The Summer Institute on High Energy Physics was the second of this kind organized at Louvain. Four years ago we had already decided to organize a Summer Institute. The first one was con ceived in 1970, at Kiev, by D. Speiser, J. Weyers, and G. Zweig, and thanks to a NATO grant took place from August 20th to Septem ber 15th 1971, at Louvain in the Groot Begijnhof. All lectures were directed toward one subject: duality. The lecturers were R. Brout (ULB - Bruxelles), D. Fairlie (University of Durham), F. Gilman (SLAC - Stanford), D. Horn (University of Tel Aviv), J. Mandula (Caltech - Pasadena), C. Michael (CERN - Geneva), J. Rosner (University of Minnesota), C. Schmidt (CERN - Geneva), J. Veneziano (The Weizmann Institute), J. Weyers (UCL - Louvain and CERN - Geneva), and G. Zweig (Caltech - Pasadena). The direc tion was in the hands of F. Cerulus (KUL - Louvain), R. Rodenberg (Technische Hochschule, Aachen), D. Speiser (UCL - Louvain), and J. Weyers (CERN - Geneva). Unfortunately it was not possible to publish the lecture notes for that Institute. The second Summer Institute on Elementary Particle Physics took place from August 12th to August 25th 1973, again in Louvain. It was initiated in Chicago, in 1972, by F. Halzen (University of Wisconsin) and J. Weyers (UCL - Louvain and CERN - Geneva). Lecturers included R. Carlitz (University of Chicago), F. Gilman (SLAC - Stanford), F. Halzen (University of Wisconsin), D.

The handbook centers on detection techniques in the field of particle physics, medical imaging and related subjects. It is structured into three parts. The first one is dealing with basic ideas of particle detectors, followed by applications of these devices in high energy physics and other fields. In the last part the large field of medical imaging using similar detection techniques is described. The different chapters of the book are written by world experts in their field. Clear instructions on the detection techniques and principles in terms of relevant operation parameters for scientists and graduate students are given.Detailed tables and diagrams will make this a very useful handbook for the application of these techniques in many different fields like physics, medicine, biology and other areas of natural science.

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.