This proceedings volume collected papers presented at a recent symposium on Chiral Symmetry in Hadrons and Nuclei — the seventh in a series of international symposia — with an aim of providing a platform for discussions among the experts and an overview of the present status in the hadron and nuclear physics related to the chiral symmetry.The recent past years have seen a remarkable progress towards a unified description of nonperturbative strong interaction phenomena based on the fundamental theory of the strong interaction, Quantum ChromoDynamics, and Effective Field Theories. The topics discussed in these proceedings include: chiral and heavy-quark spin symmetry; chiral dynamics of few-body hadron systems; chiral symmetry and hadrons in a nuclear medium; chiral dynamics in nucleon-nucleon interaction and atomic nuclei; chiral symmetry in rotating nuclei; hadron structure and interactions; exotic hadrons, heavy flavor hadrons and nuclei; mesonic atoms and nuclei.

This proceedings volume collected papers presented at a recent symposium on Chiral Symmetry in Hadrons and Nuclei -- the seventh in a series of international symposia -- with an aim of providing a platform for discussions among the experts and an overview of the present status in the hadron and nuclear physics related to the chiral symmetry. The recent past years have seen a remarkable progress towards a unified description of nonperturbative strong interaction phenomena based on the fundamental theory of the strong interaction, Quantum ChromoDynamics, and Effective Field Theories. The topics discussed in these proceedings include: chiral and heavy-quark spin symmetry; chiral dynamics of few-body hadron systems; chiral symmetry and hadrons in a nuclear medium; chiral dynamics in nucleon-nucleon interaction and atomic nuclei; chiral symmetry in rotating nuclei; hadron structure and interactions; exotic hadrons, heavy flavor hadrons and nuclei; mesonic atoms and nuclei.

Chiral symmetry, a basic symmetry of the strong interaction and thus of QCD, plays a major role in low energy hadron physics. This workshop highlighted its importance for the understanding of hadron properties, hadron matter and recent precise lattice and experimental results. Besides, heavy quark physics was also addressed.

This volume presents topics in which researchers in elementary particle and nuclear physics are commonly interested: nonperturbative aspects of QCD and chiral properties of hadrons, relativistic heavy ion reactions and quark-gluon plasma, nuclear matter at high temperature/ density, lattice QCD, quark structure of hadrons and nuclei, high q2 phenomena in hadrons and nuclei, heavy quarks and weak interaction, hyperon interactions and hypernuclei, relativistic nuclear theory, recent experimentals and other topics.Speakers: A A Andrianov, H Ejiri, V N Fetisov, Y Iwasaki, C Ciofi Degli Atti, V G Kadyshevsky, D I Kazakov, R Brockmann, A P Kobushkin, C M Ko, T Humanic, S H Lee, T Matsui, Y Mizuno, Y M Musakhanov, T Morü, M Namiki, S Saito, T-A Shibata, T Suzuki, A I Titov, G M Vagradov, M K Volkov, M Oka, A V Shebeko, S N Yang, G M Zinovjev, etc.

This volume collects papers presented at the international workshop “Hadron-Nuclear Physics 09” held at Osaka, November 16-19, 2009. The series of this workshop has provided opportunities to discuss common interests of hadron and nuclear physics.Hadrons and nuclei show up different layers of phenomena governed by the same dynamics dictated by the fundamental law of the strong interaction, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). The basic building blocks of matter, quarks and gluons, are confined in hadrons, generating their masses dynamically and breaking chiral symmetry spontaneously. The latter is the origin of the presence of the pion which governs the essential part of the nuclear interaction. Therefore, the common key words are chiral symmetry and pions.This volume contains reports of current achievements in hadron physics including exotic multiquark states, meson production reactions and non-linear dynamics of hadrons, and those in nuclear physics clustering phenomena, exotic neutron rich nuclei and the pions in nuclei. As related subjects, applications to astronuclear physics, including accelerator physics and laser physics are also discussed comprehensively.