Proceedings of the Symposium on hadron spectroscopy. Keszthely, 6-11. Sept. 1968. (Budapest, 1969)

Analyticity, regge poles and conspiracy

HADRON SPECTROSCOPY In the jungle of particles and resonances the great break-through started with the discovery of the Eightfold Way. The zoological systematization of hadrons was made possible with the help of the compact groups SU(3) and SU(6). This first success made the theoreticians conceited. We started thinking in terms of quarks, and in our mind we followed the classical trail of atomic physics: we wanted to understand the hadrons as molecule-like composite systems. (See e.g. the Proceedings of our last Balaton meeting, Balatonvilágos, 1966, Acta Physica Hungarica Yol. 22). But the hopes turned out to be prema­ture. The hadronic jungle is more entangled. Real progress was made possible only by more sophisticated methods, which grew out of the compact description. The union of the SU(6) with the Lorentz group led us to non-compact algebras. The interplay of the analytic Regge description and the Lorentz symmetry resulted in a conspiracy of poles; thus, we arrived also from another direction at the infinite representations of non-compact algebras. Trying to build up a relativistic quark theory, express­ing the higher symmetries in terms of local currents we got a coupled system of current commutators. This current algebraic approach enabled us to under­stand quite a number of relations among the different measurable properties of hadronic matter. Thus, we have learned that it is not possible to understand a single resonance or a single decay mode in itself, but only the complex system of all the hadronic energy levels, the correlated transitions among them, offer us an insight into the fundamental nature of hadronic matter. The increasing importance of this hadron spectroscopy suggested to us the organization of a symposium on this subject. In the series of Balaton meetings of the Hungarian Physical Society this conference was held in the small town of Keszthely, at the west end of the Lake, about 150 km from Vienna. The Symposium on Hadron Spectroscopy joined with the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Vienna. This provided an excellent opportunity for theoreticians coming from overseas to meet young physicists from Europe. Most of the review talks and short reports are included in this volume of the Acta Physica Hungarica. The Organizing Committee is highly indebted to all the speakers for the rapid preparation of manuscripts, to the Hungarian Physical Society and to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for their financial support, and to the Editor-in-Chief of the Acta Physica for publishing these Proceedings. G. Marx 1*

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