A brief review on the recent theoretical progress in hot/dense QCD is given. Special emphasis is put on the non-perturbative aspects of QCD plasma and the modification of hadron proporties near the critical temperature of chiral transition.

A unique transition state is a precursor of quark matter formation. We point out the hallmarks of this state and evaluate the quark diffusion coefficient in the vicinity of the QCD critical line. During the last decade the investigation of the quark matter at finite temperature and density became a compelling topic in QCD. Drawn in the (T, μ) plane with μ being the quark chemical potential the ...

According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), matter at ultra-high densities will take the form of a color-superconducting quark liquid, in which there is a condensate of Cooper pairs of quarks near the Fermi surface. I present a review of the physics of color superconductivity. I give particular attention to the recently proposed gapless CFL (gCFL) phase, which has unusual properties such as quas...

As it has been discussed widely during this conference, strangeness opens a new dimensions to nuclear physics. Insofar, systems with strangeness number S = −1,−2 have been discussed. Here we want to examine the unknown domain of finite nuclear systems with S < −2. There have been speculations about the existence of finite systems of strange quark matter (strangelets) and strange hadronic matter...

The collisions of large nuclei may give us insight into the nature of QCD at high temperatures and/or densities. In this talk I review the status of theory for heavy ion collisions from Quark Matter 2002. I concentrate on the the results for the largest nuclei, with atomic number A ≈ 200. At the SPS at CERN, there are two notable results for AA collisions, for √ s/A : 5 → 17 GeV [1]: J/Ψ suppre...

Highlights of Quark Matter 95 are discussed. 1. The View from Mount RHIC This year marked a major milestone in the field of high energy nuclear collisions. Lead beams were successfully accelerated to 160 AGeV at the CERN/SPS and the first data Rapidity y or η Au+Au from AGS to RHIC HIJING1.3

We suggest a scenario where the three light quark flavors are sequentially deconfined under increasing pressure in cold asymmetric nuclear matter as, e.g., in neutron stars. The basis for our analysis is a chiral quark matter model of Nambu– Jona-Lasinio (NJL) type with diquark pairing in the single flavor color-spin-locking (CSL), two-flavor (2SC) and three-flavor color-flavor locking (CFL) ch...

We discuss the fermionic excitation spectra of the dense QCD and QED plasma at zero temperature, and analyze the stability of the normal (perturbative) ground state. The standard re-summed perturbation theory breaks down because the infrared (IR) divergences show up in the spectra near the Fermi surface. We employ the effective field theory approach and the renormalization group to investigate ...

The simplest pattern of color superconductivity involves BCS pairing between up and down quarks. We argue that this “2SC” phase, and variants of it, will not arise within a compact star. A macroscopic volume of quark matter must be electrically neutral and must be a color singlet. Satisfying these requirements imposes a significant free energy cost on the 2SC phase, but not on color-flavor lock...