This volume outlines the exciting new opportunities in hadron physics which have been created by the Japan Hadron Facility (JHF), a major joint initiative between High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI). The topics covered include unprecedented possibilities of studying strange matter, neutrino oscillations and hadron structure. The close interaction with lattice QCD is emphasised.

This volume outlines the exciting new opportunities in hadron physics which have been created by the Japan Hadron Facility (JHF), a major joint initiative between KEK and JAERI. The topics covered include unprecedented possibilities of studying strange matter, neutrino oscillations and hadron structure. The close interaction with lattice QCD is emphasised.

This volume discusses the exciting physics with new accelerator facilities, which are being constructed or proposed in various places. The facilities are RHIC (Brookhaven), CEBAF (TJINP), SPring-8 (Nishi-Harima), RIBF (RIKEN), JHP (KEK-INS), RIB (MSU), LISS (IUCF) and COSY (Juelich). RHIC aims at the creation of a QCD deconfinement phase and the study of the properties of such matter. CEBAF and SPring-8 use leptons to probe the quark-gluon structures of hadrons and nuclei. LISS and COSY use high resolution hadron beams to study hadron structures. JHP produces strong secondary hadron beams for hyper-nuclear physics and rare decay studies of basic symmetries. RIBF and RIB produce radioactive nuclear beams for the study of the nuclear structure of unstable nuclei far from beta stability, and astrophysics issues.

The unique role of strangeness in nuclear physics has recently attracted much attention, from both the theoretical and experimental viewpoints. This is due not only to the broad spectrum of possible hadron many-body systems with strangeness, but also to the fact that strangeness gives us an opportunity to study fundamental baryon-baryon interactions in a new perspective. Our knowledge of this subject has widened as the scope of hypernuclear experiments has expanded from strangeness exchange and the associated production reactions to hypernuclear weak decays, β decays, cascade hypernuclei, double-Λ events, electroproduction of strangeness, etc. This trend will be accelerated by the full operation of new laboratories such as TJLab, COSY, DAΦNE, JHF, MAMI, and others. Various aspects of those important and exciting topics are discussed in this book in order to get a perspective of this fast developing area of nuclear physics.

This proceedings volume discusses recent developments in the physics of strongly interacting systems, with emphasis on matter under extreme conditions that are possibly encountered in astrophysical phenomena and relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

This comprehensive volume covers the most recent advances in the field of spin physics, including the latest research in high energy and nuclear physics and the study of nuclear spin structure. The comprehensive coverage also includes polarized proton and electron acceleration and storage as well as polarized ion sources and targets. Many significant new results and achievements on the different topics considered at the symposium are presented in this book for the first time.