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 main aim of this book is to provide a broad overview of nuclear physics in terms of both hadron-meson dynamics and quark-lepton dynamics. It covers topics such as elastic and inelastic scattering, spin-isospin responses and charge exchange reactions, giant resonances, nuclear clusters,nuclear physics with strange flavour, and others. All subjects are presented from the experimental point of view, and enough prerequisite material is included for the book to be accessible to graduate students. From this the reader is led through to discussions of the important questions of currentresearch. H. Ejiri is Director of the Research Centre for Nuclear Physics (RCNP) at the University of Osaka, Japan. H. Toki is Professor of Physics at the University of Osaka, Japan.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of some key developments in the understanding of the nucleon-nucleon interaction and nuclear many-body theory. The main problems at the level of meson exchange physics have been solved, and we have an effective field theory using a phenomenological interaction pioneered by Achim Schwenk and Scott Bogner, which is nearly universally accepted as a unique low-momentum interaction that includes all experimental data to date.This understanding is based on a multi-step development in which different scientific insights and a wide range of physical and mathematical methodologies fed into each other. It is best appreciated by looking at the different 'steps along the way', starting with the pioneering work of Brueckner and his collaborators that was just as necessary and important as the insightful masterly improvements to Brueckner's theory by Hans Bethe and his students. Moving on from there, the off-shell effects that bedeviled Bethe's work — which had resulted in the 1963 Reference Spectrum Method — were treated relatively accurately by introducing an energy gap between initial bound states and an intermediate state. With their influential 1967 paper, Brown and Kuo prepared the effective field theory. Later, the introduction of 'Brown-Rho scaling' deepened understanding of saturation in the many-body system and fed directly into recent work on carbon-14 dating.

Nuclei and nuclear reactions offer a unique setting for investigating three (and in some cases even all four) of the fundamental forces in nature. Nuclei have been shown – mainly by performing scattering experiments with electrons, muons and neutrinos – to be extended objects with complex internal structures: constituent quarks; gluons, whose exchange binds the quarks together; sea-quarks, the ubiquitous virtual quark-antiquark pairs and last but not least, clouds of virtual mesons, surrounding an inner nuclear region, their exchange being the source of the nucleon-nucleon interaction. The interplay between the (mostly attractive) hadronic nucleon-nucleon interaction and the repulsive Coulomb force is responsible for the existence of nuclei; their degree of stability, expressed in the details and limits of the chart of nuclides; their rich structure and the variety of their interactions. Despite the impressive successes of the classical nuclear models and of ab-initio approaches, there is clearly no end in sight for either theoretical or experimental developments as shown e.g. by the recent need to introduce more sophisticated three-body interactions to account for an improved picture of nuclear structure and reactions. Yet, it turns out that the internal structure of the nucleons has comparatively little influence on the behavior of the nucleons in nuclei and nuclear physics – especially nuclear structure and reactions – is thus a field of science in its own right, without much recourse to subnuclear degrees of freedom. This book collects essential material that was presented in the form of lectures notes in nuclear physics courses for graduate students at the University of Cologne. It follows the course's approach, conveying the subject matter by combining experimental facts and experimental methods and tools with basic theoretical knowledge. Emphasis is placed on the importance of spin and orbital angular momentum (leading e.g. to applications in energy research, such as fusion with polarized nuclei) and on the operational definition of observables in nuclear physics. The end-of-chapter problems serve above all to elucidate and detail physical ideas that could not be presented in full detail in the main text. Readers are assumed to have a working knowledge of quantum mechanics and a basic grasp of both non-relativistic and relativistic kinematics; the latter in particular is a prerequisite for interpreting nuclear reactions and the connections to particle and high-energy physics.