Abstract
These lectures provide a modern introduction to selected topics in the
physics of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions which shed light on the
fundamental theory of strong interactions, the Quantum Chromodynamics. The
emphasis is on the partonic forms of QCD matter which exist in the early and
intermediate stages of a collision -- the colour glass condensate, the glasma,
and the quark-gluon plasma -- and on the effective theories that are used for
their description. These theories provide qualitative and even quantitative
insight into a wealth of remarkable phenomena observed in nucleus-nucleus or
deuteron-nucleus collisions at RHIC and/or the LHC, like the suppression of
particle production and of azimuthal correlations at forward rapidities, the
energy and centrality dependence of the multiplicities, the ridge effect, the
limiting fragmentation, the jet quenching, or the dijet asymmetry.
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