Related papers: Relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions and the QC…
After a few microseconds of the creation of our Universe through the Big Bang, the primordial matter was believed to be a soup of the fundamental constituents of matter -- quarks and gluons. This is expected to be created in the laboratory…
Central nuclear collisions at energies far above 1 GeV/nucleon may provide for conditions, where the transition from highly excited hadronic matter into quark matter or quark-gluon plasma can be probed. Here I review our current…
QCD is the fundamental theory to describe the strong interaction, where quarks and gluons have the color degrees of freedom. However, a single quark or gluon can not be separated out and all observable particles are color singlet states.…
Strongly interacting matter exhibits new phases under extreme conditions. Matter was exposed to such extremes not only in the Early Universe, but also today in the cores of neutron stars, as well as in laboratory experiments at a much…
The properties of dense QCD matter are delineated through the construction of equations of state which should be consistent with QCD calculations in the low and high density limits, nuclear laboratory experiments, and the neutron star…
I discuss the phase structure of strongly interacting matter at high temperatures and densities, as predicted by statistical QCD, and consider in particular the nature of the transition of hot hadronic matter to a plasma of deconfined…
Ultrarelativistic collisions between heavy nuclei briefly generate the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a new state of matter characterized by deconfined partons last seen microseconds after the Big Bang. The properties of the QGP are of intense…
Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase diagram is usually plotted as temperature (T) versus the chemical potential associated with the conserved baryon number (\mu_{B}). Two fundamental properties of QCD, related to confinement and chiral…
A fundamental question of physics is what ultimately happens to matter as it is heated or compressed. In the realm of very high temperature and density the fundamental degrees of freedom of the strong interaction, quarks and gluons, come…
I retrace the developments from Hagedorn's concept of a limiting temperature for hadronic matter to the discovery and characterization of the quark-gluon plasma as a new state of matter. My recollections begin with the transformation more…
This review deals with the structure of hadrons, strongly interacting many-body systems consisting of quarks and gluons. These systems have a size of about 1 fm, which shows up in scattering experiments at low momentum transfers $Q$ in the…
The quark gluon plasma (QGP) is one of the most interesting forms of matter providing us with insight on quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and the early universe. It is believed that the heavy-ion collision experiments at the Relativistic Heavy…
Despite the progress made in understanding the NN interactions at long distances based on effective field theories, the understanding of the dynamics of short range NN interactions remains as elusive as ever. One of the most fascinating…
In nuclear collisions at relativistic energies, matter is created which resembles closely the matter that filled all space until about 15 microseconds after the big bang. Here we summarize selected aspects of the research that led to the…
Current studies on heavy hadrons in nuclear medium are reviewed with a summary of the basic theoretical concepts of QCD, namely chiral symmetry, heavy quark spin symmetry, and the effective Lagrangian approach. The nuclear matter is an…
The propagation of colored quarks through strongly interacting systems, and their subsequent evolution into color-singlet hadrons, are phenomena that showcase unique facets of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Medium-stimulated gluon…
Major aspects of the subhadronic state of nuclear matter populated with deconfined color particles are reviewed. At high and even at rather low nuclear collision energies, this is expected to be a short-term quark-gluon plasma (QGP), but,…
Studies of the spectrum of hadrons and their structure in experiments with electromagnetic probes offer unique insight into many facets of the strong interaction in the regime of large quark-gluon running coupling, {\it i.e.} the regime of…
The properties of dense QCD matter are delineated through the construction of equations of state which should be consistent with the low and high density limits of QCD, nuclear laboratory experiments, and the neutron star observations.…
Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of strong interactions of quarks and gluons collectively called partons, the basic constituents of all nuclear matter. Its non-abelian character manifests in nature in the form of two remarkable…