Contemporary Topics in Medium Energy Physics

The primary objective of the book on "Contemporary Topics in Medium Energy Physics" is to help the reader in exploring important frontier research, as of the year of 1992, in the area of medium energy physics. The book is the result of the multi-pronged efforts by the authors who were invited to speak at the Second German Chinese Symposium on "Medium Energy Physics" (September 7-10, 1992, Bochum, Germany). The premise of the meeting is to investigate primarily how quantum chromo dynamics (QCD), the candidate theory of strong interactions, manifests itself in high energy and nuclear physics. This book is divided into four parts: (i) field-theoretic treatments in QCD; (ii) effective chirally symmetric models and QCD; (iii) electroweak physics in general; and (iv) topological solutions. The focus is more on exposition of new ideas, rather than a comprehensive review of the current status, concerning these subjects, as of the year of 1992. As there are many distinctly different research areas in contemporary intermediate energy physics, we could only choose a few topics of current interest, especially those which are related, directly or indirectly, to the structural studies of the nucleon (proton or neutron). Fortunately, there are in recent years merging trends in these studies: There is a call for an alternative, and more efficient, method to handle problems related to strong interactions (as described by QCD). This is the focus of the papers included in Part I.