Physics with hadron and photon beams at the SPS

This report attempts to cover the physics results obtained in the last 25 years by some 70 SPS experiments. A variety of beams, pion, kaon, proton, antiproton, hyperon and photon were used in these experiments, and, in one case (UA6), the p and p ¯ beams stored in the SPS Collider were made to hit an internal gas jet target. The panoply of detection techniques employed was also very large, from bubble chambers to silicon microdetectors, and the physics issues addressed ranged from hard to ultrasoft processes. The available space however, will only allow to touch briefly a few amongst the many interesting results which have been published since 1979. t follows, we shall try to group the experiments under four headings: rd scattering, (2) Heavy flavours, (3) Spectroscopy, (4) Soft processes.