The flavours of the quark–gluon plasma

Quarks of other flavours than up and down, i.e. s, c and b quarks, have been long recognized as effective probes of the structure of hot QCD matter. In this paper, I review some of the motivations for their investigation and discuss the salient results obtained so far, with a focus on the results from the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC). Some ideas for future studies are also mentioned.