Nucleon Structure Proceedings

Recent experimental investigations of deep inelastic scattering, baryon form factors and high momentum transfer nuclear reactions have revealed many unexpected phenomena that suggest deep relationships between nucleon structure, hadronic spectroscopy and quantum chromodynamics. The proceedings of this summer school will help young researchers understand these topics and appreciate the importance of existing and expected data.This volume is the first of a series on the summer schools and workshops at the Institute for Nuclear Theory, which was opened at the University of Washington following the recommendation of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee. The formation of this national institute was a response by the nuclear physics comunity to the shortage of nuclear theorists vis-a-vis experimentalists.

The conference NSTAR 2000 was part of a series of conferences and workshops that began in New York in 1988. Since then, the field of excited nucleons and hadron structure has developed enormously, and the scope has broadened. Most significantly, new experimental facilities have come into operation, allowing precise measurements of resonance couplings and transition form factors. The search for ?missing? quark model states and gluonic excitations in complex hadronic channels is now possible.On the theory side, new and promising developments have emerged: quark models with meson degrees of freedom, hybrid baryon models, and studies of baryons in the limit of many colors. For the first time, lattice QCD has been employed to calculate masses of excited nucleons. Nucleon resonances are now recognized as providing significant contributions to the nucleon spin sum rules, as well as the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn and Bjorken integrals, at finite momentum transfer.

The topic of the internal spin structure of the nucleon has become an unusually active subfield of particle and nuclear physics, together with the relevant technologies. This volume presents up-to-date coverage.All the talks given at the symposium can be found in the volume. In addition, selected articles are reprinted, including two early papers which record initial thinking about the topic, all experimental papers giving data on nucleon spin structure functions determined from polarized lepton-nucleon scattering, and two valuable previously unpublished papers.

After about three decades of experimental and theoretical efforts, the structure of the nucleon (proton and neutron) is now fairly well understood based on quantum chromodynamics, but only if averaged over its spin. As the recent “proton spin crisis” revealed, we do not understand much about the nucleon structure when its spin is polarized to a specific orientation. We expect that our understanding on this challenging problem will soon be significantly improved by the RHIC-Spin and other experiments in the near future, as well as by the lattice- and perturbative-QCD theoretical calculations. The purpose of this symposium was to summarize the current understanding and discuss the future perspective of this problem with experimental and theoretical physicists from both high-energy and nuclear physics communities.The symposium covered the overview of the structure studies, updates on the experimental results from CERN, SLAC, DESY, FNAL, and KEK, future experiments at RHIC, and recent theoretical developments (18 presentations, 113 participants).