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.

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 nucleus-nucleus collisions are presented and discussed. This invaluable book is based on E Witten's lectures on topological quantum field theory which were presented in the spring of 1989 at Fine Hall, Princeton. At that time Witten unified several important mathematical works in terms of quantum field theory, most notably the Donaldson polynomial, Gromov/Floer homology and Jones polynomials. In the book Witten explains his three-dimensional construction of Jones polynomials via Chern-Simons gauge theory. The classical moduli space consists of unitary flat connections. To quantize it, he constructs a Hilbert space consisting of holomorphic sections of the natural determinant bundle over the moduli space, or non-Abelian theta functions. He explains that the quantization is independent of complex structures so that the theory becomes topological. He then constructs morphisms in terms of the Feynman path integral. He provides the relevant background, such as the Feynman -- Kac formula and Feynman diagrams, thus making the book more accessible to mathematicians. His construction leads to many beautiful applications, such as the skein relation, the surgery formula and a proof of Verlinde's formula.

This comprehensive volume summarizes and structures the multitude of results obtained at the LHC in its first running period and draws the grand picture of today’s physics at a hadron collider. Topics covered are Standard Model measurements, Higgs and top-quark physics, flavour physics, heavy-ion physics, and searches for supersymmetry and other extensions of the Standard Model. Emphasis is placed on overview and presentation of the lessons learned. Chapters on detectors and the LHC machine and a thorough outlook into the future complement the book. The individual chapters are written by teams of expert authors working at the forefront of LHC research.

The aim of this book is to offer to the next generation of young researchers a broad and largely self-contained introduction to the physics of heavy ion collisions and the quark-gluon plasma, providing material beyond that normally found in the available textbooks. For each of the main aspects - QCD thermodynamics and global features of the QGP, collision hydrodynamics, electromagnetic probes, jet and quarkonium production, color glass condensate, and the gravity connection - the present volume provides extensive and pedagogical lectures, surveying the present status of both theory and experiment. A particular feature of this volume is that all lectures have been written with the active assistance of selected students present at the course in order to ensure the adequate level and coverage for the intended readership.

This book addresses the confinement problem, which quite generally deals with the behavior of non-abelian gauge theories, and the force which is mediated by gauge fields, at large distances. The word “confinement” in the context of hadronic physics originally referred to the fact that quarks and gluons appear to be trapped inside mesons and baryons, from which they cannot escape. There are other, and possibly deeper meanings that can be attached to the term, and these will be explored in this book. Although the confinement problem is far from solved, much is now known about the general features of the confining force, and there are a number of very well motivated theories of confinement which are under active investigation. This volume gives a both pedagogical and concise introduction and overview of the main ideas in this field, their attractive features, and, as appropriate, their shortcomings.