Preface
This summer's Mini-Workshop on Quark Dynamics has been another in the traditional series of meetings held at Bled, in the inspiring atmosphere of Villa Ple-melj. The Workshop, virtually free of the time constraints imposed on speakers at large-scale venues, has retained the spirit of "friendly confrontation" among physicists working on closely related problems in hadronic physics. With respect to the previous Workshops, the emphasis has shifted from the structure of hadrons to the dynamics of their production and detection, and a colorful set of topics has been covered.
The relativistic approach has been advanced one step further, using the spectator approximation and the point form. Yet, a few "naughty" electro-magnetic and mesonic decays of baryons remain to be open problems. To see, or not to see a pentaquark was an unbalanced issue with prevailing arguments against the sightings. On the other hand, the tetraquark proponents were optimistic about the conclusion that the DD* state is probably bound. The Roper resonance has been observed in lattice QCD. Production of pions was shown to be a three-body problem sensitive to spin-orbit and tensor forces. Does the strong coupling change over time? Maybe a laser can tell. High energies, high temperatures, high densities, the chiral phase transition, and quark stars still excite our phantasy. Can effective interactions be parameterized directly by Feynman graphs? What is the role of the gluon condensate?
These Proceedings represent a succinct record of the broad range of issues discussed at the Workshop.
Ljubljana, November 2004
M. Rosina B. Colli S. Sirca