Written primarily for researchers and graduate students who are new in this emerging field, this book develops the necessary tools so that readers can follow the latest advances in this subject. Readers are first guided to examine the basic informations on nucleon-nucleon collisions and the use of the nucleus as an arena to study the interaction of one nucleon with another. A good survey of the relation between nucleon-nucleon and nucleus-nucleus collisions provides the proper comparison to study phenomena involving the more exotic quark-gluon plasma. Properties of the quark-gluon plasma and signatures for its detection are discussed to aid future searches and exploration for this exotic matter. Recent experimental findings are summarised.

The discussion covers nuclear collisions at relativistic energies including classes of high energy nucleus--nucleus collisions, and the kinetics of a central collision; and the asymptotic hadron spectrum including known and unknown hadrons, the relevance of the spectrum and the means of its study, thermodynamics of hadronic matter, examples of hadronic spectra, the temperature, composition of the initial fireball and its expansion, isoergic expansion with no pre-freezeout radiation, isentropic expansion of the fireball, the quasi-dynamical expansion, and finally antinuclei, hypernuclei, and the quark phase. 28 references. (JFP).

This is a collection of exciting papers in the area of high energy nuclear collisions and quark gluon plasma. The volume covers lectures on the natures of hadronic matter at high temperature and/or density and signals of quark-hadron phase transitions. It also includes discussions and descriptions of the data of CERN and BNL nucleus-nucleus collisions. Other contributions deal with physics at RHIC, LHC and the PS-collider, collision simulators and various related topics.

The various definitions of the quasi-elastic component used in the current literature are discussed and interrelated. By use of the rows-on-rows model, it is demonstrated that the direct part of a recent two-component model approximates quite well the single-collision contribution to the one-nucleon inclusive cross section.

This is an updated version of the book published in 1985. QCD-motivated, it gives a detailed description of hadron structure and soft interactions in the additive quark model, where hadrons are regarded as composite systems of dressed quarks.In the past decade it has become clear that nonperturbative QCD, responsible for soft hadronic processes, may differ rather drastically from perturbative QCD. The understanding of nonperturbative QCD requires a detailed investigation of the experiments and the theoretical approaches. Bearing this in mind, the book has been rewritten paying special attention to the interplay of soft hadronic collisions and the quark model. It is at the crossroads of these domains that peculiar features of strong QCD reveal themselves.The book discusses constituent quarks, diquarks, the massive effective gluons and the problem of scalar isoscalar mesons. The quark-gluonium classification of meson states is also given. Experimentally observed properties of hadrons are presented together with the corresponding theoretical interpretation in the framework of the composite hadron structure.The text includes a large theoretical part, which shows how to treat composite systems (including relativistic ones) with a technique based on spectral integration. This technique provides the possibility of handling hadrons as weakly bound systems of quarks and, at the same time, takes into account confinement.Attention is focused on the composite structure revealing itself in high energy hadron collisions. Fields of applicability of the additive quark model are discussed, as is colour screening in hadronic collisions at high and superhigh energies. Along with a detailed presentation of hadron-hadron collisions, a description of hadron-nucleus collisions is given.

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.