The quark-gluon medium

The properties of the quark-gluon medium observed in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions are discussed. The main experimental facts about these collisions are briefly described and compared with data about proton-proton collisions. Both microscopic and macroscopic approaches to their description are reviewed. The chromodynamics of the quark-gluon medium at high energies is mainly considered. The energy loss of partons moving in this medium is treated. The principal conclusion is that the medium possesses some collective properties which are crucial for understanding the experimental observations.Comment: Final version, to appear in Physics-Uspekh

Future Summary

We are emerging from a period of consolidation in particle physics. Its great, historic achievement was to establish the Theory of Matter. This Theory will serve as our description of ordinary matter under ordinary conditions -- allowing for an extremely liberal definition of "ordinary -- for the foreseeable future. Yet there are many indications, ranging from the numerical to the semi-mystical, that a new fertile period lies before us. We will discover compelling evidence for the unification of fundamental forces and for new quantum dimensions (low-energy supersymmetry). We will identify new forms of matter, which dominate the mass density of the Universe. We will achieve much better fundamental understanding of the behavior of matter in extreme astrophysical and cosmological environments. Lying beyond these expectations, we can identify deep questions that seem to call for ideas outside our present grasp. And there's still plenty of room for surprises.Comment: 25 pages, 13 EPS figures, LaTeX with BoxedEPS macros. Closing talk delivered at the LEPfest, CERN, October 11, 2000. Email correspondence to [email protected]

Strange Quark Matter Theory

Theoretical approaches to strange and other types of quark matter accounted for at the SQM2003 Meeting are reviewed. They range from simple statistical models through perturbative QCD supported mico-dynamical simulations til lattice gauge theory and astrophysics results. Finally some ideas for future research in this field are outlined.Comment: Theory summary talk given at Strange Quark Matter 2003 Conference, March 12-17, 2003, Atlantic Beach, NC, USA. (LateX 19 pages, 15 postscript figures.

QCD and String Theory

This talk begins with some history and basic facts about string theory and its connections with strong interactions. Comparisons of stacks of Dirichlet branes with curved backgrounds produced by them are used to motivate the AdS/CFT correspondence between superconformal gauge theory and string theory on a product of Anti-de Sitter space and a compact manifold. The ensuing duality between semi-classical spinning strings and long gauge theory operators is briefly reviewed. Strongly coupled thermal SYM theory is explored via a black hole in 5-dimensional AdS space, which leads to explicit results for its entropy and shear viscosity. A conjectured universal lower bound on the viscosity to entropy density ratio, and its possible relation to recent results from RHIC, are discussed. Finally, some available results on string duals of confining gauge theories are briefly reviewed.Comment: 12 pages, prepared for the Proceedings of the 2005 Lepton-Photon Symposium; v2: minor revisions, references added, the version to appear in the proceeding

Cosmology

In these lectures we first concentrate on the cosmological problems which, hopefully, have to do with the new physics to be probed at the LHC: the nature and origin of dark matter and generation of matter-antimatter asymmetry. We give several examples showing the LHC cosmological potential. These are WIMPs as cold dark matter, gravitinos as warm dark matter, and electroweak baryogenesis as a mechanism for generating matter-antimatter asymmetry. In the remaining part of the lectures we discuss the cosmological perturbations as a tool for studying the epoch preceeding the conventional hot stage of the cosmological evolution.Comment: 47 pages, set of lectures given at the 2011 European School of High-Energy Physics, Cheile Gradistei, Romania, 7-20 Sep 2011, edited by C. Grojean, M. Mulder