The proceedings blend current and future two-photon physics. Developments since the last Photon-Photon Workshop four years ago are summarized, and the future of the field is projected, not only at existing accelerators, but also at heavy-ion colliders B-factories, and especially linear colliders with back-scattered laser beams.

Two-photon physics, i.e. photon-photon collisions in electron-positron colliders, a relatively new field in elementary particle physics, has become very popular in the last 20 years. Many experiments have been performed in this field, and the theoretical implications (in particular in quantum chromodynamics) have been studied in much detail. Nine international workshops devoted to two-photon physics have taken place between 1973 and 1992.This meeting was particularly timely, since a new generation of electron-positron colliders is presently being built or planned. These colliders will involve a large spectrum of beam energies, but their common characteristics should be a high particle flux (luminosity). This should allow for measuring many new phenomena as well as for studying known processes with much higher precision than before. Particularly promising is the prospect of building a dedicated high-energy photon collider; this should become possible using a laser technique allowing for the “conversion” of a linear electron beam into a photon beam.Over 60 physicists (both experimentalists and theorists), mainly from European countries (France, Britain, Italy, Germany, Russia, as well as Sweden and Switzerland), discussed these new possibilities at the above meeting. Over 30 talks were presented and many extended debates took place.

In this volume, the structure and reactions of radioactive nuclei are described. The relevance of halo nuclei to nuclear astrophysics is stressed in different contributions. Other topics included are: three-body aspects of light neutron-rich nuclei, elastic scattering, charge exchange and Coulomb excitation, fragment moment distribution, mass at half-life measurement and electromagnetism-induced fission.

The first precision measurements on CP violation in the B system are reported. Both the BELLE and the BABAR collaboration presented, among others, results for sin 2ß with much improved accuracy. Results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, SNO, also deserve to be mentioned. The convincing evidence of solar neutrino oscillations had been presented by SNO prior to the conference; a full presentation was given at the conference. An incredibly precise measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon is reported, a fresh result from the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Apart from these distinct physics highlights, there are also the first results from the new Tevatron run and from the relativistic heavy ion collider RHIC. Theorists write of our ever better understanding of the Standard Model and of what might lie beyond. Risky as it is to highlight only a couple of exciting subjects, it is merely meantto whet the appetite for further reading.