'The book offers a broad overview of the facilities around the world at which the relevant experiments have been carried out or are planned, and of the theoretical concepts and methods through which the results of these experiments can be interpreted. I am fairly sure that this volume will provide experts with a useful and timely summary of the state of their field, while sufficiently assiduous newcomers will find it a tolerably good starting point for further exploration.' Contemporary Physics
Part I. A New Phase of Matter?: 1. Micro-bang: big bang in the laboratory; 2. Hadrons; 3. Vacuum as a physical medium; 4. Statistical properties of hadronic matter; Part II. Analysis Tools and Experiments: 5. Nuclei in collision; 6. Understanding collision dynamics; 7. Entropy and its relevance in heavy ion collisions; Part III. Particle Production: 8. Particle spectra; 9. Highlights of hadron production; Part IV. Hot Hadronic Matter: 10. Relativistic gas; 11. First look at hadronic gas; 12. Hagedorn gas; Part V. QCD, Hadronic Structure and High Temperature: 13. Hadronic structure and quantum chromodynamics; 14. Perturbative QCD; 15. Lattice quantum chromodynamics; 16. Perturbative quark-gluon plasma; Part VI. Strangeness: 17. Thermal flavor production in deconfined phase; 18. Strangeness background; 19. Hadron freeze-out analysis.