What have we learned and want to learn from heavy ion collisions at CERN SPS?

Abstract

The talk is a mini-review of the current status of the field, with emphasis on SPS heavy ion program, now and beyond 2000 (as asked by the organizers). The main question is, of course, whether we can convince ourselves and the community at large that the QGP is in fact produced at SPS. We came a long way toward the positive answer, and are definitely on strongly rising part of the learning curve. Still, in few key directions we lack important pieces of evidences.

Invited talk at Quark Matter 99, Torino May 1999

References in corpus (3)

• Superconductivity by long-range color magnetic interaction in high-density quark matter
• Highly Sensitive Centrality Dependence of Elliptic Flow -- A Novel Signature of the Phase Transition in QCD
• Local Thermal and Chemical Equilibration and the Equation of State in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

Cited by in corpus (23)

• Flow at the SPS and RHIC as a Quark Gluon Plasma Signature
• Anisotropic transverse flow and the quark-hadron phase transition
• Collective flow and two-pion correlations from a relativistic hydrodynamic model with early chemical freeze out
• Collective Flow signals the Quark Gluon Plasma
• Thermal Photons and Lepton Pairs from Quark Gluon Plasma and Hot Hadronic Matter
• Hydrodynamic afterburner for the Color Glass Condensate and the parton energy loss
• When can long-range charge fluctuations serve as a QGP signal?
• Differential Flow of Protons in Au+Au Collisions at AGS Energies
• $\varphi$ Production in In-In Collisions at 158 AGeV
• Local equilibrium in heavy-ion collisions: Microscopic analysis of a central cell versus infinite matter
• Rapidity-dependent spectra from a single-freeze-out model of relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Nonequilibrium Models of Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions
• The Instanton/Sphaleron Mechanism of Prompt Gluon Production in High Energy Heavy Ion Collisions at RHIC
• A comparative measurement of $\varphi \to K^{+}{K}^{-}$ and $\varphi \to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ in In-In collisions at the CERN SPS
• Hydrodynamic afterburner for the CGC at RHIC
• Thermal photon to dilepton ratio in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions
• HBT interferometry with quantum transport of the interfering pair
• $\varphi$ Meson Production in In-In Collisions and the $\varphi$ Puzzle
• Charge fluctuations in a final state with QGP
• Resonances from a Hadronic Fireball
• Highlights from NA60
• The Debye Length and the Running Coupling of QCD: a Potential and Phenomenological Approach
• NA60 results on phi production in the hadronic and leptonic channels in In-In collisions at 158 GeV