N^∗ Experiments and Their Impact on Strong QCD Physics

I give a brief report on experimental studies of the spectrum and the structure of the excited states of the nucleon and what we learn about their internal structure. The focus is on the effort to obtain a more complete picture of the light-quark baryon excitation spectrum employing electromagnetic beams, and on the study of the transition form factors and helicity amplitudes an their dependence on the size of the four-momentum transfer Q², especially on some of the most prominent resonances. These were obtained in pion and eta electroproduction experiments off proton targets. (author)