From hadron gas to quark matter, 1

An analytical, non-perturbative description of a strongly interacting hadron gas is presented. Its main features are: the formulation is relativistically covariant, hadrons have finite extensions which are treated a la Van der Waals and their strong interactions are simulated by a hadronic mass spectrum generated by a bootstrap equation under the constraints of baryon number conservation. The system exhibits a singularity, which has the typical features of a phase transition gas to liquid, but which the authors interpret here as the transition into a quark-gluon plasma phase, which, however, cannot be described by this model. (16 refs).