The purpose of the School and Workshop was to study recent topics in QCD and hadron physics from various points of view. The subjects included perturbative and nonperturbative aspects of QCD, chiral effective theory in hadron physics and high temperature and density nuclear matter physics.Another purpose was to enhance communications and collaborations among researchers in the Asia and Oceania region.

The purpose of the School and Workshop was to study recent topics in QCD and hadron physics from various points of view. The subjects included perturbative and nonperturbative aspects of QCD, chiral effective theory in hadron physics and high temperature and density nuclear matter physics. Another purpose was to enhance communications and collaborations among researchers in the Asia and Oceania region.

This workshop brought together theorists actively working in studies of QCD and general aspects of dynamics in non-Abelian gauge theories. The proceedings include papers on the current state of the theory in these areas of research, and may serve as useful review and reference material.

This volume summarizes our contemporary understanding of the deconfinement transition in QCD at finite temperature and chemical potential. Questions as to whether a quark-gluon plasma exists in the interior of dense astrophysical objects or which bound-state signals have to be studied in order to unambiguously detect the QCD phase transition(s) in future heavy-ion collision programmes at RHIC and LHC are addressed. Progress in answering these questions requires a fusion of lattice QCD with other nonperturbative approaches and low-energy effective models for QCD. Experts in these fields present in the book their methods and their results in understanding the deconfinement phenomenon.

This volume presents topics in which researchers in elementary particle and nuclear physics are commonly interested: nonperturbative aspects of QCD and chiral properties of hadrons, relativistic heavy ion reactions and quark-gluon plasma, nuclear matter at high temperature/ density, lattice QCD, quark structure of hadrons and nuclei, high q2 phenomena in hadrons and nuclei, heavy quarks and weak interaction, hyperon interactions and hypernuclei, relativistic nuclear theory, recent experimentals and other topics.Speakers: A A Andrianov, H Ejiri, V N Fetisov, Y Iwasaki, C Ciofi Degli Atti, V G Kadyshevsky, D I Kazakov, R Brockmann, A P Kobushkin, C M Ko, T Humanic, S H Lee, T Matsui, Y Mizuno, Y M Musakhanov, T Morü, M Namiki, S Saito, T-A Shibata, T Suzuki, A I Titov, G M Vagradov, M K Volkov, M Oka, A V Shebeko, S N Yang, G M Zinovjev, etc.

This book provides in a pedagogical way some up-to-date reviews of properties of strongly interacting matter produced at RHIC, analytical approaches to QCD, and nuclear and high-energy astrophysics. It also contains schematic outlines of topics on high-precision non-perturbative QCD, first results from RHIC, and heavy-ion collisions at LHC with the ATLAS detector.The proceedings have been selected for coverage in: OCo Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings)"