Dear Friends, It seems like it was only yesterday that we drove the last of you to the airport. The memories and the spirit of the Scientific Detectors for Astronomy Workshop (SDW2002) remain fresh and strong. For us, this was a very special event, a great gathering of what may be one of the friendliest and most cooperative technical communities on our little planet. We have tried to capture the spirit of the Workshop in these Proceedings and we hope you are able to relive your week in Hawaii. For those readers who did not attend, we invite you into this community. As you probably noticed, there is a new name on the cover: Jenna Beletic was the ace up our sleeve for these Proceedings. As a summer intern at Keck, she took up the task of organizing, proofreading, editing and formatting the papers. She also made the graphics (her artistic talents shine on pages xxxiii and xxxv), contacted authors and prepared the mountain of paperwork which goes with producing a book. Jenna’s enthusiasm at learning, her passion for the job and creativity (e. g. find 100 ways to get Paola and Jim to do their jobs) have been a motivating addition to our team of “old workshop foxes”...... and a source for a good deal of paternal pride. We are honoured to have her as a fellow editor.

This book features up-to-date technology applications to radiation detection. It synthesises several techniques of and approaches to radiation detection, covering a wide range of applications and addressing a large audience of experts and students.Many of the talks are in fact reviews of particular topics often not covered in standard books and other conferences, for instance, the medical physics section. To present these medical physics talks is crucial, since a large fraction of the community in medical physics are from the particle physics community. The same feature is true for astroparticle and space physics, which are relatively new fields.This book is unique in its scope. Except for IEEE, there is no other conference in the world that presents such a wide coverage of advanced technology applied to particle physics. However, unlike IEEE, more room is made in the book for reviews and general talks.

The exploration of the subnuclear world is done through increasingly complex experiments covering a wide range of energy and performed in a large variety of environments ranging from particle accelerators, underground detectors to satellites and the space laboratory. Among recent advances one has to indicate, for instance, first results obtained from space and LHC experiments and progress done in preparation of the latter experiments upgrades, including plans for the LHC machine upgrade. The achievement of these research programs calls for novel techniques, new materials and instrumentation to be used in detectors, often of large scale. Therefore, fundamental physics is at the forefront of technological advance and also leads to many applications. Among these, medical applications have a particular importance due to health and social benefits they bring to the public.

This conference will be of interest to researchers in theoretical and experimental particle and nuclear physics. The proceedings describe recent progress at understanding the structure and interactions of nuclei, and of their building blocks, protons, neutrons, together with mesons. The papers cover the latest experimental and theoretical developments in the field, and identify the opportunities for future directions. Finally, the use of nuclei as a theatre in which to probe the Standard Model of Particle Physics is explored.