Physics of hot and dense QCD

Abstract

We give a brief review of modern theoretical understanding of the physics of QCD at finite temperature and density. We concentrate in particular on the properties of hadron gas at relatively small temperatures and discuss in details the physics of the phase transition. We argue that the phase transition in temperature is probably absent, but it can appear with a vengeance when finite density effects are taken into account. We notice also that the temperatures one can expect to reach at the heavy ion collider at RHIC are not yet high enough for the perturbation theory in the QCD coupling constant to work well.