In this review, we provide a short outlook of some of the currently most popular pictures and promising approaches to non-perturbative physics and confinement in gauge theories. A qualitative and by no means exhaustive discussion presented here cover
s such key topics as the phases of QCD matter, the order parameters for confinement, the central vortex and monopole pictures of the QCD vacuum structure, fundamental properties of the string tension, confinement realisations in gauge-Higgs and Yang-Mills theories, magnetic order/disorder phase transition among others.
Measurements of three-dimensional correlation functions of like-sign low transverse momentum kaon pairs from Au+Au collisions at top RHIC energy $sqrt s_{NN}$=200 GeV are presented. The extracted kaon source function is narrower than the pion one and
does not have the long tail along the pair transverse momentum direction. This indicates a much smaller role of long-lived resonance decays and/or of the emission duration on kaon emission. Three-dimensional Gaussian shape of the kaon source function can be adequately reproduced by Therminator simulations with resonance contributions taken into account. Comparison to pion data at the same energy reveals that the kaon Gaussian radii in the outward and sideward directions scale with the transverse mass $m_T$. In the longitudinal direction, unlike at lower SPS energies, the Gaussian radii do not seem to follow the exact $m_T$ scaling between kaons and pions.
Results from the Beam Energy Scan (BES) program conducted by STAR experiment at RHIC are presented. The data from Phase-I of the BES program collected in Au+Au collisions at center-of-mass energies ($sqrt{s_{NN}}$) of 7.7, 11.5, 19.6, 27, and 39 GeV
cover a wide range of baryon chemical potential $mu_{B}$ (100--400 MeV) in the QCD phase diagram. Several STAR results from the BES Phase-I related to turn-off of strongly interacting quark--gluon plasma (sQGP) signatures and signals of QCD phase boundary are reported. In addition to this, an outlook is presented for the future BES Phase-II program and a possible fixed target program at STAR.
Recent soft physics results from collisions of ultra-relativistic nuclei at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) operating at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) are reviewed. Topics discussed cover the Beam Energy Scan program with some emphasis on anisotropic particle flow.
