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 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 book makes a global survey of nonperturbative aspects of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) from the viewpoints of mathematical, elementary-particle and hadron physics, including recent lattice-QCD results. It presents current, important progress in the following areas: the quark confinement mechanism, dynamical chiral-symmetry breaking, topologies in QCD (instantons, monopoles, vortices), SUSY QCD, nonperturbative methods (1/Nc, ladder QCD, AdS/CFT), QCD phase transition at finite temperature and density, quark-gluon plasma, and so on. For recent topics, the book also includes the experimental.

This volume discusses the exciting physics with new accelerator facilities, which are being constructed or proposed in various places. The facilities are RHIC (Brookhaven), CEBAF (TJINP), SPring-8 (Nishi-Harima), RIBF (RIKEN), JHP (KEK-INS), RIB (MSU), LISS (IUCF) and COSY (Juelich). RHIC aims at the creation of a QCD deconfinement phase and the study of the properties of such matter. CEBAF and SPring-8 use leptons to probe the quark-gluon structures of hadrons and nuclei. LISS and COSY use high resolution hadron beams to study hadron structures. JHP produces strong secondary hadron beams for hyper-nuclear physics and rare decay studies of basic symmetries. RIBF and RIB produce radioactive nuclear beams for the study of the nuclear structure of unstable nuclei far from beta stability, and astrophysics issues.

The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the various pictures of color confinement and its consequences on the properties of hadrons. We consider color confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and the properties of QCD at finite temperature, as the fundamental subjects of QCD. We include discussions on the roles of instantons to hadron physics. We also provide ideas of critical experiments at medium to higher energies to identify the mechanism of color confinement and chiral symmetry breaking.

The contributions in this conference proceeding present an alternative approach to solving the Quantum Field Theory problem using the variational approach. Many different issues are visited using this approach — Yang Mills Theory, going beyond the Guassian Approximation, in QCD and QED.