The NATO Advanced Study Institute on Physios of St~ong Fields was held at Maratea/Italy from 1-14 June, 1986. The school was devoted to the advances, theoretical and experimental, in physics of strong fields made during the past five years. The topic of the first week was almost exclusively quantum electrodynamics, with dis cussions of symmetry breaking in the ground state, of the physics of strong fields in heavy ion collisions and of precision tests of perturba tive quantum electrodynamics. The famous positron lines found at GSI (Darmstadt) and the related question "new particle versus vacuum decay" - (yes or no or both) - constituted the center of experimental advances. This was followed in the second week by the presentation of a broad range of other areas where strong fields occur, reaching from nuclear physics over quantum chromodynamics to gravitation theory and astrophysics. We were fortunate to be able to calIon a body of lecturers who not only made considerable personal contributions to this research but who are also noted for their lecturing skills. Their enthusiasm and dedication for their work was readily transmitted to the students resulting in a very suc cessful school.

Inhalt

Strong Fields in Perspective.- Status of Precision QED in Light and Heavy Atoms.- The Many Facets of the Dirac Vacuum.- Are the Positron Peaks Caused by Internal Electron-Positron Pair Conversion ?.- Atomic Clock Phenomena in Collisions of Very Heavy Ions.- Narrow Correlated Positron-Electron Peaks from Superheavy Collision Systems.- Investigation of Positron Line Emission in Heavy Ion Collisions with the EPOS-Spectrometer.- Special Aspects of the EPOS Experiments on Positron Emission from Superheavy Collision Systems.- Spectroscopy of Positrons from Heavy Ion-Atom Collisions.- Positron Emission from Subcritical Systems.- The Consequences of Sudden Rearrangements of Electronic Shells.- Are the GSI Events Caused by Particle Decay ?.- On the Possibility of New Particle Production in Heavy-Ion Collisions.- Quasiatomic Spectroscopy as a Tool for Deep Inelastic Collisions.- Positrons and Electrons Emitted in Elastic and Dissipative Heavy Ion Collisions.- Do Nucleons Dissolve in Giant Nuclei ?.- Vacuum Vibrations.- Quantum Mechanical Treatment of Heavy-Ion Collisions.- Nuclear Contact Times in Dissipative Heavy Ion Collisions Measured via S-Ray Spectroscopy.- Positron-Electron Angular Correlations in Heavy Ion Collisions.- Exotic Nuclear Structure and Decays: New Nuclear Collective Phenomena.- Ionisation and Tunneling in a Strong Electric Field.- Quantum Mechanical Theory of Positron Production in Heavy Ion Collisions with Nuclear Contact.- Study of the Consequences of Hypothesized Potential Pockets Using Simple Models.- Theories of Heavy-Ion Interaction Potentials for Giant Dinuclear Systems.- Future Aspects of Positron Spectroscopy.- Interference Effects in Quasimolecular Radiation and a Clock for Heavy Ion Nuclear Reactions.- Relativistic Density Functional Theory.- Nonperturbative Radiative and Bound-State quations for Strong Quantumelectrodynamics.- Magnetic Resonances and the Positron Peak in Heavy-Ion Collisions.- Atomic Processes in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions.- ?- and ?-Pair Production from Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions.- Experiments on Few-Electron Very High-Z Ions.- A Novel Approach to Lamb Shift Measurements in High Z Hydrogenic Ions.- Symmetry Violation in Atoms.- Atomic Physics and the Dimensionality of Space.- An Introduction to Skyrmions as Applied in Nuclear Physics.- The Baryon-Baryon Interaction and the Quark Model.- Nuclear Matter at High Densities and Temperature.- The Non-Topological Soliton Bag Model.- Pair Production and Quantum Transport in Strong Color Fields.- Antimatter Clusters from Hadronizing Quark-Gluon Plasma.- Colour Interactions in Giant Quark Bags.- The QCD Vacuum.- Gluon Condensation in Quark-Gluon Plasma.- How Topological Concepts Lead to Quantum Numbers for Baryons.- Pressure Ensemble and Dense Nuclear Matter with Finite Size Nucleons at Zero Temperature.- Boundary Conditions and the Structure of the Vacuum.- Quantum Effects in Strong Gravitational Fields.- Temperature Corrections to the Casimir Effect.- The Future of Nuclear Physics.- Van der Waals Forces and Zero Point Energy.- Summary Talk: Theoretical.- Experimental Summary.