New book on phase transitions in high-energy physics

The textbook Principles of Phase Structures in Particle Physics, published by World Scientific Publishing in the series “World Scientific Lecture Notes in Physics”, explores the field of particle physics under extreme conditions such as presumed to have existed in the beginnings of the universe. The book, authored by Hildegard Meyer-Ortmanns, Physics Professor at Jacobs University, and Thomas Reisz, formerly Heidelberg University, is available now.

[ Aug 15, 2007]  Every day experiences of phase transitions are those from ice to water and water to vapor for instance. But how much must temperature increase until ordinary matter dissolves into its truly elementary constituents, and how does the gas of elementary particles look like, after a transition to a plasma that is made out of the quarks and gluons which usually are confined in the atomic nuclei? For sure such plasma has quite different properties from ordinary matter under conditions of daily life. The book by the physicists Hildegard Meyer-Ortmanns and Thomas Reisz addresses the phase structure of particle physics, which shows up in matter at extremely high densities and/or extremely high temperatures. Such extreme conditions were reached in the early universe, shortly after the big bang, and they are realized nowadays in heavy-ion collisions, performed in laboratory experiments. The book explores the underlying fundamental theories as well as their macroscopic manifestations in phase transitions, which are much less known.

Principles of Phase Structures in Particle Physics contains a number of introductory parts suited for graduate students and post-docs who are interested in field theory and statistical physics’ aspects of particle physics. It also provides advanced chapters for physicists with some expertise in the field. To the variety of analytical and numerical tools, explored in this book, belong convergent and asymptotic expansions in strong and weak couplings, dimensional reduction, renormalization group studies, gap equations, Monte Carlo simulations with and without fermions, finite-size and finite-mass scaling analyses, and the approach of effective actions as supplement to first-principle calculations. The book concludes with a short summary of possible experimental manifestations of the quark-gluon plasma which is an exotic state of matter, nowadays created during heavy-ion collisions for very short instances of time, at which the temperature is of the order of 10¹² K.