Since the seminal paper titled “Remarks on the chiral phase transition in chromodynamics” by Pisarski and Wilczek in 1984, tremendous progress has been made in our understanding of the phase structure of strong-interaction matter, e.g. it has been established from lattice-regularized Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) that strong-interaction matter undergoes a rapid crossover transition from the hadronic phase to the quark-gluon plasma phase.
Despite this progress key questions related to the fate of symmetry breaking patterns under extreme conditions of high temperature and large baryon number density as well as other control parameters, and particularly the influence of the axial anomaly on QCD phase transitions still remain elusive. These key questions are not only of theoretical interest but also closely related to the on-going ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions experiments. This workshop aims at bringing together experts in the field as well as young practitioners to discuss the latest developments on these studies.