Exotic nuclei: Recent highlights and perspectives Original Research Article

The present article aims at giving an aperçu on the important effort nowadays invested into radioactive beam experiments. Selected and very recent examples are used in order to demonstrate the remarkable progress obtained just before the turn of this century. Together with the advent of new radioactive beam facilities, planned or already under construction, these recent experiments point to the new opportunities and open the perspectives for low-energy nuclear physics of the next millenaire. A short discussion of the different aspects of making (beams of) nuclei far from stability is included in order to present the variety of the possible technical approaches and their complementarity.