COMPASS results on the spin structure of the nucleon and diffractive mesonproduction

A short overview of the experimental programme on investigations of the spin structure of the nucleon and meson spectrocopy of the COMPASS collaboration is given. The experiment is a fixed target experiment performed at the M2 beam line of the CERN SPS using high energy muon and hadron beams. Measurements of polarised deep inelastic muon scattering with longitudinally and transversely polarised nucleons give access to quark helicity and transverse quark distributions as well as to the gluon polarisation. Measurements of diffractive and central production with hadron beams were started to search for exotic mesons and glue balls.