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Ions are atoms or molecules stripped of their electrons, so they can be accelerated by electric fields. They can be made to hit each other with low energy, intermediate energy, high energy, or very high energy; each energy range seeks to investigate different aspects of hadronic physics. Intermediate-energy heavy ion collisions explore the nuclei far from stability valley, the incompressibility of nuclear matter, the liquid-gas phase transition in nuclear environment, the symmetry energy far from the normal density, and other phenomena. This has been an active field of research for last four decades.This is a book for entrants in the field. It is suitable as a companion book in a graduate course. For practitioners in the field it will be useful as a reference.

This is a sequel to the review volume Quark-Gluon Plasma. There are 13 articles contributed by leading investigators in the field, covering a wide range of topics about the theoretical approach to the subject. These contributions are timely reviews of nearly all the actively pursued problems, written in a pedagogical style suitable for beginners as well as experienced researchers.

This book gives an overview of relativistic heavy ion physics with particular emphasis on those theoretical approaches which seek an understanding and explanation of the measurements. These approaches try to build a bridge between more basic theories, such as lattice QCD or nucleon-nucleon interactions, and complicated experimental observables involving a large number of particles. Thus, mainly theoretical approaches are discussed here which are strongly and directly related to experiments, and in turn they are phenomenological to some extent. These models use the available information from more complete reaction model describing the whole collision and the observables.It is suitable as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students - both experimentalists and theorists - for studies in the field of relativistic heavy ion physics. It may also serve as a handbook where basic concepts of reaction models can be found and the most important references for further reading are provided.