Preface

We are pleased to present the continuation of the series Lecture Notes in Physics emerging from the Euroschool on Exotic Beams. This school, initiated in Leuven (Belgium) in 1993, has been running every year (with one exception in 1999). Based on lectures given at the Euroschool, the Lecture Notes provide an introduction for graduate students and young researchers to novel and exciting fields of physics with radioactive ion beams and their applications. The fourth volume in this series covers selected material presented in Euroschool lectures between 2007 and 2011. Since the late 80s, the field of radioactive ion beams has been rapidly developing and substantially expanding. While many of its roots were founded in Europe, and also leadership of the field was for many years concentrated in Europe, there are meanwhile intense efforts worldwide to build and exploit dedicated secondgeneration radioactive beam facilities. The exciting physics of radioactive ions is mainly linked to the study of nuclear structure under extreme conditions of isospin, mass, spin and temperature. Radioactive ion beam science addresses problems in nuclear astrophysics, solid-state physics and fundamental interactions. Furthermore, important applications and spin-offs also originate from this basic research. The development of new production, acceleration and ion manipulation techniques and the construction of new detectors is also an important part of this science. A major aim is the development of a unified picture of the atomic nucleus, to understand the structure and dynamics of nuclei and to provide reliable predictions of nuclear structure properties within the “Terra Incognita”, the regions in the nuclear chart which cannot be explored with present experimental techniques. As with previous volumes, the present Lecture Notes do not comprise a complete overview of the field, but represent sample topics of theory and experiment. Since the appearance of the latest volume in 2009, and already before, many new subjects were covered in the lectures, and some of them are presented here. The topics have been selected by the editors to exhibit recent advances in the field and to complement previous Lecture Notes. None of them has been covered in previous volumes, all represent an active field of current research, and all authors are well known experts in their domains and are highly respected scientists. Their contributions to this book are not meant to be review-type articles rather they provide a