Universal Aspects of Strongly Interacting Matter under Extreme Conditions
Dr. habil Lorenz von Smekal (TU Darmstadt)

Strongly interacting matter fuels the stars and makes up almost the entire mass of the luminous universe. The underlying theory of quarks and gluons, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), completely specifies the interactions. However, these are so complex and non-linear that they have yet to be fully understood. Indeed, it is these strong interactions which under normal conditions confine quarks and gluons into the interior of hadrons. Understanding the generation of their masses, the confinement of quarks and gluons, the different phases of QCD at extreme temperatures or densities and the transitions between them are some of the great challenges in physics. In this talk I will discuss and illustrate universal aspects of chiral symmetry restoration and the deconfinement transition, and I will briefly describe the status of non-perturbative functional methods to investigate the QCD phase diagram.