Book excerpt: This is the second volume in a series of lecture notes based on the highly s- cessful Euro Summer School on Exotic Beams that has been running yearly since 1993 (apart from 1999) and is planned to continue to do so. It is the aim of the School and these lecture notes to provide an introduction to - dioactive ion beam (RIB) physics at the level of graduate students and young postdocs starting out in the ?eld. Each volume will contain lectures covering a range of topics from nuclear theory to experiment to applications. Our understanding of atomic nuclei has undergone a major re-orientation over the past two decades and seen the emergence of an exciting ?eld of research: the study of exotic nuclei. The availability of energetic beams of short-lived nuclei, referred to as radioactive ion beams (RIBs), has opened the way to the study of the structure and dynamics of thousands of nuclear species never before observed in the laboratory. In its 2004 report “Persp- tives for Nuclear Physics Research in Europe in the Coming Decade and - yond”, the Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee (NuPECC) statesthatthe?eldofRIBphysicsisoneofthemostimportantdirectionsfor the future science programme in Europe. In 2005 it published its “Roadmap for Construction of Nuclear Physics Research Infrastructures in Europe”.