The QNP series of international conferences on Quarks and Nuclear Physics is by now a well established and highly respected forum where the most recent developments in the field are discussed and communicated. QNP 2006 is the forth edition of this biennial meeting. Selected and refereed original contributions of QNP 2006 have been published in The European Physical Journal A - Hadrons and Nuclei (EPJ A), while the present proceedings book, in addition to reprinting the articles published in EPJ A, further includes all other contributions selected and accepted by the organizing committee for publication and archiving.
The generalization of QCD from three to C colors, developed in 1974 by Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft, has proved to be an extraordinarily useful and robust theoretical extension for studying the behavior of strong interaction physics. This book is the proceedings of the first-ever meeting exclusively devoted to large NC QCD. The workshop brought together representatives of many subdisciplines for a meeting of minds on topics ranging from finite temperature and density to the lattice, perturbative QCD, instantons, mesons, baryons, and nuclear physics. Beginning with 't Hooft's keynote presentation, the contributions are designed to introduce uses of large NC methods in each specialty to a broader particle physics audience."
The large Nc limit plays a fundamental role in the study of non-abelian gauge theories such as quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Since its discovery in 1974 by 't Hooft, the 1/Nc expansion has provided crucial insights into the non-perturbative aspects of gauge theories. The expansion implemented at the effective theory level is one of the fundamental tools currently in use in hadronic physics; there are important effects and relations that follow from the 1/Nc expansion, which held remarkably well in the real world with Nc= 3. The 1/Ncexpansion also plays a central role in the recently discovered connections between non-Abelian gauge and string theories, promising new ways to analyze the non-perturbative domain of gauge theories.This volume contains contributions from leading theorists and covers the recent developments in the 1/Nc expansion in QCD. The topics addressed include confinement, AdS/CFT correspondence and the string-QCD connection, topology in large Nc, lattice QCD, and a variety of applications to mesons and baryons.
The conference focused on the current status of baryon spectroscopy, form factors and structure functions, electroweak interactions and symmetries, strange and exotic states, chiral perturbation theory, heavy quark physics, and medium modifications, through plenary session summaries and reviews and parallel session reports of recent experimental and theoretical advances. Plans for future facilities and upgrades were highlighted in special plenary sessions.
This meeting on Hadron Spectroscopy and the Confinement Problem took place from June 27 to July 8, 1995. The first four days were at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London and the last six at the University College of Swansea, Wales. The reason for the split sites was a question of accomodating the 54 students and 12 lecturers. However, it was enjoyed by all concerned, providing the opportunity to sample the nightlife of London one week and enjoy the delightful coastal area around Swansea the following week. The meeting immediately preceded the Hadron '95 conference in Manchester. The contents of this volume run roughly parallel to the order of the lectures. Martin Faessler's brief and that of Madjid Boutemeur was to review experimental tech niques as well as physics results. We have tried to review all the areas which are currently active experimentally. This means mostly Light Meson Spectroscopy. However, Simon Capstick gave us a welcome review of Baryon Spectroscopy and the coming CEBAF program. This is an opportunity to thank NATO for their generous financial support, and also the two host institutions for excellent coordination and an enjoyable stay.
The Workshop N* Physics and non-perturbative QeD was held at the Eu ropean Center for Theoretical Studies and Related Areas (ECT*) in Trento, Italy, during May 18-29, 1998. Previous workshops of the series on N* Physics took place at the Florida State University (1994), at CEBAF (1995), at the Institute for Nuclear Theory in Seattle (1996) and at the George Washington University (1997). The Workshop was devoted to a summary of recent experimental and the oretical research on N* phsyics and special emphasis was given to the infor mation that photo-and electro-production of nucleon resonances can provide on the non-perturbative regime of Quantum Chromodynamics. The idea was to stimulate discussions among experimentalists and theoreticians in order to pursue the interpretation of the huge amount of forthcoming data from several laboratories in the world. It was therefore decided to have both experimental and theoretical lectures on the main topics, like ,among the others, single and double pion production, TJ-and K-meson production, the GDH sum rule, the spin of the proton, etc. Thanks to the unusual two-week extension of the Work shop, the allotted time for the lectures was extended up to one hour in order to allow the invited lecturers to give a detailed presentation of their topics. Fi nally, various short contributions were selected to sharpen the discussion about selected items.
In August 1978 a group of 80 physicists from 51 laboratories of 15 countries met in Erice to attend the 16th Course of the International School of Subnuclear Physics. The countries represented at the School were: Austria, Denmark, Federal Republic of Germany, Finland, France, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, The United States of America, and Yugoslavia. The School was sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Public Education (MPI) , the Italian Ministry of Scientific and Technological Research (MRSI) , the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Sicilian Regional Government, and the Weizmann Institute of Science. As usual, the Course was devoted to a review of the most out standing problems and results in Subnuclear Physics, with particular emphasis on the new aspects; there were mainly two: supersymmetry and electroweak interactions. In his famous lecture at Erice in 1967, Sid Coleman reviewed "All possible symmetries of the S matrix. " All but one, namely that which tells you: if you have a fermion you must have a boson. This is super symmetry , and this produces the superspace, i. e. an entity which has not only the Einstein-"bosonic" coordinates, but also "fermionic" coordinates. From superspace we get supergravity; and this means that one day we should be able to detect not only the graviton (with spin 2) but also the gravitino (spin 3/2). If we add "flavour", "colour", and "family" as other intrinsic degrees of freedom, we get extended supergravity.
The Sixth Latin American Symposium on Nuclear Applications covered the most active topics in basic nuclear physics which were grouped into four broad categories, namely, nuclear structure, nuclear reactions, subnuclear physics, and nuclear thermodynamics and dynamics. It also placed a significant emphasis on the applications of nuclear science and nuclear instrumentation to a wide range of fields of knowledge.
The study of N∗s can provide us with critical insights into the nature of QCD in the confinement domain. The keys to progress in this domain are the identification of its important degrees of freedom and the effective forces between them. The nucleon is the simplest system in which the nonabelian character of QCD is manifest. There are Nc quarks in a baryon because there are Nc colors, and as a consequence Gell-Mann and Zweig were forced to introduce the quarks in order to describe the octet and decuplet baryons.This volume gives a status report on the recent experimental and theoretical results in the field of nucleon resonance physics. A wealth of new high precision data was presented from facilities around the world, such as BES, BNL, ELSA, GRAAL, JLab, MAMI, MIT/Bates, SPring8, and Yerevan. Particular emphasis was laid on polarization degrees of freedom and large acceptance detectors as precision tools for studying small but important transition amplitudes, and the helicity (spin) structure of the nucleon. There were new results describing the nucleon resonance structure on the basis of quantum chromodynamics, either directly in terms of quarks and gluons by means of lattice gauge theory, or in terms of hadrons in the framework of chiral field theories. A status report on duality showed the surprising connections between the physics of the low energy nucleon resonance region and the realm of quark structure functions in deep inelastic scattering. Finally, this volume contains a summary report of the BRAG workshop, devoted to the analysis of baryon resonances.
