Nuclear collisions at intermediate, relativistic, and ultra-relativistic
energies offer unique opportunities to study in detail manifold fragmentation
and clustering phenomena in dense nuclear matter. At intermediate energies, the
well known processes of nuclear multifragmentation -- the disintegration of
bulk nuclear matter in clusters of a wide range of sizes and masses -- allow
the study of the critical point of the equation of state of nuclear matter. At
very high energies, ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions offer a glimpse at
the substructure of hadronic matter by crossing the phase boundary to the
quark-gluon plasma. The hadronization of the quark-gluon plasma created in the
fireball of a ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collision can be considered, again,
as a clustering process. We will present two models which allow the simulation
of nuclear multifragmentation and the hadronization via the formation of
clusters in an interacting gas of quarks, and will discuss the importance of
clustering to our understanding of hadronization in ultra-relativistic
heavy-ion collisions.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure
