| Description |
While magnetic field strengths created in solid state physics laboratories do not exceed 106 Gauss, much stronger fields can be present in compact astrophysical objects. For instance near the surface of a magnetar these can reach values as high as 1015 Gauss, with even higher values towards the core. In such fields atoms become essentially two-dimensional objects. Recently, it was realized that in heavy ion collisions at the Brookhaven National Lab as well as at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN even larger field strengths are being generated, for very short periods of time, in very small volumes. These magnetic fields are so strong that in their presence even some properties of strongly interacting matter, composed of quarks and gluons, will change, possibly with observable consequences. I will describe theoretical expectations relating to matter in such environments. These have mostly been obtained by simulating quantum chromodynamics on a spacetime lattice on supercomputers. |