The topics covered in the conference ranged from the physics that can be done with polarized beams of particles (protons, electrons, gamma-rays, etc.) to the techniques and instrumentation necessary to achieve this. Topics included: nucleon structure measurements (from where does the spin of the proton and neutron come), the acceleration, storage and polarization of particle beams and the polarized targets and sources necessary for mounting the experiments.

With ever increasing computational resources and improvements in algorithms, new opportunities are emerging for lattice gauge theory to address key questions in strongly interacting systems, such as nuclear matter. Calculations today use dynamical gauge-field ensembles with degenerate light up/down quarks and the strange quark and it is possible now to consider including charm-quark degrees of freedom in the QCD vacuum. Pion masses and other sources of systematic error, such as finite-volume and discretization effects, are beginning to be quantified systematically. Altogether, an era of precision calculation has begun and many new observables will be calculated at the new computational facilities. The aim of this set of lectures is to provide graduate students with a grounding in the application of lattice gauge theory methods to strongly interacting systems and in particular to nuclear physics. A wide variety of topics are covered, including continuum field theory, lattice discretizations, hadron spectroscopy and structure, many-body systems, together with more topical lectures in nuclear physics aimed a providing a broad phenomenological background. Exercises to encourage hands-on experience with parallel computing and data analysis are included.

From its early beginnings at SLAC in the 1970's, the study of nucleon spin structure using polarized lepton beams and polarized nucleon targets has become increasingly important in nuclear and particle physics, with current experiments at several of the world's high energy and nuclear physics laboratories (CERN, DESY, SLAC and Jefferson Lab) and with enormous related theoretical studies. The understanding of the fascinating but complicated problem of nucleon spin structure has progressed substantially, but fundamental questions remain and it can be confidently predicted that future activity will be high.The Erice Course on The Spin Structure of the Nucleon covered both the experimental and theoretical aspects of the subject, and this volume includes the lectures given at the School. In many cases the lecture material has been extended and updated by the authors. In addition, several recent publications on experimental work have been added in an appendix.

The topic of the internal spin structure of the nucleon has become an unusually active subfield of particle and nuclear physics, together with the relevant technologies. This volume presents up-to-date coverage.All the talks given at the symposium can be found in the volume. In addition, selected articles are reprinted, including two early papers which record initial thinking about the topic, all experimental papers giving data on nucleon spin structure functions determined from polarized lepton-nucleon scattering, and two valuable previously unpublished papers.

The QNP series of international conferences on Quarks and Nuclear Physics is by now a well established and highly respected forum where the most recent developments in the field are discussed and communicated. QNP 2006 is the forth edition of this biennial meeting. Selected and refereed original contributions of QNP 2006 have been published in The European Physical Journal A - Hadrons and Nuclei (EPJ A), while the present proceedings book, in addition to reprinting the articles published in EPJ A, further includes all other contributions selected and accepted by the organizing committee for publication and archiving.

The four articles of the present volume address very different topics in nuclear physics and, indeed, encompass experiments at very different kinds of exp- imental facilities. The range of interest of the articles extends from the nature of the substructure of the nucleon and the deuteron to the general properties of the nucleus, including its phase transitions and its rich and unexpected quantal properties. The first article by Fillipone and Ji reviews the present experimental and theoretical situation pertaining to our knowledge of the origin of the spin of the nucleon. Until about 20 years ago the half-integral spin of the neutron and p- ton was regarded as their intrinsic property as Dirac particles which were the basic building blocks of atomic nuclei. Then, with the advent of the Standard Model and of quarks as the basic building blocks, the substructure of the - cleon became the subject of intense interest. Initial nonrelativistic quark m- els assigned the origin of nucleon spin to the fundamental half-integral spin of its three constituent quarks, leaving no room for contributions to the spin from the gluons associated with the interacting quarks or from the orbital angular momentum of either gluons or quarks. That naive understanding was shaken, about fifteen years ago, by experiments involving deep-inelastic scattering of electrons or muons from nucleons.

This first open access volume of the handbook series contains articles on the standard model of particle physics, both from the theoretical and experimental perspective. It also covers related topics, such as heavy-ion physics, neutrino physics and searches for new physics beyond the standard model. A joint CERN-Springer initiative, the "Particle Physics Reference Library" provides revised and updated contributions based on previously published material in the well-known Landolt-Boernstein series on particle physics, accelerators and detectors (volumes 21A, B1,B2,C), which took stock of the field approximately one decade ago. Central to this new initiative is publication under full open access