This volume deals with both the experimental and theoretical aspects of meson physics; in particular, it presents new results. The main topics are: hadronic and electromagnetic meson production in various reactions; meson interaction with mesons, nucleons and nuclei; the structure of hadrons; mesons and fundamental symmetries; exotic systems. The book provides an overview of the current status of these areas, as well as of new developments, besides giving a preview of the forthcoming investigations.

There are four fundamental forces in nature: gravitational, electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces. The last two are sometimes referred to as nuclear forces. It is the main objective of high energy physics to explore these forces, and hopefully unify them into one fundamental theory. This goal has made high energy physics one of the most ambitious, attractive, challenging, and powerful areas of physics, and has attracted experts from other areas including pure and applied mathematics, and computer science. The MRST annual conference brings together senior and junor investigators and provides a friendly and stimulating atmosphere to discuss recent developments in high energy physics. A broad range of topics in high energy physics was covered in this conference, and therefore these proceedings will be very useful to both senior researchers as well as graduate students in high energy physics, nuclear physics, and computational physics, providing most recent ideas, techniques, and directions for future research in this field.

Particle accelerators are used today for an increasing range of scientific and technological applications. They are very powerful tools to investigate the origin and structure of matter, and to improve understanding of the interaction of radiation with materials, including transmutation of nuclides and beneficial effects or risks from radiation. They are used to identify properties of molecules that can be used in pharmacy, for medical diagnosis and therapy, or for biophysics studies.Particle accelerators must be operated in safe ways that protect operators, the population and the environment. New technological and research applications give rise to new aspects in radiation shielding. These workshop proceedings review the state of the art in radiation shielding of accelerator facilities and of irradiated targets. They also evaluate progress made and discuss the additional developments required to meet radiation protection needs.

New theories are explored and discussed on establishing relations between the fundamental theory of strong interactions, known as QCD, and experiment. Powerful theoretical models, known as effective theories, based on symmetries of QCD, have been developed to address the non-perturbative regime of QCD in an approximate, yet quantitatively controllable way. The present workshop focussed on the most recent developments in this area. New results on meson and baryon physics are discussed as well and new directions towards the possible experimental confirmation of nuclear/quark matter and quark-gluon plasma are indicated.

This book features up-to-date technology applications to radiation detection. It synthesises several techniques of and approaches to radiation detection, covering a wide range of applications and addressing a large audience of experts and students.Many of the talks are in fact reviews of particular topics often not covered in standard books and other conferences, for instance, the medical physics section. To present these medical physics talks is crucial, since a large fraction of the community in medical physics are from the particle physics community. The same feature is true for astroparticle and space physics, which are relatively new fields.This book is unique in its scope. Except for IEEE, there is no other conference in the world that presents such a wide coverage of advanced technology applied to particle physics. However, unlike IEEE, more room is made in the book for reviews and general talks.