This volume contains the invited and contributed papers presented at the Fourth International Conference on Perspectives in Hadronic Physics and sent to the Editors within the deadline. The Conference was held at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy, from May 12th to 16th, 2003, and was attended by about 100 scientists from 20 countries. The series ofConferences on Perspectives on Hadronic Physics takes place every two years since 1997 and follows the seven Workshops on Perspectives in Nuclear Physics at Intermediate Energies, organized every two years at ICTP since 1983. The aim of these Conferences is to discuss the status-of-the-art concerning the experimental and theoretical investigations of hadronic systems, from nucleons to nuclei and dense nuclear matter, in terms of the relevant underlying degrees of freedom. For such a reason the Fourth Conference has been focused on those experimental and theoretical topics which have been in the last few years the object of intensive investigations, viz. the various approaches employed to describe the structure of hadrons in terms of QCD and QCD inspired models, the recent developments in the treatment of the properties and propagations of hadronic states in the medium, the relevant progress done in the solution of the few- and many- hadron problems, the recent results in the experimental investigation of dense hadronic matter and, last but not least, the physics programs of existing Laboratories and the suggested projects for new Facilities.

This volume collects the papers given at the European Workshop "Theoretical and Experimental Investigations of Hadronic Few-Body Systems" which, adhering to an invitation of the European Few-Body Physics Research Committee, was organized in Rome on October 7-11, 1986. All papers presented at the workshop appear in the volume, plus two papers which could not be presented orally because their authors were at the last moment unable to attend. The list of contents closely follows the programme of the workshop. The workshop, attended by 128 American, European, and Japanese physicists from 60 different institutions and universities, was sponsored by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (lNFN) and was organized by the INFN Section located at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita (ISS), which kindly provided the venue for the meeting and many related facilities. The goal of the workshop was to summarize the present situa tion and the future perspectives concerning the theoretical descriptions of strongly interacting few-body systems and their experimental investigation by electromagnetic and hadronic probes, mainly at intermediate energies. To this end, representatives from most international groups working within different theoretical methods and with different experimental facilities, were invited and asked to illustrate their latest results and future research programs; the intention was to provide, by this way, an impartial and broad information which could be useful to whom is actively working in few body physics, as well as to young students entering this field of research."

The Thirteenth European Conference on Few-Body Problems in Phys- ics (European Few-Body Problems XIII) was held at the Elba Internation- al Physics Centre (EIPC) in Marciana Marina, Isola d'Elba, Italy, during September 9-14, 1991. The previous Conferences of the series, promoted by the European Few-Body Physics Research Committee, took place in Budapest (1972), Graz (1973), Tiibingen (1975), Vlieland (1976), Uppsala (1977), Dubna (1979), Sesimbra (1980), Ferrara (1981), Tbilisi (1984), Bala- tonfiired (1985), Fontevraud (1987), and Uzhgorod (1990). The European Few-Body Conferences represent a relevant opportunity for European scientists interested in few-body problems, of summarizing and updating, together with colleagues from countries all over the world, the status of art in this field of research, which ranges from the study of atomic and molecular structure, to nuclear and particle physics. The suc- cess of this series of Conferences, which also represent a bridge between the triennial IUPAP International Conferences on Few-Body Problems in Physics, testifies the relevance reached by few-body physics in various fields and the important theoretical and experimental contributions pro- vided by the European few-body community.