The Conference “Bologna 2000: Structure of the Nucleus at the Dawn of the Century” was devoted to a discipline which has seen a strong revival of research activities in the last decade. New experimental results and theoretical developments in nuclear physics will certainly make important contributions to our knowledge and understanding of Nature's fundamental building blocks.The interest aroused by the Conference among the scientific community was clearly reflected in the large number of participants. These represented the most important nuclear physics laboratories in the world.The Conference covered five major topics of modern nuclear physics: nuclear structure, nucleus-nucleus collisions, hadron dynamics, nuclear astrophysics, and transdisciplinary and peaceful applications of nuclear science. It reviewed recent progress in the field and provided a forum for the discussion of current and future research projects.

This book covers the following topics: (1) meson and hadron production by real and virtual photon interaction with nucleons and nuclei; (2) astrophysical studies via photoreactions and hadron reactions; (3) new technologies for the electromagnetic probes and detector development; (4) nuclear structure studies with electromagnetic probes; (5) fundamental symmetries with electromagnetic probes and related problems.The proceedings have been selected for coverage in:• Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings)

While electromagnetic interactions were first used to probe the structure of elementary particles more than 20 years ago, their importance has only become fully evident in the last 10 years. In the resonance region, photo production experiments have provided clear evidence for simple quark model ideas, and confirmed the Melosh-transformed SU(6)w as a relevant symmetry classification. At higher energies, their most striking feature is their similarity to hadron-induced reactions, and they have provided fresh insight into the ideas developed to explain strong-interaction physics. New dimensions are added by taking the photon off mass shell, both in the spacelike region, where the development of high-energy electron and muon beams has led to the discovery and study of scaling and the intro duction of "partons," and even more dramatically in the timelike region, where the development of high-energy electron-positron storage rings has led to the exciting discoveries of the last four years. In view of the immense interest stimulated by these developments, an extensive review of our present state of knowledge is both timely and useful. Because of the very wide range of the subject, a cooperative venture presents itself as the most suitable format and is the one we have adopted here. The emphasis throughout is primarily, but not entirely, on phenomenology, concentrating on describing the main features of the experimental data and on the theoretical ideas used directly in their inter pretation.

In recent years, the main research areas were photonuclear reactions and meson productions by using the first high-duty tagged photon beam and the TAGX spectrometer. Although this field is developing quite rapidly, the synchrotron was closed in 1999 after 37 years of operation, and these activities continue at new facilities. It was therfore a good time to discuss the present status and future directions of this field at this occasion. The Symposium was attended by 85 physicists and 35 talks were presented. This book contains the papers presented in the scientific program of the Symposium. aspects of kaon photoproduc