This book offers the unique possibility of tackling the problem of hadronic deconfinement from different perspectives. After general introductions to the physical issues, from both the theoretical and the experimental point of view, the book presents the most recent expertise on field theory approaches to the QCD phase diagram, many-body techniques and applications, the dynamics of phase transitions, and phenomenological analysis of relativistic heavy ion collisions. One of the major goals of this book is to promote interchange among those fields of research, which have traditionally been cultivated by different communities of physicists. The contributions in the book help in obtaining deep comprehension of this new state of matter, a system of deconfined quarks and gluons. At the same time the book offers a few examples of how the seeds of the deconfined state are looked for in the phenomenological analysis of the observables measured in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The main topics are dealt with in a pedagogical style, suitable for beginners as well as experienced researchers.

Charmonium suppression is a promising signal of quark-gluon plasma. In this volume, the latest development both in experiments and in the theory of charmonium production in high-energy nuclear collisions are presented and discussed.

Many high-energy collider experiments (including the current Large Hadron Collider at CERN) involve the collision of hadrons. Hadrons are composite particles consisting of partons (quarks and gluons), and this means that in any hadron-hadron collision there will typically be multiple collisions of the constituents — i.e. multiple parton interactions (MPI). Understanding the nature of the MPI is important in terms of searching for new physics in the products of the scatters, and also in its own right to gain a greater understanding of hadron structure. This book aims at providing a pedagogical introduction and a comprehensive review of different research lines linked by an involvement of MPI phenomena. It is written by pioneers as well as young leading scientists, and reviews both experimental findings and theoretical developments, discussing also the remaining open issues.

This conference brought together about 150 physicists and covered the entire field of research with antiprotons, from atomic physics at low energies to hadronic reactions at high energies. The conference demonstrated that this field is evolving, with new physics being studied at existing and planned facilities.

This book is devoted to phenomena that are of interest to both particle and nuclear physicists. The topics include nucleon structure (including spin structure), electron, neutrino, and hadron scattering from nucleons and nuclei, strange matter, the standard model, theory of nucleons and nuclei from both the QCD and nucleon-meson viewpoints, new experimental techniques, and new facilities.

This volume contains the invited and contributed papers presented at the Fourth International Conference on Perspectives in Hadronic Physics and sent to the Editors within the deadline. The Conference was held at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy, from May 12th to 16th, 2003, and was attended by about 100 scientists from 20 countries. The series ofConferences on Perspectives on Hadronic Physics takes place every two years since 1997 and follows the seven Workshops on Perspectives in Nuclear Physics at Intermediate Energies, organized every two years at ICTP since 1983. The aim of these Conferences is to discuss the status-of-the-art concerning the experimental and theoretical investigations of hadronic systems, from nucleons to nuclei and dense nuclear matter, in terms of the relevant underlying degrees of freedom. For such a reason the Fourth Conference has been focused on those experimental and theoretical topics which have been in the last few years the object of intensive investigations, viz. the various approaches employed to describe the structure of hadrons in terms of QCD and QCD inspired models, the recent developments in the treatment of the properties and propagations of hadronic states in the medium, the relevant progress done in the solution of the few- and many- hadron problems, the recent results in the experimental investigation of dense hadronic matter and, last but not least, the physics programs of existing Laboratories and the suggested projects for new Facilities.