By Reinhard Stock (auth.), R. Stock (eds.)

This new quantity, I/23, of the Landolt-Börnstein information assortment sequence maintains a convention inaugurated via the overdue Editor-in-Chief, Professor Werner Martienssen, to supply within the form of an encyclopedia a precis of the implications and concepts of Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics. previously, the Landolt-Börnstein sequence was once in most cases referred to as a compilation of numerical info and practical relatives, however it was once felt that the extra complete precis undertaken the following should still meet an pressing objective. quantity I/23 experiences at the current country of theoretical and experimental wisdom within the box of Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics. what's intended through this relatively technical terminology is the research of strongly interacting subject, and its stages (in brief QCD topic) by way of nucleus-nucleus collisions at relativistic power. The previous decade has obvious a dramatic development, and widening of scope during this box, which addresses one of many leader ultimate open frontiers of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and, in a much wider feel, the "Standard version of undemanding Interactions". the information because of the CERN SPS, BNL AGS and GSI SIS experiments, and particularly additionally from virtually a decade of experiments performed on the "Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider"(RHIC) at Brookhaven, were totally analyzed, uncovering a wealth of knowledge approximately either the restricted and deconfined stages of QCD at excessive strength density.