Few Particle Problems in the Nuclear Interaction emerged from the International Conference on Few Particle Problems in the Nuclear Interaction held in Los Angeles, from August 28-September 1, 1972. The aim of the conference was to discuss recent developments in low and medium energy few-particle problems. This included the fields of the nuclear three-body problem; nuclear forces (in particular, three-body forces); symmetries; and the interaction of mesons, leptons, and photons with few-nucleon systems. Special sessions were also devoted to the application of the results and techniques of the few-particle research to the problems of other fields, in particular nuclear structure and astrophysics. The conference was organized into nine plenary sessions and 13 parallel sessions. This volume contains 184 papers presented during the nine sessions on the following topics: the nucleon-nucleon interaction; three-body forces; hypernuclear systems; symmetries; three-body problems; multiparticle reactions; proposed studies of few-nucleon systems with meson factories; few-nucleon systems and leptons, mesons, and photons; and applications.

Dramatic progress has been made in all branches of physics since the National Research Council's 1986 decadal survey of the field. The Physics in a New Era series explores these advances and looks ahead to future goals. The series includes assessments of the major subfields and reports on several smaller subfields, and preparation has begun on an overview volume on the unity of physics, its relationships to other fields, and its contributions to national needs. Nuclear Physics is the latest volume of the series. The book describes current activity in understanding nuclear structure and symmetries, the behavior of matter at extreme densities, the role of nuclear physics in astrophysics and cosmology, and the instrumentation and facilities used by the field. It makes recommendations on the resources needed for experimental and theoretical advances in the coming decade.

I have been teaching courses on experimental techniques in nuclear and particle physics to master students in physics and in engineering for many years. This book grew out of the lecture notes I made for these students. The physics and engineering students have rather different expectations of what such a course should be like. I hope that I have nevertheless managed to write a book that can satisfy the needs of these different target audiences. The lectures themselves, of course, need to be adapted to the needs of each group of students. An engineering student will not qu- tion a statement like “the velocity of the electrons in atoms is ?1% of the velocity of light”, a physics student will. Regarding units, I have written factors h and c explicitly in all equations throughout the book. For physics students it would be preferable to use the convention that is common in physics and omit these constants in the equations, but that would probably be confusing for the engineering students. Physics students tend to be more interested in theoretical physics courses. However, physics is an experimental science and physics students should und- stand how experiments work, and be able to make experiments work. This is an open access book.