Particle Production in Highly Excited Matter

Seven years after the first experiments in the new field of Nuclear Physics, the Highly Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics, the Nato-Advanced- Study-Institute on the 'Particle Production in Highly Excited Matter' was held from July 12 till July 24, 1992, at Il Ciocco, Castelvecchio Pascoli, near Lucca in Italy. The school took place at a mo ment when intensive efforts are mounted by the scientific community of Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics to meet the extraordinary challenge of the new upcoming physics opportunities. The gold beams of 10 GeV A at Brookhaven AGS have been sent to the experiments this Summer and we extent our congratulations to the persons and teams who made this possible. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven is under construction and expected to allow experiments to see collisions in the intersec tion regions early 1998. The lead beams at the SPS at CERN scheduled for summer 1994 are eagerly awaited by 6 large experiments, and many scientists are planning the experiments at the planned LHC with heavy ions to be turned on before the year 2000. Seen against this background of rather fierce activity, we were most delighted when NATO accepted our application for an Advanced Study Institute oriented to the main subject of this young and dynamic field of research. We are very grateful to the Scientific Affairs Division of NATO and Dr. L. DaCunha, the director of the Advanced Study Institute program for giving our community this opportunity.

Proceedings of a NATO ASI held in Il Ciocco, Tuscany, Italy, July 12-24, 1992

Big Bang in the Laboratory.- Physics of the Quark-Gluon Plasma.- Physics of Relativistic Nuclear Collisions.- From the BEVALAC to RHIC: Recent Results and Future Perspectives.- Towards the LHC.- Low pt Physics and Compact Detectors at RHIC and LHC.- pp and $$bar pp$$ Collisions.- Fireball Spectra.- Quark Matter in Equilibrium.- Surface Energy and Chiral Interface of a Coexisting Quark-Hadron System.- Rehadronisation of the Quark-Gluon Plasma.- Cascade Models and Particle Production: A Comparison.- Relativistic Hydrodynamics and Flavor Flow.- Flavor Flow in Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions: The RQMD Approach.- Quark-Gluon Plasma Formation in Ultra-Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions.- Jets and High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions.- Dynamical Approach to Pair Production from Strong Fields.- Particle Production and Vacuum Structure in Strong Fields.- A Pedestrians Guide to Interferometry.- Multiparticle Correlations and Fluctuations in High Energy Hadronic and Nuclear Collisions.- Meson Spectra - What we can learn from Single Particle Distributions.- Strangeness in Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions.- On the Trail of Quark-Gluon Plasma: Strange Antibaryons in Nuclear Collisions.- Strangeness Production in the S+Pb and p+Pb Collisions at 200 GeV/c per Nucleon.- Physics from Photon and Lepton-Pair Spectra.- Photons and Lepton Pairs - The Deep Probes of Quark-Gluon Plasma.- Probing the Primordial State in High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions.- Pion Dynamics and Lepton Pair Production.- Kinetics of Pre-equilibrium Parton Matter Probed by Dilepton Radiation.- Coherent Photon Interactions in Central and Peripheral Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions.- Particle Production, Hadron Deconfinement and Thermodynamics in p-p Interaction.- The Quark-Gluon Plasma: Searchfor the Holy Grail.