Introduction

Abstract

The understanding of the basic constituents of nuclear matter, of how they interact and of what makes them build nuclei is still a challenging task for the scientific community. It covers a wide area of research, from nuclear spectroscopy at energies of a few MeV, to high--energy (particle) physics, utilizing particle beams with energies of a few hundreds of GeV. The link between these two extremes may be illustrated by means of the constituents of nuclei, i.e. protons and neutrons, which are called nucleons. For a detailed overview of the theoretical description of the structure of the nucleon and the quark models involved, the reader is referred to the book by Thomas and Weise 1.