Quark excitations of nuclei - A new frontier in nuclear research -

The investigation of nuclei in the energy domain of the elementary N*-resonances (i.e. for 200 MeV < Eexc < 2 GeV) opens up a new and important domain of nuclear research for essentially two reasons: (i) the quark structure of the nuclear constituent, the nucleon, leads to new nuclear phenomena; their investigation appears to be of fundamental importance for the understanding of complex hadronic systems; (ii) the nucleus can be used as a unique laboratory to test QCD in the nonasymptotic region where perturbative approaches fail. This is of particular interest, e.g. for the confinement problem. — Some specific aspects of subnuclear research are discussed in connection with the analysis of recent experiments and, in particular, in view of a possible strategy for a systematic investigation of nuclear quark excitations.