Research Center for Nuclear Physics (RCNP) of Osaka University is the national research center for nuclear physics. RCNP is the research institute, where many scientists want to come and perform the forefront research. In order to attract scientists and to perform good experiments, RCNP should be equipped with the world best facilities. The research field of RCNP is the Nuclear Physics and the Hadron Physics.

RCNP houses the cyclotron complex of providing proton beams up to the energy of 420MeV and light ion beams. The beams have the world best resolution among existing cyclotrons in the world. Laser Electron Photon facility at Spring8 (LEPS) of RCNP produces currently high-energy photon beams of 2.4GeV. LEPS was completed and experiments on the proton target have been performed. Oto Cosmo Laboratory is the low background laboratory to perform low noise experiments as double beta decay and dark matter search, which require low background circumstance. RCNP has also a strong computing power to perform the data analysis of large amount of complex experimental data. A super computer of high-speed calculations is also equipped at RCNP. All these facilities are open to all the nuclear physicists.

In this fiscal year, there appeared an important concept on Nuclear Physics due to the spin-isospin experiments obtained by (p,n) reactions at RCNP. The (p,n) reactions at zero degree provide the Gamow-Teller strength and at large angles provide the spin responses. These experiments suggest some important effects being produced by the pion. Together with the importance of the pion in few-body systems and the hadron physics, these date urged us to conjecture the surface pion condensation, which has been proved by numerical calculations. We shall perform further experiments to prove this concept in the forth-coming experiments.

In Japan, we are currently making reformation of National Universities. RCNP belongs to Osaka University. The discussion of the reformation is to make all the national universities independent. RCNP is a common-in-use research institute and it is not obvious at this moment as how to finance RCNP, which should be strongly supported by the Nuclear Physics community. It is very important to perform good researches to be appreciated not only by the nuclear physicists but also by scientists in all the fields. Your support of RCNP is essential for the healthy activities of RCNP in the near future.

In the fiscal year 2000, we held 3 International Symposiums. They are on Giant Resonances, Spin Physics, and GeV photons. We were able to have very good presentations and good discussions. They were published already in the form of proceedings.

We had many good foreign visitors under the COE program of Monbusho, Ministry of Education. These prominent scientists bring in very new views on researches in Nuclear and Hadron Physics. We had very fruitful collaborations between the COE professors and the local scientists through this program. The results are published in prominent research journals. Some of the collaborations are continued even after they have left RCNP. Students are profited a lot with the foreign visitors as performing research under this international circumstance. They are grown up as independent scientists, who are already world competitive when they are awarded their PhD.

Using this space I would like to thank to all colleagues from RCNP and also all the users of RCNP, not only from the nearby universities, but also from all over Japan and even from world-wide institutes. The participations of all these scientists from various places are the key elements for RCNP in achieving its goal of understanding the sub-atomic world. RCNP as a return will make all the efforts to improve the facilities to the world-best level all the time. The role of the advisory committee is also very important for the success of the RCNP mission and I am thankful to the committee members for the constant valuable works.

Hiroshi Toki
Director of RCNP