Refereed and selected contributions from International Conference on Quark Nuclear Physics, QNP 2002

The International Conference on Quark Nuclear Physics 2002 (QNP2002) was held in the Forschungszentrum Jiilich from June 9 to 14, 2002. It was organized by the Institute of Nuclear Physics (IKP) at the Forschungszentrum Jiilich, together with the Universities of Bonn und Mainz. This meeting takes place every two years, and was the successor to QNP2000 which was held in Adelaide. QNP2002 brought together about 200 scientists from 25 countries who met for their scientific work in the Forschungszentrum, but spent their free time in the medieval city of Aachen, the former capital of Charles the Great. The particular feature of this conference is that it provides a comprehensive overview of the at­ tempts in understanding hadrons and nuclei, including dense matter, in terms of their fundamental constituents, the quarks and the gluons. One of the basic themes of the program was that fact that we do have an underlying theory of strongly interacting particles, namely the QCD. For that rea­ son, the experimental topics covered during the meeting ranged from precision measurements with hadronic and electromagnetic probes to ultra-relativistic heavy-ion reactions. Correspondingly, the theoretical topics spanned an equally wide range, including perturbative and lattice QCD calcu­ lations as well as effective theories and QCD motivated quark models. In the morning sessions invited reviews were given. In the afternoon twelve topical parallel sessions, directed by conveners, summarized the newest research results.

This volume contains the refereed and selected contributions from the International Conference on Quark Nuclear Physics (QNP2002), held from 9 to 14 June 2002 in Jülich, Germany.

It covered the following topics:

- Structure and Spectroscopy of Hadrons

- QCD-Inspired Quark Models of Hadrons and Nuclei

- Effective Theories

- Lattice Gauge Theories

- Soft and Hard Hadronic Processes

- Soft and Hard Electroweak Processes

- Medium Modifications of Hadrons

- Matter Under Extreme Conditions and Quark-Gluon Plasma

- Heavy-Quark Physics