  Breakup reactions are generally quite complicated, they involve nuclear and
electromagnetic forces including interference effects. Coulomb dissociation is
an especially simple and important mechanism since the perturbation due to the
electric field of the nucleus is exactly known. Therefore firm conclusions can
be drawn from such measurements. Electromagnetic matrixelements, radiative
capture cross-sections and astrophysical S-factors can be extracted from
experiments. We describe the basic theory, give analytical results for higher
order effects in the dissociation of neutron halo nuclei and briefly review the
experimental results obtained up to now. Some new applications of Coulomb
dissociation for nuclear astrophysics and nuclear structure physics are
discussed.
