[en] The contributions of the CORINNE II conference cover a wide range topics in the fields of particle-particle correlations, particle properties and production, and multifragmentation in heavy ion collisions. 40 items are indexed separately for INIS database. (K.A.)

[en] Various methods to characterize the fragment size distributions in nuclear multifragmentation are discussed. The goal is to find the best signals of a phase transition associated to multifragmentation. The concepts of scaling and critical exponents are reviewed and the possibility to determine them in finite nuclei is examined. The fluctuations of the fragment size distribution and a possible signal of intermittency are also discussed. (authors). 29 refs., 4 figs., 1 tab

[en] During the past years artificial neural networks (ANN) have gained increasing interest not only in the regime of financial forecast and data mining, but also in the field of particle physics. Up to now artificial neural networks have mostly been applied in high energy physics trigger studies. The use of ANNs in medium energy physics data analysis is summarized. (author). 21 refs., 9 figs

[en] Bose effects are reviewed as a tool for recreating the space-time evolution of a reaction. The same formulation used in the two-particle interferometric phenomenology can be extended to the case of many-boson symmetrization. Opportunities for novel Bose-Einstein behavior are discussed. (author). 20 refs., 2 figs

[en] Recent results for η meson production in relativistic heavy ion collisions at SIS are discussed and compared to the available systematics of particle production. The production probabilities follow simple scaling laws. The new dilepton project HADES at GSI is introduced. The design principles of HADES are discussed, as well as the physics program, which includes the investigation of medium modifications of vector mesons and the study of electromagnetic properties of mesons. (author). 23 refs., 4 figs

[en] Modifications of hadron masses and some of their basic properties with temperature or nuclear density are considered as one possible signature for the formation of dense hadronic matter in nuclear collisions. Some basic results on the temperature dependence of hadron properties obtained from calculations of hadron correlation functions, the chiral condensate and the equation of state in finite temperature lattice QCD are discussed. (author). 12 refs., 5 figs

[en] Two-particle correlation functions provide information on the space-time characteristics of the emitting source. In many cases, ambiguities of the relative magnitudes of source radius and lifetime can be reduced by analysis of correlation functions evaluated for specific directional cuts on the relative velocity of the coincident particle pair. Information on non-spherical breakup geometries is more difficult to extract. Examples of two-proton correlation functions in which directional cuts are employed to reduce existing space-time ambiguities for the emitting system are presented. (author). 50 refs., 10 figs

[en] A summary and survey on the change of the chiral < q-barq> condensate in dense (and hot) matter is presented. Implications for nuclear physics and relativistic heavy ion collisions are discussed, such as the strong Dirac scalar mean field that results from the density dependence of < q-barq>, and possible consequences for decreasing hadron masses in matter. (author). 22 refs., 4 figs

[en] The characteristics of strange particle production in nuclear collisions in the energy range from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand MeV per nucleon are described and examples of experimental data are given. Strange particles yields are enhanced relative to non strange particles at all energies, if central nucleus-nucleus collisions are compared to nucleon-nucleon interactions. The dominant production mechanisms at low energies are interactions involving heavy resonances. Quark-gluon degrees of freedom seem to become important at high energies. (author). 18 refs., 8 figs

[en] It is always a good thing to look for new methods and technologies, which have been developed even outside of physics. Such a new method is reported: the wavelet transformation. It has found widespread application in engineering for signal processing and data compression. A basic introduction of the wavelet transformation is given. Because of its self-similar structure, wavelets may represent a very convenient tool to describe self-similar processes; therefore wavelet transformation is applied in correlation studies of self-similar cascades. It is also shown, that wavelet correlations give information about clustering. (K.A.). 6 refs., 4 figs