Abstract. The European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) consortium has provided the focal plane instruments for the three X-ray mirror systems on XMM-Newton. Two cameras with a reflecting grating spectrometer in the optical path are equipped with MOS type CCDs as focal plane detectors (Turner 2001), the telescope with the full photon flux operates the novel pn-CCD as an imaging X-ray spectrometer. The pn-CCD camera system was developed under the leadership of the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik (MPE), Garching. The concept of the pn-CCD is described as well as the different operational modes of the camera system. The electrical, mechanical and thermal design of the focal plane and camera is briefly treated. The in-orbit performance is described in terms of energy resolution, quantum efficiency, time resolution, long term stability and charged particle background. Special emphasis is given to the radiation hardening of the devices and the measured and expected degradation due to radiation damage of ionizing particles in the first 9 months of in orbit operation.Key words. XMM-Newton -back illuminated pn-CCDs -radiation hardness -energy resolution -quantum efficiency -particle and flourescence background

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In this talk results from a new QCD analysis in leading (LO) and next-toleading (NLO) order are presented. New parametrizations of the polarized quark and gluon densities are derived together with parametrizations of their fully correlated 1σ error bands. Furthermore the value of α s (M 2 Z ) is determined. Finally a number of low moments of the polarized parton densities are compared with results from lattice simulations. All details of the analysis are given in Ref. [1].

A non-singlet QCD analysis of the structure function F 2 (x, q 2 ) in LO, NLO, NNLO and N 3 LO is performed based on the world data for charged lepton scattering. We determine the valence quark parton densities and present their parameterization and that of the correlated errors in a wide range of x and Q 2 . In the analysis we determined the QCD-scale Λ MS QCD,N f =4 = 265±27 MeV (NLO), 226±25 MeV (NNLO), 234±26 MeV (N 3 LO), with a remainder uncertainty of ±2 MeV for the yet unknown 4-loop anomalous dimension, corresponding to α s (M 2 Z ) = 0