Related papers: Experiments at the CERN SPS: first signals of deco…
Statistical calculations within the Standard Model indicate that at extremely high densities the quarks and gluons will become deconfined, leading to a new state of matter, the so-called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Recently it was announced…
This review presents a unified account of the NA35, NA49, and NA61/SHINE experiments, which together form a continuous programme of heavy-ion studies conducted at the H2 beamline of the CERN North Area using the SPS accelerator. The…
The heavy-ion programme at the CERN SPS, which started back in '86, has produced a wealth of very interesting and intriguing results in the quest for the quark-gluon plasma. The highlights of the programme on dilepton and direct photon…
The progress over the 30 years since the first high-energy heavy-ion collisions at the BNL-AGS and CERN-SPS has been truly remarkable. Rigorous experimental and theoretical studies have revealed a new state of the matter in heavy-ion…
For the first time in the CERN history two experimental programs devoted to study nucleus-nucleus collisions at high energies are performed in parallel. In the SPS ion program, carried out by NA61/SHINE, interactions of light and medium…
The NA49 fixed-target experiment studied high energy-density matter produced in nucleus-nucleus reactions at the CERN SPS. In central Pb+Pb collisions at 158A GeV the energy density at the early stage substantially exceeds the threshold for…
Almost exactly 3 decades ago, in the fall of 1986, the era of experimental ultra-relativistic (\emph{E/m $\gg 1$}) heavy ion physics started simultaneously at the SPS at CERN and the AGS at Brookhaven with first beams of light Oxygen ions…
While heavy ion collisions at the SPS have produced excited strongly interacting matter near the conditions for quark deconfinement, the RHIC may be the first machine capable of creating quark-antiquark plasmas sufficiently long-lived to…
The first collisions of lead nuclei, delivered by the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the end of 2010, at a centre-of-mass energy per nucleon pair $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV, marked the beginning of a new era in ultra-relativistic…
High-energy heavy-ion collisions provide a unique opportunity to study the properties of the hot and dense strongly-interacting system composed of deconfined quarks and gluons -- the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) -- in laboratory conditions. The…
The history and the main results of the energy scan program at the CERN SPS are reviewed. Several anomalies in energy dependence of hadron production predicted as signals of deconfinement phase transition are observed and they indicate that…
Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, predicts a transition of the usual matter to a new phase of matter, called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), at sufficiently high temperatures. The non-perturbative technique of…
The major aim of nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC is to study the physics of strongly interacting matter and the quark gluon plasma (QGP), formed in extreme conditions of temperature and energy density. We give a brief overview of the…
We propose a new fixed-target experiment for the study of electromagnetic and hard probes of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) in heavy-ion collisions at the CERN SPS. The experiment aims at performing measurements of the dimuon spectrum from…
Statistical QCD predicts with increasing temperature a transition from hadronic matter to a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons. The SPS Heavy Ion Programme was initiated to study this transition and the resulting quark-gluon plasma.…
High energy collisions of heavy atomic nuclei allow to create and carefully study a high-density, colour-deconfined state of strongly-interacting matter. According to calculations from lattice Quantum-Chromodynamics, under the conditions of…
Lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD), defined on a discrete space time lattice, leads to a spectacular non-perturbative prediction of a new state of matter, called quark-gluon plasma (QGP), at sufficiently high temperatures or equivalently…
Proton-proton (pp) collisions have been traditionally used as a baseline measurement in the search for a deconfined state of matter in heavy-ion collisions at ultrarelativistic energies. The unprecedented collision energies that are…
The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN has played a pioneering role in the study of heavy-ion collisions since 1986 and nowadays remains central to the exploration of the Quark Gluon Plasma. This document summarizes the present status…
A brief history of the observation of the onset of deconfinement - the beginning of the creation of quark gluon plasma in nucleus-nucleus collisions with increasing collision energy - is presented. It starts with the measurement of hadron…