The first meeting of the APS Topical Group on Hadronic Physics (`GHP')
took place on 24–26 October 2004, at Fermilab. Two factors contributed to
the decision to hold this meeting. First, the Topical Group on Hadronic
Physics had recently been established, and there was general agreement
that a conference devoted to the physics of hadrons was an important group
activity. Second, many exciting new experimental results on hadron spectroscopy
had been announced recently, and there was intense interest in these
new developments. The meeting was very well attended, with over 120
scientists participating; this was triple our original estimate of
the likely audience for this meeting.
The plenary sessions covered a broad range of topics, as we considered it
important to promote communication between the communities pursuing research
in different areas of hadron physics. The topics discussed included new results
from RHIC on the QGP, the status of experiments on the flavour-exotic pentaquark
and other new baryons, the new open-charm Ds and hidden-charm X states,
conventional light quark resonances, glueballs and hybrids, and
new facilities. Finally, a `town meeting' was held to discuss funding prospects for
hadronic physics and related issues, which included a panel discussion with
representatives from DOE, NSF and JLab. These plenary sessions were supplemented by
14 parallel sessions, giving a total of approximately 80 presentations.
To make the conference more accessible to younger researchers, as well as to
simiplify administration, there was no conference fee for this meeting. This was
possible as a result of the generous financial support of our hosts at Fermilab,
for which we are very appreciative. We are also grateful to Larry Cardman for
arranging Jlab assistance in producing and distributing the conference poster,
to Gerald Ragghianti for designing the poster and proceedings cover, and to
Lali Chatterjee and the Institute of Physics for arranging publication of the
proceedings at no cost to the topical group. The efforts of the session organizers
and chairs, which were crucial for the smooth operation of the conference, are also
gratefully acknowledged. Finally, we were extremely fortunate to have the local
assistance of Cynthia Sazama and Suzanne Weber at Fermilab, who dealt with the
many details of conference organization with good cheer, exemplary competence
and unstinting loyalty, even to the extent of sacrificing their weekends.
We hope that this first GHP conference has been a useful contribution to the field
of hadron physics, and that it may encourage the organization of subsequent
APS conferences on this diverse, challenging and fascinating field.