It is apparent from the history of science, that few-body problems have an interdis ciplinary character. Newton, after solving the two-body problem so brilliantly, tried his hand at the Sun-Earth-Moon system. Here he failed in two respects: neither was he able to compute the motion of the moon accurately, nor did he understand the reason for that. It took a long time to understand the fundamental importance of Newton's failure, and only Poincare realised what was the fundamental difficulty in Newtons programme. Nowadays, the term deterministic chaos is associated with this problem. The deep insights of Poincare were neglected by the founding fathers of Quantum Physics. Thus history was repeated by Bohr and his students. After quantising the hydrogen atom, they soon found that the textbook case of a three-body problem in atomic physics, the 3He-atom, did not yield to the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantisation methods. Only these days do people realise what precisely were the difficulties connected to this semi classical way of treating quantum systems. Our field, as we know it today, began in principle in the early 1950's, when Watson sketched the outlines of three-body scattering theory. Mathematical rigour was achieved by Faddeev and thereafter, at the beginning of the 1960's, the quantum three-body prob lem, at least as far as short-range forces were concerned, w&s tamed. In the years that followed, through the work of others, who first applied Faddeev's methods, but later added new techniques, the three-and four-body problems became fully housebroken.

Proceedings of the XVth European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, Peniscola (Castellon), Spain, June, 5 - 9, 1995

The first Asia-Pacific Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics took place from August 23 to August 28, 1999, at the Noda campus of the Sci ence University of Tokyo in Noda-city and Sawayaka Chiba Kenmin Plaza in Kashiwa-city, a suburb of Tokyo close to the Narita-Tokyo International Air port, with the Frontier Research Center for Computation Sciences (FRCCS) of the Science University of Tokyo as the host institute. The High Energy Accel erator Research Organization (KEK), the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), the Research Center for Nuclear Physics (RCNP)-Osaka University, the Physical Society of Japan, and the Association of Asia Pacific Physical Societies (AAPPS) supported this conference. The conference was initiated in the Asia Pacific area as a counterpart to the successful European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics (APFB99), in addition to the International Few-Body Conference Series and the Few Body Gordon Conference series in North America. The Physics of Few-Body Problems covers, as is well known, systems with finite numbers of particles in contrast to many-body systems with very large numbers of particles. Therefore, it covers such wide fields as mesoscopic, atom-molecular, exotic atom, nucleon, hyperon, and quark-gluon physics, plus their applications.

It is apparent from the history of science, that few-body problems have an interdis ciplinary character. Newton, after solving the two-body problem so brilliantly, tried his hand at the Sun-Earth-Moon system. Here he failed in two respects: neither was he able to compute the motion of the moon accurately, nor did he understand the reason for that. It took a long time to understand the fundamental importance of Newton's failure, and only Poincare realised what was the fundamental difficulty in Newtons programme. Nowadays, the term deterministic chaos is associated with this problem. The deep insights of Poincare were neglected by the founding fathers of Quantum Physics. Thus history was repeated by Bohr and his students. After quantising the hydrogen atom, they soon found that the textbook case of a three-body problem in atomic physics, the 3He-atom, did not yield to the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantisation methods. Only these days do people realise what precisely were the difficulties connected to this semi classical way of treating quantum systems. Our field, as we know it today, began in principle in the early 1950's, when Watson sketched the outlines of three-body scattering theory. Mathematical rigour was achieved by Faddeev and thereafter, at the beginning of the 1960's, the quantum three-body prob lem, at least as far as short-range forces were concerned, w&s tamed. In the years that followed, through the work of others, who first applied Faddeev's methods, but later added new techniques, the three-and four-body problems became fully housebroken.

In this Supplement we have collected the invited and contributed talks pre sented at the XVIII European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, organised by the Jozef Stefan Institute and the University of Ljubljana, Slove nia. The Conference, sponsored by the European Physical Society, took place at the lakeside resort of Bled from 8 to 14 September, 2002. This meeting was a part of the series of European Few-Body Conferences, previously held in Evora/Portugal (2000), Autrans/France (1998), Peniscola/Spain (1995), ... Our aim was to emphasise, to a larger extent than at previous Conferences, the interdisciplinarity of research fields of the Few-Body community. To pro mote a richer exchange of ideas, we therefore strived to avoid parallel sessions as much as possible. On the other hand, to promote the participation of young scientists who we feel will eventually shape the future of Few-Body Physics, we wished to give almost all attendees the opportunity to speak.

The International Conference Mesons and Light Nuclei, organized by the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP), Rez, was held during July 2 - 7, 1995 in small north Bohemian town Straz pod Ralskem. It was the sixth in a series of meetings which took place previously at Liblice 74 and 81, Bechyne 85 and 88, and Prague 91. The conferences gained already their firm position among intermediate energy nuclear physics activities. International nuclear physics community strongly supported our intention to continue the series. This year's venue for the conference was the accommodation and social area of the DIAMO company at Straz. The goal of the meeting was to summarize the present situation and the future perspectives concerning the experimental investigations and theoreti cal descriptions of light nuclei and their interactions with electromagnetic and hadronic probes, mainly at intermediate energies. The scientific program of the conference included the following areas of research: nuclear physics with pions and antiprotons, T)-meson physics, baryonic systems with strangeness, relativis tic few-body dynamics, and electroweak nuclear interaction. Representatives from many international groups working within different experimental facili ties and with different theoretical methods were invited and asked to present their latest results and future research programs. The Straz conference, attended by 102 physicist from institutions in 22 countries, was sponsored by the Austrian Ministry for Science and Research, Czech Ministry for Industry and Trade, and by SKODA PRAHA a.s. Thanks to this sponsorship we could also invite several participants and students at essentially reduced cost.

Few-body physics covers a rich and wide variety of phenomena, ranging from the very lowest energy scales of atomic and molecular physics to high-energy particle physics. The papers contained in the present volume provide an apercu of recent progress in the field from both the theoretical and experimental perspectives and are based on work presented at the “22nd International Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics”. This book is geared towards academics and graduate students involved in the study of systems which present few-body characteristics and those interested in the related mathematical and computational techniques.