The kaon factory - towards the physics of strongly interacting systems

With the advent of the standard model for quarks and leptons and unified forces there are profound new questions for the physics of strongly interacting systems: the nature of the nucleon, the physics of quark confinement, fundamental symmetries governing hadron decay and the effect of quarks and gluons on nuclear behaviour. Of the new large facilities now planned to respond to these questions the kaon factory is central. It uses very intense (∼100 μA) primary proton beams (∼30 GeV) to generate intense secondary beams of various hadrons and leptons. (author)