Electromagnetic Processes and Interactions

Abstract

The electron, the muon, and their neutrinos are important tools in testing the structure of the fundamental electromagnetic and weak interactions. On the other hand, if these interactions are known, they serve as ideal probes for the internal structure of complex hadronic targets such as nucleons and nuclei. Although electroweak interactions should in fact be discussed as a whole and on the same footing, purely electromagnetic interactions play a distinctive role, for obvious experimental reasons: At low and intermediate energies the effective electromagnetic coupling is larger by many orders of magnitude than the weak couplings, so that electromagnetic processes are measurable to much higher accuracy than purely weak processes.