NSTAR 2001, proceedings of the workshop on the physics of excited nucleons, Mainz, Germany, 7-10 March 2001.

The study of N*s can provide us with critical insights into the nature of QCD in the confinement domain. The keys to progress in this domain are the identification of its important degrees of freedom and the effective forces between them. The nucleon is the simplest system in which the nonabelian character of QCD is manifest. There are Nc quarks in a baryon because there are Nc colors, and as a consequence Gell-Mann and Zweig were forced to introduce the quarks in order to describe the octet and decuplet baryons. This volume gives a status report on the recent experimental and theoretical results in the field of nucleon resonance physics. A wealth of new high precision data was presented from facilities around the world, such as BES, BNL, ELSA, GRAAL, JLab, MAMI, MIT/Bates, SPring8, and Yerevan. Particular emphasis was laid on polarization degrees of freedom and large acceptance detectors as precision tools for studying small but important transition amplitudes, and the helicity (spin structure of the nucleon. There were new results describing the nucleon resonance structure on the basis of quantum chromodynamics, either directly in terms of quarks and gluons by means of lattice gauge theory, or in terms of hadrons in the framework of chiral field theories. A status report on duality showed the surprising connections between the physics of the low energy nucleon resonance region and the realm of quark structure functions in deep inelastic scattering. Finally, this volume contains a summary report of the BRAG workshop, devoted to the analysis of baryon resonances.