Horst Stocker - Böcker

The International Conference on Nuclear Physics at the Turn of the Millennium: Structure of Vacuum and Elementary Matter, held on March 10th to March 16th, 1996 at Wilderness/George, South Africa, is in honor of the 60th birthday of Prof Walter Greiner. Topics included: Supercritical Fields and Pair-Production in Heavy-Ion Collisions; Superheavy Nuclei, Exotic Nuclear States and Decays; Superdense Matter in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions: Collective Flow, Particle Production and the Nuclear Equation of State, Phase Transitions in QCD, Strange Matter and Signatures of the Quark Gluon Plasma.

This proceedings volume gives a consistent overview of various theoretical and experimental programs which study the dynamics of nucleus-nucleus collisions from low to ultra-relativistic energies. The contributions concentrate on the following topics: cold fragmentation of nuclear matter, pre-equilibrium and thermalization, thermal and chemical equilibration, fragmentation and correlations in intermediate energy collisions, dynamical properties of hot and dense nuclear matter in medium effects, resonance and strange nuclear matter, and signals of the deconfined state.High quality data obtained using experimental devices close to 4π geometries and recent theoretical developments are presented. They illustrate the significant progress made during the last few years in understanding the properties of nuclear matter in extreme conditions of pressure and temperature.This book serves as a graduate textbook and as a reference work on recent developments in this area.

Walter Greiner (1935-2016) was a German physicist of the Goethe University, Frankfurt, well-known for his many contributions in scientific research and developments, in particular the field of nuclear physics. He was a well-respected science leader and a teacher who had supervised batches of young collaborators and students, many of whom are now leaders in both academics and industry worldwide. Greiner had a wide interest of science which covered atomic physics, heavy-ion physics, and nuclear astrophysics. Greiner co-founded GSI, the Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, and the multi-disciplinary research center, FIAS (Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies). Besides numerous professorship with universities worldwide, including the University of Maryland, Greiner received many prestigious prizes in honor of his outstanding contributions, among others are the Otto Hahn Prize and the Max Born Prize.This memorial volume is a special tribute by Greiner's former colleagues, students, and friends honoring his contributions and passion in science. The volume begins with a writing by Greiner about his early days in science. The subsequent articles, comprising personal and scientific reminiscences of Walter Greiner, serve as timely reviews on various topics of current interest.