An historical overview of the standard reaction formalisms, including R-matrix, DWBA, Glauber, time-dependent approaches, transport and others, will be an important component of the meeting. Keeping in mind the old issues that arose from reactions with stable nuclei will help us understand the challenges of applying existing approaches to radioactive beams.

The descriptions that have commonly been used to analyze reactions between stable nuclei are often unrealistic for reactions of weakly bound, unstable nuclei. Some progress has been made in reformulating reaction theories to incorporate the principal features of the reaction mechanisms and apply them to a variety of new phenomena. This work is typically in terms of simplified few-body models, so the great open problem for the future remains: how to implement the full many-body dynamics. A particular challenge is to perform reaction calculations that exploit the full complexity of the ab-initio structure models, an effort that has grown rapidly in recent years.

The workshop will cover several types of reactions that are of interest for different reasons. For example, radiative capture, breakup and transfer reactions can provide single-particle spectroscopic information, while fusion reactions at low energy and more violent central collisions at high energy can provide information about nuclear properties crucial to understanding the conditions inside neutron stars.