Ebook: The Physics of the Quark-Gluon Plasma: Introductory Lectures

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.

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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 Computational Methods for Hyperbolic Equations.- Shock-Capturing Schemes in Computational MHD.- The Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability.- Pressure-Driven Instabilities in Astrophysical Jets.- Thermal Instabilities.- The Oscillatory Instability of Radioactive Shock Waves.- Index