In the last hundred years, modern physics and cosmology have shown that there exist regions of the universe forever beyond our reach, hidden by truly ultimate horizons. Such regions exist in those remote parts of the universe where, from our point of view, space expands faster than the speed of light. They are found in black holes, where the gravity is strong enough to retain even light within its field of attraction. And in the realm of the very small, quarks must remain forever confined to their world of extreme density and can never be removed from it. The aim of this book is to describe these ultimate horizons, how they were discovered, how they shape our view of the world, and what clues we have about a world beyond them.

The aim of this book is to offer to the next generation of young researchers a broad and largely self-contained introduction to the physics of heavy ion collisions and the quark-gluon plasma, providing material beyond that normally found in the available textbooks. For each of the main aspects - QCD thermodynamics and global features of the QGP, collision hydrodynamics, electromagnetic probes, jet and quarkonium production, color glass condensate, and the gravity connection - the present volume provides extensive and pedagogical lectures, surveying the present status of both theory and experiment. A particular feature of this volume is that all lectures have been written with the active assistance of selected students present at the course in order to ensure the adequate level and coverage for the intended readership.

From the Editors Preface: ""Quark Matter 1987" was attended by about 250 scientists, representing 75 research institutions around the world - the scientific community engaged in experimental and theoretical studies of high energy nuclear collisions. The central theme of the meeting was the possibility of achieving extreme energy densities in extended systems of strongly interacting matter - with the ultimate aim of creating in the laboratory a deconfined state of matter, a state in which quarks and gluons attain the active degrees of freedom. High energy accelerator beams and cosmic radiation projectiles provide the experimental tools for this endeavour; on the theoretical side, it is intimately connected to recent developments in the non-perturbative study of quantum chromodynamics. Phase transitions between hadronic matter and quark-gluon plasma are of basic interest also for our understanding of the dynamics of the early universe ... A very special feature of this Sixth Quark Matter Conference was the advent of the first experimental results from dedicated accelerator studies. These were conducted during 1986/87 at the AGS of Brookhaven National Laboratory ... and at the CERN SPS ... An intense discussion of these data formed the main activity of the meeting.

This volume contains the Proceedings of'the International Workshop "Lattice Gauge Theory 1986," held at Brookhaven National Laboratory, September 15 - 19, 1986. The meeting was the sequel to the one held at Wuppertal in 1985, the Proceedings of which have appeared in the same Plenum series. During the past few years, a considerable number of meetings on lat tice gauge theory have been held, on both sides of the Atlantic. With our workshop, through early planning and coordination with other prospective organizers, we tried to channel this activity into one major yearly meeting. For 1986, these efforts were successful, and it is our hope that a pattern has been set for the coming years. One result, however, was that the number of participants considerably exceeded that normally found at NATO Advanced Research Workshops. This year, a "nucleus" of NATO-supported experts induced a large number of further interested specialists to obtain their own funds - thus greatly amplifying the impact of the event. The topics covered at the workshop ranged from hadron spectra to strong interaction thermo dynamics; they included spontaneous symmetry breaking and Higgs models, renormalization group methods, as well as many contributions on various possible schemes for the simulation of dynamical quarks. First systematic applications of finite size scaling to lattice gauge theory were discussed, and the approach to the continuum limit was considered in detail."

The aim of this book is to offer to the next generation of young researchers a broad and largely self-contained introduction to the physics of heavy ion collisions and the quark-gluon plasma, providing material beyond that normally found in the available textbooks.

For each of the main aspects - QCD thermodynamics and global features of the QGP, collision hydrodynamics, electromagnetic probes, jet and quarkonium production, color glass condensate, and the gravity connection - the present volume provides extensive and pedagogical lectures, surveying the present status of both theory and experiment.

A particular feature of this volume is that all lectures have been written with the active assistance of selected students present at the course in order to ensure the adequate level and coverage for the intended readership.

Der 4. Juli 2012 stellt ein historisches Datum fur das Europaische Kernforschungszentrum CERN in Genf dar: die Verkundung der Entdeckung des letzten, vorhergesagten, noch fehlenden und lange gesuchten Elementarteilchens, des Higgs-Bosons. Ein Jahr spater kommen im Rahmen der Konferenz des Zentrums fur interdisziplinare Forschung (ZiF) in Bielefeld eine Vielzahl der mit dem Grossprojekt am CERN verbundenen Wissenschaftler zusammen, um nicht nur uber die Entdeckung des Teilchens, sondern vor allem uber die Realisierung und Bedeutung eines derart ungeheuren Unterfangens fur solch ein wissenschaftliches Grossprojekt zu berichten. Der Generaldirektor des CERN, Prof. Dr. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, liefert in seinem Eroeffnungsvortrag die Grundlage fur die Diskussion der vielerlei Aspekte, die dabei ins Spiel kommen. So finden sich im vorliegenden Band zum einen Berichte uber die Grossforschung selbst: von der Entdeckung des Higgs-Teilchens uber die Erforschung des Quark-Gluon-Plasmas und die Bedeutung von Theorien der Neuen Physik, wie der Supersymmetrie, bis hin zur Gefahr durch Schwarze Mikroloecher. Zum anderen werden Themen werden Themen wie der Bau und die Finanzierung von Grossprojekten, wie dem LHC am CERN oder dem FAIR in Darmstadt, naher beleuchtet. Daruber hinaus bereichern Beitrage uber die philosophischen Aspekte und kulturellen bzw. gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen der wissenschaftlichen Grossforschung am LHC den interdisziplinaren Austausch um weitere Perspektiven. Durch eine Vielzahl an Informationsboxen werden dem Leser relevante Hintergrunde und die notwendigen physikalischen Sachverhalte nahergebracht.