of confinement is not yet understood, and it is hard to investigate the properties of the fundamental theory in the determination of the structures and interactions of hadronic systems. As a consequence of these difficulties, the frontier between effective and fundamental theories has been intensively investigated in the last few years, and progress has been achieved in several directions. The 'Hadron Physics' workshop gathered together experts who have been taking the lead in these developments in recent years. Four sets of lectures were presented, providing a pedagogical and updated basis that gives support to research work in frontier problems. This book puts together the main current methods in the study of the properties of hadrons. The perspective of future developments based on different approaches can then be more clearly perceived.

The study of QCD in the confinement regime poses some of the most difficult problems of fundamental physics at present. The mechanism of confinement itself is not described formally, and it is hard to investigate the properties of the fundamental theory in the determination of the structures and interactions of hadronic systems. The strong coupling and the extreme non-linearity of the theory severely limit the applicability and the extension and generalization of models and methods. The area of particle/nuclear physics called Hadron Physics deals with the phenomena determined by the confinement regime of QCD.The International Workshop on Hadron Physics 98 aimed to provide a framework for the comparative evaluation of different approaches to the difficult problems of QCD, and gathered together experts who have been leading developments in hadronic physics in recent years. As a central feature of the workshop program, there were four sets of lectures: (1) “An Introduction to Effective Field Theory” (J F Donoghue); (2) “Non-perturbative QCD” (A Di Giacomo); (3) “Diffraction: Past, Present and Future” (E Predazzi); “QCD at High Temperature and Density” (T Hatsuda). These courses provided a pedagogical and updated account of the recent developments that gave support to the discussion of frontier research problems. The lecturers did very useful work in the review and description of important lines of research.The lectures are reproduced in this book, together with invited talks and contributed papers dealing with specific research problems, for the use and appreciation of a wider audience.

This volume reviews recent advances in both theoretical and experimental studies in the field of medium energy physics. The following topics are covered: hadronic structures; hadron-hadron interactions; QCD and its model theory; meson physics; medium and high energy lepton-nucleus interactions; weak interaction and double-βdecay in nuclei; p-p and p-nucleus interactions; systems with strangeness and hypernuclei; and high energy p-A and A-A collisions and QGP.