This is a detailed and pedagogical exposition of the effective Lagrangian techniques and their applications to high-energy physics. It covers the main theoretical ideas and describes how to use them in different fields, such as chiral perturbation theory and the symmetry breaking sector of the standard model and even low-energy quantum gravity. The book is written in the language of modern quantum field theory. Some of the theoretical topics treated are: decoupling; the Goldstone theorem; the non-linear model; anomalies; the Wess-Zumino-Witten term; and the equivalence theorem.

This book is devoted to some recently developed techniques in quantum field theory (QFT), as well as to their main applications to different areas of parti cle physics. All together they are known as the effective or phenomenological Lagrangian formalism. Motivated by the enormous amount of work carried out in this field during the last years, our purpose when writing this book has been to give a modern and pedagogical exposition of the most relevant as pects of the topic. We hope that our efforts will be useful, both for graduated students in the search for a solid theoretical background in...

The QNP series of international conferences on Quarks and Nuclear Physics is by now a well established and highly respected forum where the most recent developments in the field are discussed and communicated. QNP 2006 is the forth edition of this biennial meeting.

Selected and refereed original contributions of QNP 2006 have been published in The European Physical Journal A - Hadrons and Nuclei (EPJ A), while the present proceedings book, in addition to reprinting the articles published in EPJ A, further includes all other contributions selected and accepted by the organizing...