Quark Matter and Nuclear Collisions: A Brief History of Strong Interaction Thermodynamics

Abstract

The past fifty years have seen the emergence of a new field of research in physics, the study of matter at extreme temperatures and densities. The theory of strong interactions, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), predicts that in this limit, matter will become a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons -- the medium which made up the early universe in the first 10 microseconds after the big bang. High energy nuclear collisions are expected to produce short-lived bubbles of such a medium in the laboratory. I survey the merger of statistical QCD and nuclear collision studies for the analysis of strongly interacting matter in theory and experiment.