With its many beautiful colour pictures, this book gives fascinating insights into the unusual forms and behaviour of matter under extremely high pressures and temperatures. These extreme states are generated, among other things, by strong shock, detonation and electric explosion waves, dense laser beams, electron and ion beams, hypersonic entry of spacecraft into dense atmospheres of planets and in many other situations characterized by extremely high pressures and temperatures. Written by one of the world's foremost experts on the topic, this book will inform and fascinate all scientists dealing with materials properties and physics and also serve as an excellent introduction to plasma-, shock-wave and high-energy-density physics for students and newcomers seeking an overview. This second edition is thoroughly revised and expanded, in particular with new material on high energy-density physics, nuclear explosions and other nuclear transformation processes.

This exhaustive survey is the result of a four year effort by many leading researchers in the field to produce both a readable introduction and a yardstick for the many upcoming experiments using heavy ion collisions to examine the properties of nuclear matter. The books falls naturally into five large parts, first examining the bulk properties of strongly interacting matter, including its equation of state and phase structure. Part II discusses elementary hadronic excitations of nuclear matter, Part III addresses the concepts and models regarding the space-time dynamics of nuclear collision experiments, Part IV collects the observables from past and current high-energy heavy-ion facilities in the context of the theoretical predictions specific to compressed baryonic matter. Part V finally gives a brief description of the experimental concepts. The book explicitly addresses everyone working or planning to enter the field of high-energy nuclear physics.

This book addresses the needs of growing community of graduate students and researchers new to the area, for a survey that covers a wide range of pertinent topics, summarizes the current status of the field, and provides the necessary pedagogical materials for newcomers. The investigation of strongly interacting matter under the influence of macroscopic rotational motion is a new, emerging area of research that encompasses a broad range of conventional physics disciplines such as nuclear physics, astrophysics, and condensed matter physics, where the non-trivial interplay between global rotation and spin is generating many novel phenomena. Edited and authored by leading researchers in the field, this book covers the following topics: thermodynamics and equilibrium distribution of rotating matter; quantum field theory and rotation; phase structure of QCD matter under rotation; kinetic theory of relativistic rotating matter; hydrodynamics with spin; magnetic effects in fluid systems with high vorticity and charge; polarization measurements in heavy ion collisions; hydrodynamic modeling of the QCD plasma and polarization calculation in relativistic heavy ion collisions; chiral vortical effect; rotational effects and related topics in neutron stars and condensed matter systems.

This book focuses on the non-traditional branches of physics and mechanics of shock waves that have arisen recently in connection with the intensive study of these waves in a wide variety of phenomena - from nuclear matter to clusters of galaxies. The book is devoted to the various physical phenomena and properties of intense shock waves. The author addresses methods of generation, diagnostics, as well as theoretical methods for describing shock waves at extremely high pressures and temperatures in laboratory and quasi-laboratory conditions. The state of materials with high energy density generated by shock wave compression is discussed. In addition, the book aims to systematize, generalize, and describe from a universal viewpoint the extensive theoretical and experimental material on the physics of high energy densities - the physics and mechanics of intense shock waves. The book is based on lectures delivered by the author at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Higher School of Physics of Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation, as well as overviews presented at many scientific conferences and symposia. It is useful to a wide range of researchers in natural sciences, giving them access to original works and allowing them to navigate the fascinating problems of the modern science of intense shock waves.

The thermodynamics of strongly interacting matter has become a profound and challenging area of modern physics, both in theory and in experiment. Statistical quantum chromodynamics, through analytical as well as numerical studies, provides the main theoretical tool, while in experiment, high-energy nuclear collisions are the key for extensive laboratory investigations. The field therefore straddles statistical, particle and nuclear physics, both conceptually and in the methods of investigation used. This course-tested primer addresses above all the many young scientists starting their scientific research in this field, providing them with a general, self-contained introduction that emphasizes in particular the basic concepts and ideas, with the aim of explaining why we do what we do. To achieve this goal, the present text concentrates mainly on equilibrium thermodynamics: first, the fundamental ideas of strong interaction thermodynamics are introduced and then the main concepts and methods used in the study of the physics of complex systems are summarized. Subsequently, simplified phenomenological pictures, leading to critical behavior in hadronic matter and to hadron-quark phase transitions are introduced, followed by elements of finite-temperature lattice QCD leading to the important results obtained in computer simulation studies of the lattice approach. Next, the relation of the resulting critical behavior to symmetry breaking/restoration in QCD is clarified before the text turns to the study of the QCD phase diagram. The presentation of bulk equilibrium thermodynamics is completed by studying the properties of the quark-gluon plasma as new state of strongly interacting matter. The final chapters of the book are devoted to more specific topics which arise when nuclear collisions are considered as a tool for the experimental study of QCD thermodynamics.

The equation of state was originally developed for ideal gases, and proved central to the development of early molecular and atomic physics. Increasingly sophisticated equations of state have been developed to take into account molecular interactions, quantization, relativistic effects, etc.Extreme conditions of matter are encountered both in nature and in the laboratory, for example in the centres of stars, in relativistic collisions of heavy nuclei, in inertial confinement fusion (where a temperature of 109 K and a pressure exceeding a billion atmospheres can be achieved). A sound knowledge of the equation of state is a prerequisite for understanding processes at very high temperatures and pressures, as noted in some recent developments.This book presents a detailed pedagogical account of the equation of state and its applications in several important and fast-growing topics in theoretical physics, chemistry and engineering.