The physics of the quark-gluon plasma

These notes have grown out of a set of lectures given at the Universite de Liege in Spring 1983 for the 3eme Cycle FNRS en Physique Nucleaire. In several cases simple calculations had to be done in order to be able to give even a crude estimate of the importance of specific processes or effects. Such considerations concern, e.g.: pion radiation from the surface of the plasma, the possible lifetime of a supercooled quark-gluon plasma phase in the case of a first-order phase transition, the analysis of the momentum-dependence of the running coupling constant asub(s) (q, T) at finite temperature and the influence of finite bag size on the apparent number of degrees of freedom of the quark-gluon plasma. (orig./HSI)