Wanda Maria Alberico - Böcker

By collecting contributions of the many scientists who have interacted with Sergio Fubini and shared his friendship and enthusiasm for unraveling the ultimate mysteries of matter, this book offers a panorama of recent and interesting achievements in experimental and theoretical particle physics, gauge and string theories and the like. It also contains some reports about the historical development of this branch of activity, with its political, financial and cultural implications for the present and future. The common feature of the contributions is the search for symmetry and simplicity in complex phenomena. The book represents a struggle toward the future without forgetting the good and the bad of the past.

The idea of neutrino oscillations was suggested in 1957 by B Pontecorvo, immediately after the discovery of parity violation in β-decay. It took more than 40 years and the efforts of many experimental teams before the first convincing evidence that neutrinos are massive and mixed particles came to light.A central figure in this enthusiastic endeavour to unravel neutrino properties is Samoil M Bilenky, from his early collaboration (in Dubna) with Pontecorvo to his most recent attempts at analyzing and reconciling, in a coherent theoretical framework, the results of many difficult experiments. These aim at the measurement of neutrino masses and oscillations: from the various solar neutrino experiments, via the LSND accelerator experiment, to the most suggestive atmospheric neutrino experiments.This book, which celebrates the seventieth birthday of Samoil M Bilenky, offers a fairly complete overview of theoretical issues and experimental facts about our present understanding of neutrino physics and its implications for astrophysical and cosmological problems. Indeed, some contributions are devoted to more general topics within and beyond the Standard Model, from lattice QCD to dark matter and supersymmetric models.

This book offers the unique possibility of tackling the problem of hadronic deconfinement from different perspectives. After general introductions to the physical issues, from both the theoretical and the experimental point of view, the book presents the most recent expertise on field theory approaches to the QCD phase diagram, many-body techniques and applications, the dynamics of phase transitions, and phenomenological analysis of relativistic heavy ion collisions.One of the major goals of this book is to promote interchange among those fields of research, which have traditionally been cultivated by different communities of physicists. The contributions in the book help in obtaining deep comprehension of this new state of matter, a system of deconfined quarks and gluons. At the same time the book offers a few examples of how the seeds of the deconfined state are looked for in the phenomenological analysis of the observables measured in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The main topics are dealt with in a pedagogical style, suitable for beginners as well as experienced researchers.