From its early beginnings at SLAC in the 1970's, the study of nucleon spin structure using polarized lepton beams and polarized nucleon targets has become increasingly important in nuclear and particle physics, with current experiments at several of the world's high energy and nuclear physics laboratories (CERN, DESY, SLAC and Jefferson Lab) and with enormous related theoretical studies. The understanding of the fascinating but complicated problem of nucleon spin structure has progressed substantially, but fundamental questions remain and it can be confidently predicted that future activity will be high.The Erice Course on The Spin Structure of the Nucleon covered both the experimental and theoretical aspects of the subject, and this volume includes the lectures given at the School. In many cases the lecture material has been extended and updated by the authors. In addition, several recent publications on experimental work have been added in an appendix.

A comprehensive survey of the most recent results from the field of quark-gluon structure of the nucleon, in particular how the spin of the nucleon is shared by its constituents. After very intriguing results from CERN and SLAC at the end of the 1980s, the last decade has seen a set of second-generation experiments at high energy accelerators that have yielded precise information on the solution of the 'Spin Crisis' - as well as opening up new questions. The articles are written by experts from the leading collaboration and theory groups as well as providing an expert summary of the state of the art, the book points the way to future research directions. Its main focus is on semi-inclusive and exclusive measurements of deep inelastic lepton scattering, which enables for the first time the determination of the flavor-separated quark spin distributions. Future developments on generalized parton distributions and their interpretation as well as the transverse spin structure are also covered. An indispensable volume for all working in hadronic physics.

From its early beginnings at SLAC in the 1970's, the study of nucleon spin structure using polarized lepton beams and polarized nucleon targets has become increasingly important in nuclear and particle physics, with current experiments at several of the world's high energy laboratories (CERN, DESY and SLAC) and with enormous related theoretical studies. The understanding of the fascinating but complicated problem of nucleon spin structure has progressed substantially, but fundamental questions remain and it can be confidently predicted that future activity will be high. The Erice Course on The Spin Structure of the Nucleon covered both the experimental and theoretical aspects of the subject, and this volume includes the lectures given at the School. In many cases the lecture material has been extended and updated by the authors. In addition, several recent publications on experimental work have been added in an appendix.

The topic of the internal spin structure of the nucleon has become an unusually active subfield of particle and nuclear physics, together with the relevant technologies. This volume presents up-to-date coverage.All the talks given at the symposium can be found in the volume. In addition, selected articles are reprinted, including two early papers which record initial thinking about the topic, all experimental papers giving data on nucleon spin structure functions determined from polarized lepton-nucleon scattering, and two valuable previously unpublished papers.

After about three decades of experimental and theoretical efforts, the structure of the nucleon (proton and neutron) is now fairly well understood based on quantum chromodynamics, but only if averaged over its spin. As the recent “proton spin crisis” revealed, we do not understand much about the nucleon structure when its spin is polarized to a specific orientation. We expect that our understanding on this challenging problem will soon be significantly improved by the RHIC-Spin and other experiments in the near future, as well as by the lattice- and perturbative-QCD theoretical calculations. The purpose of this symposium was to summarize the current understanding and discuss the future perspective of this problem with experimental and theoretical physicists from both high-energy and nuclear physics communities.The symposium covered the overview of the structure studies, updates on the experimental results from CERN, SLAC, DESY, FNAL, and KEK, future experiments at RHIC, and recent theoretical developments (18 presentations, 113 participants).