Temperature and heat, entropy and order or disorder are key classical
concepts of physics. These are challenged by searching matter under
extreme conditions, such as high (relativistic) energy, strong
acceleration or gravitation, or unusual complexity due to long range
correlations. In our quest for quark matter all these conditions might
occur simultaneously. This book, strongly motivated by the authors'
everyday research experiences in the field of high-energy heavy-ion
collisions, aims to bundle these challenges to modern physics.
The main topic is at the heart of thermodynamics -- the very concept of
temperature, its use and extensions. New developments on this issue are
both applications and foundations of non-extensive statistics, as well
as concepts borrowed from gravity and string theory to describe the
surprisingly statistical behavior of elementary matter at the highest
accelerator energies of the world.
The reader will benefit from bringing these new developments in one book
together, by having the view of classical and modern concepts at the
heart of physics across the problems related to high-energy, high
acceleration and high complexity.
After reviewing the classical approaches, the author discusses the
dual-gravity and non-extensive statistical aspects of heavy-ion
collisions, describing these experimental findings with the use of the
concept of temperature.