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.

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.

Few-body resonances are in the frontiers of resonance studies. Very similar problems occur in atomic and molecular physics, nuclear physics and high-energy physics. This collection presents the state of the art of the studies of resonance states in these fields and demonstrates their common methodological aspects. Most of the contributions are theoretical, but quite a few are closely linked with experiments through the data they are dealing with.

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.

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.

The Asia-Pacific Conferences on Few-Body Problems in Physics tackle cover the various aspects of few-body systems in physics, with high caliber contributions from internationally renowned researchers. Readers will gain a clear picture of the latest developments in the field in both the theoretical and experimental sectors.The scope of these proceedings covers research in the following areas: three-body forces and few-nucleon dynamics, hadron structure and QCD; exotic hadrons and atoms; effective field theory in few-body physics; electromagnetic and weak processes in few-body systems; few-body dynamics in atoms, molecules, Bose-Einstein condensates and quantum dots; few-body approaches to unstable nuclei, nuclear astrophysics and nuclear clustering aspects; and hypernuclear physics.

Contents:Relationships Between q-Deformations, Typical Length Scales and Lower Measurability Bounds (E Papp)Description of Kerr States via Deformed Bosons (A I Solomon et al.)Quantum Mechanics on Phase Spaces ZN x ZN (J Tolar)Continuous Fuzzy Measurement of Energy: Realization and Application (J Audretsch)Decoherence and the Final Pointer Basis (M Castagnino & R Laura)On Hybrid Dynamics of the Copenhagen Dichotomic World (L Diósi)Storage and Read-Out of Quantum-State Information via Interference (M Freyberger et al.)Is There a Gravitational Collapse of the Wave-Packet? (H-J Schmidt)Operators and Maps Affiliated to EPR Channels (A Uhlmann)Reconstruction of Quantum States and Its Conceptual Implications (S Weigert)Geometric Formulation of Nonlinear Quantum Mechanics for Density Matrices (P Bóna)Fundamental Principles of Quantum Mechanics and Non(Linearity) (R Cirelli et al.)Nonlinear von Neumann-Type Equations (M Czachor et al.)Some Aspects of Nonlinearity and Gauge Transformation in Quantum Mechanics (G A Goldin)On a Theorem of Ashtekar and Lewandowski in the Mathematical Framework of Canonical Quantization in Quantum Gravity (H Baumgärtel)The Fuzzy (Super)Sphere and Field Theory (H Grosse & G Reiter)Quantum Fields Along Worldlines (M Keyl)Field Theory Revisited (C Piron)and other papers Readership: Mathematical physicists. Keywords: