Edited and authored by the pioneers and leading experts in this newly emerging field, this book offers a valuable resource for a broad community of physicists and graduate students.

The purpose and motivation of these lectures can be summarized in the following two questions: What is the ground state (and its properties) of dense matter? What is the matter composition of a compact star? The two questions are, of course, strongly coupled to each other. Depending on your point of view, you can either consider the ?rst as the main question and the second as a consequence or application of the ?rst, or vice versa. If you are interested in fundamental questions in particle physics you may take the former point of view: you ask the question what happens to matter if you...