Coulomb excitation - A nuclear microscope

Multiple Coulomb excitation with heavy-ion beams offers an unique opportuni ty to study model-independently the collective properties of the nuclear st ructure. Existing detector systems and data analysis methods allow not only to measure complete sets of parameters describing the electromagnetic prop erties of the nuclei - electric and magnetic multipole matrix elements - bu t also by using sum rules to translate these results to the shape evolution of the charge distributions independently for each level. The technique of Coulomb excitation can also be used to answer specific questions, as illus trated in this paper.