The physics of the quark-gluon plasma

This paper is based on a series of eleven lectures that were presented at a workshop on The Physics of the Quark-Gluon Plasma held at Hua-Zhong Normal University in Wuhan, People's Republic of China, in September 1983. The lectures were updated for publication in November 1985. They cover perturbation theory of the plasma at high temperature, as well as the nonperturbative methods and results of lattice gauge theory computations. Physical models of the confinement-deconfinement phase transition and the modes of chiral symmetry breaking are presented. The possibility that a quark-gluon plasma might be produced in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions is briefly discussed in the introductory lecture.