Current studies on heavy hadrons in nuclear medium are reviewed with a summary of the basic theoretical concepts of QCD, namely chiral symmetry, heavy quark spin symmetry, and the effective Lagrangian approach. The nuclear matter is an interesting place to study the properties of heavy hadrons from many different points of view. We emphasize the importance of the following topics: (i) charm/bottom hadron-nucleon interaction, (ii) structure of charm/bottom nuclei, and (iii) QCD vacuum properties and hadron modifications in nuclear medium. We pick up three different groups of heavy hadrons, quarkonia (J/ψ, Υ), heavy-light mesons (D/D,B/B) and heavy baryons (Λ c , Λ b ). The modifications of those hadrons in nuclear matter provide us with important information to investigate the essential properties of heavy hadrons. We also give the discussions about the heavy hadrons, not only in infinite nuclear matter, but also in finite-size atomic nuclei with finite baryon numbers, to serve future experiments. but it is "renormalized" to the low energy degrees of freedom such as the collective modes (e.g. surface vibration, rotation, nucleon pairings) [9].2 We notice that, for the light u and d flavors, the first excited state of the nucleon, N (1535) with spin-parity J P = 1/2 − , is well explained as an orbital excitation of valence quarks (P-wave excitation), but with an s quark the corresponding state, Λ(1405) with J P = 1/2 − , shows up with very different structure governed by theKN -πΣ dynamics.4 See for example Ref. [28]. 5 This is an example of the quantum fluctuations, which are important in the state with finite baryon number density.Such fluctuation effect is suppressed at finite temperature. 6 The Kondo effect is a known phenomena caused by the Fermi instability when the heavy impurity particle with non-Abelian interaction exists (see Sect. 4).(j ) J with total spin J and brown muck spin j decays to the final heavy hadron Ψ (j) J with total spin J and brown muck spin j by emitting a light hadron, e.g. a pion π with relative angular momentum L. Due to the independent conservations of the heavy quark spin S and the brown muck spin j, we see that the strength of the decay widths is parametrized as(2.2.45) by neglecting the corrections with the heavy hadron mass M [57]. Here J ( ) = j ( ) ± 1/2. In realistic application to experimental data, we need to include the phase space factor due to the different mass thresholds. Including this factor, we can reproduce the branching ratios of the known decay patterns of 8 We notice the conservation of J is valid only when the vacuum is rotationally invariant. If the rotational symmetry is broken, we cannot apply the following discussion. For example, such situation can happen when the external field (e.g. a magnetic field [56]) breaks the rotational symmetry.11 Note that the notations are different from those in Sect. 2.3.1 as fπ = √ 2F , ξ = u, V µ = −a µ , A µ = −a µ ⊥ and Uq = h. 12 We note that the covariant derivative forqQ meson is defined by D µ Hv = ∂ µ Hv + iHvV µ [26]...