| Preamble | p. xi |
| A new phase of matter? | p. 1 |
| Micro-bang and big-bang | p. 1 |
| Energy and time scales | p. 1 |
| Quarks and gluons | p. 6 |
| The hadronic phase transition in the early Universe | p. 8 |
| Entropy-conserving (isentropic) expansion | p. 10 |
| The dynamic Universe | p. 11 |
| Looking for quark-gluon plasma: strangeness | p. 14 |
| Other probes of quark-gluon plasma | p. 20 |
| Hadrons | p. 24 |
| Baryons and mesons | p. 24 |
| Strange hadrons | p. 27 |
| Charm and bottom in hadrons | p. 36 |
| The vacuum as a physical medium | p. 37 |
| Confining vacuum in strong interactions | p. 37 |
| Ferromagnetic vacuum | p. 40 |
| Chiral symmetry | p. 43 |
| Phases of strongly interacting matter | p. 46 |
| The expanding fireball and phase transformation | p. 50 |
| QGP and confined hadronic-gas phases | p. 52 |
| Statistical properties of hadronic matter | p. 54 |
| Equidistribution of energy | p. 54 |
| The grand-canonical ensemble | p. 57 |
| Independent quantum (quasi)particles | p. 58 |
| The Fermi and Bose quantum gases | p. 61 |
| Hadron gas | p. 64 |
| A first look at quark-gluon plasma | p. 68 |
| Experiments and analysis tools | p. 72 |
| Nuclei in collision | p. 72 |
| Heavy-ion research programs | p. 72 |
| Reaction energy and collision geometry | p. 78 |
| Rapidity | p. 81 |
| Pseudorapidity and quasirapidity | p. 85 |
| Stages of evolution of dense matter | p. 90 |
| Approach to local kinetic equilibrium | p. 95 |
| The approach to chemical equilibrium | p. 97 |
| Understanding collision dynamics | p. 100 |
| Cascades of particles | p. 100 |
| Relativistic hydrodynamics | p. 104 |
| The evolution of matter and temperature | p. 107 |
| Longitudinal flow of matter | p. 108 |
| Entropy and its relevance in heavy-ion collisions | p. 112 |
| Entropy and the approach to chemical equilibrium | p. 112 |
| Entropy in a glue-ball | p. 116 |
| Measurement of entropy in heavy-ion collisions | p. 120 |
| The entropy content in 200A-GeV S-Pb interactions | p. 122 |
| Supersaturated pion gas | p. 124 |
| Entropy in a longitudinally scaling solution | p. 128 |
| Particle production | p. 130 |
| Particle spectra | p. 130 |
| A thermal particle source: a fireball at rest | p. 130 |
| A dynamic fireball | p. 137 |
| Incomplete stopping | p. 144 |
| Transverse-mass fireball spectra | p. 148 |
| Centrality dependence of m[perpendicular, bottom]-spectra | p. 155 |
| Highlights of hadron production | p. 159 |
| The production of strangeness | p. 159 |
| Hadron abundances | p. 165 |
| Measurement of the size of a dense-matter fireball | p. 171 |
| Production of transverse energy | p. 176 |
| RHIC results | p. 178 |
| Hot hadronic matter | p. 187 |
| Relativistic gas | p. 187 |
| Relation of statistical and thermodynamic quantities | p. 187 |
| Statistical ensembles and fireballs of hadronic matter | p. 191 |
| The ideal gas revisited | p. 193 |
| The relativistic phase-space integral | p. 195 |
| Quark and gluon quantum gases | p. 199 |
| Entropy of classical and quantum gases | p. 204 |
| Hadronic gas | p. 207 |
| Pressure and energy density in a hadronic resonance gas | p. 207 |
| Counting hadronic particles | p. 211 |
| Distortion by the Coulomb force | p. 215 |
| Strangeness in hadronic gas | p. 217 |
| The grand-canonical conservation of strangeness | p. 219 |
| Exact conservation of flavor quantum numbers | p. 223 |
| Canonical suppression of strangeness and charm | p. 228 |
| Hagedorn gas | p. 235 |
| The experimental hadronic mass spectrum | p. 235 |
| The hadronic bootstrap | p. 241 |
| Hadrons of finite size | p. 247 |
| Bootstrap with hadrons of finite size and baryon number | p. 251 |
| The phase boundary in the SBM model | p. 254 |
| QCD, hadronic structure and high temperature | p. 258 |
| Hadronic structure and quantum chromodynamics | p. 258 |
| Confined quarks in a cavity | p. 258 |
| Confined quark quantum states | p. 262 |
| Nonabelian gauge invariance | p. 267 |
| Gluons | p. 271 |
| The Lagrangian of quarks and gluons | p. 273 |
| Perturbative QCD | p. 274 |
| Feynman rules | p. 274 |
| The running coupling constant | p. 277 |
| The renormalization group | p. 280 |
| Running parameters of QCD | p. 281 |
| Lattice quantum chromodynamics | p. 287 |
| The numerical approach | p. 287 |
| Gluon fields on the lattice | p. 289 |
| Quarks on the lattice | p. 290 |
| From action to results | p. 293 |
| A survey of selected lattice results | p. 298 |
| Perturbative quark-gluon plasma | p. 303 |
| An interacting quark-gluon gas | p. 303 |
| The quark-gluon liquid | p. 306 |
| Finite baryon density | p. 309 |
| Properties of a quark-gluon liquid | p. 311 |
| Strangeness | p. 316 |
| Thermal production of flavor in a deconfined phase | p. 316 |
| The kinetic theory of chemical equilibration | p. 316 |
| Evolution toward chemical equilibrium in QGP | p. 322 |
| Production cross sections for strangeness and charm | p. 326 |
| Thermal production of flavor | p. 330 |
| Equilibration of strangeness at the RHIC and SPS | p. 337 |
| The strangeness background | p. 340 |
| The suppression of strange hadrons | p. 340 |
| Thermal hadronic strangeness production | p. 343 |
| The evolution of strangeness in hadronic phase | p. 349 |
| Hadron-freeze-out analysis | p. 352 |
| Chemical nonequilibrium in hadronization | p. 352 |
| Phase space and parameters | p. 355 |
| SPS hadron yields | p. 357 |
| Strangeness as a signature of deconfinement | p. 361 |
| References | p. 371 |
| Index | p. 389 |
| Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved. |
