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)"

This workshop was established as a forum for experts from different subfields in nuclear dynamics to investigate unifying concepts of nuclear reactions in different beam energy regimes. The proceedings contain an overview of recent experimental and theoretical progress in nuclear dynamics from ultra-subbarrier fusion studies to the physics of the quark-gluon plasma at AGS, CERN, and RHIC energies.

From the Editors Preface: "Quark Matter 1987 was attended by about 250 scientists, representing 75 research institutions around the world - the scientific community engaged in experimental and theoretical studies of high energy nuclear collisions. The central theme of the meeting was the possibility of achieving extreme energy densities in extended systems of strongly interacting matter - with the ultimate aim of creating in the laboratory a deconfined state of matter, a state in which quarks and gluons attain the active degrees of freedom. High energy accelerator beams and cosmic radiation projectiles provide the experimental tools for this endeavour; on the theoretical side, it is intimately connected to recent developments in the non-perturbative study of quantum chromodynamics. Phase transitions between hadronic matter and quark-gluon plasma are of basic interest also for our understanding of the dynamics of the early universe ... A very special feature of this Sixth Quark Matter Conference was the advent of the first experimental results from dedicated accelerator studies. These were conducted during 1986/87 at the AGS of Brookhaven National Laboratory ... and at the CERN SPS ... An intense discussion of these data formed the main activity of the meeting.

The most recent conceptual design manual for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven was published in May 1986 (BNL 51932). The purpose of this workshop was to review the design specifications in this RHIC reference manual, and to discuss in detail possible improvements in machine performance by addressing four main areas. These areas are beam-beam interactions, stochastic cooling, rf and bunch instabilities. The contents of this proceedings are as follows. Following an overview of the workshop, in which the motivation and goals are discussed in detail, transcripts of the first day talks are given. Many of these transcripts are copies of the original transparencies presented at the meeting. The following four sections contain contributed papers, that resulted from discussions at the workshop within each of the four working groups. In addition, there is a group summary for each of the four working groups at the beginning of each section. Finally, a list of participants is given.