The conference NSTAR 2000 was part of a series of conferences and workshops that began in New York in 1988. Since then, the field of excited nucleons and hadron structure has developed enormously, and the scope has broadened. Most significantly, new experimental facilities have come into operation, allowing precise measurements of resonance couplings and transition form factors. The search for ?missing? quark model states and gluonic excitations in complex hadronic channels is now possible.On the theory side, new and promising developments have emerged: quark models with meson degrees of freedom, hybrid baryon models, and studies of baryons in the limit of many colors. For the first time, lattice QCD has been employed to calculate masses of excited nucleons. Nucleon resonances are now recognized as providing significant contributions to the nucleon spin sum rules, as well as the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn and Bjorken integrals, at finite momentum transfer.

Dramatic progress has been made in all branches of physics since the National Research Council's 1986 decadal survey of the field. The Physics in a New Era series explores these advances and looks ahead to future goals. The series includes assessments of the major subfields and reports on several smaller subfields, and preparation has begun on an overview volume on the unity of physics, its relationships to other fields, and its contributions to national needs. Nuclear Physics is the latest volume of the series. The book describes current activity in understanding nuclear structure and symmetries, the behavior of matter at extreme densities, the role of nuclear physics in astrophysics and cosmology, and the instrumentation and facilities used by the field. It makes recommendations on the resources needed for experimental and theoretical advances in the coming decade.

This book is devoted to the investigation of the strongly interacting hadrons — to a quark model operating with effective color particles, constituent quarks, massive effective gluons and diquarks. The study of strong interactions based on effective constituent particles requires a solid ground of experimental data, which we now have at our disposal with the serious progress made in the investigation of hadrons, especially meson states.The present understanding of QCD applied to strong interactions can be distorted by prejudices. Therefore, the way followed by the quark model is to rely on the experiment and to restore the effective Hamiltonian on the basis of QCD on the one hand, and, on the other, of the spectral integral method.Baryon-baryon and antibaryon-baryon interactions are studied with the purpose of unambiguous applications of the written formulae to the interpretation of experimental data — to the observation of new meson and baryon resonances. The technique used is the spin-orbital momentum expansion of the amplitude. This method is our basic approach to the proper treatment of experimental data. The photon-induced reactions are also considered and the problem of form factors is discussed.

The conference NSTAR 2000 was part of a series of conferences and workshops that began in New York in 1988. Since then, the field of excited nucleons and hadron structure has developed enormously, and the scope has broadened. Most significantly, new experimental facilities have come into operation, allowing precise measurements of resonance couplings and transition form factors. The search for “missing” quark model states and gluonic excitations in complex hadronic channels is now possible.On the theory side, new and promising developments have emerged: quark models with meson degrees of freedom, hybrid baryon models, and studies of baryons in the limit of many colors. For the first time, lattice QCD has been employed to calculate masses of excited nucleons. Nucleon resonances are now recognized as providing significant contributions to the nucleon spin sum rules, as well as the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn and Bjorken integrals, at finite momentum transfer.

Intended for graduate students, advanced undergraduates and research staff in particle physics and related disciplines and will also be of interest to physicists not working in this field who want an overview of the present development of the subject.

It has been well recognized that the study of the excitations of the nucleon can shed light on the nonperturbative aspects of QCD. New opportunities for such study will be opened in the next few years with the commissioning of experiments in Hall B of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab). Photo- and electroproduction studies of single and double pions, rhos, omegas, and kaons will be conducted with unprecedented precision. The Hall B CLAS detector is a major step forward, promising to provide kinematically complete measurements of cross sections and spin observables. The task of extracting new insights from such detailed measurements will require close coordination between experimental and theoretical physicists.To help optimize this interface between theory and experiment, a joint CEBAF/INT workshop was held at the Institute of Nuclear Theory in Seattle, September 9-13, 1996. The foci of the 1996 workshop included: N → N∗ transition form factors as predicted by QCD-inspired models and their experimental consequences; theoretical techniques employing QCD sum rules, perturbative QCD, and lattice QCD; reaction theories of photo- and electro-production of mesons; theoretical issues in the eta meson, vector meson, and two-pion production channels; progress in developing amplitude analyses for the available and expected data; the relationship between the Hall B program and those of other new experimental facilities.This proceeding will serve readers as both a current perspective on the field and a guide to future experimental and theoretical research directions.

The 14th RCNP OSAKA International Symposium on Nuclear Reaction Dynamics of Nucleon-Hadron Many Body System was held in Osaka from December 6 to 9, 1995. The symposium covered current topics from Nucleon Spins and Mesons in Nuclei to Quark Lepton Nuclear Physics. Thus it included the field of hadron/nuclear physics from sub-GeV to multi-GeV energy region, as well as recent activities and development at RCNP. It was also intended to be a kind of winter school for young researchers/graduate students.This proceedings consists of the invited talks and lectures presented by leading physicists in the field and short oral presentations.

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.