Abstract
Twenty years after a Letter of Intent by the GSI and LBL groups for the “Study of particle production and target fragmentation in central 20Ne on Pb reactions, at 12 GeV per nucleon energy of the CERN PS external beam" [1], based on the results found by the NA45/CERES, NA49, NA50, and WA97/NA57 experiments at the SPS, CERN announced compelling evidence for the formation of a new state of matter in heavyion collisions at CERN-SPS energies [2]. Some of the experiments were indeed the 2nd or 3rd generation successors of the apparatuses originally proposed by the GSI-LBL collaboration. Actually, the CERN ion program initiated at the SPS with the acceleration of oxygen ions at 60 and 200 GeV/nucleon only in 1986, and continued with sulphur ions at 200 GeV/nucleon up to 1993. The rest is history: lead-ion beams at 160 GeV/nucleon became available at the SPS in 1994; the LHC accelerated and collided lead beams at a center of mass energy per nucleon pair √sNN = 2.76 TeV in 2010. Heavy ion physics is definitely in the future program of CERN: ALICE will operate a major upgrade of its detectors during the second long shutdown of the LHC, in 2018-2019, and the associated physics program will span the third and fourth LHC runs, till late 2020s.
Highlights
The dawn of relativistic heavy ion physicsIn October 1980, at the initiative of Rudolf Bock and Reinhard Stock, a Workshop on Future Relativistic Heavy-Ion Experiments took place at GSI Darmstadt [3]
2nd or 3rd generation successors of the apparatuses originally proposed by the GSI-LBL collaboration
Heavy ion physics is definitely in the future program of CERN: ALICE will operate a major upgrade of its detectors during the second long shutdown of the LHC, in 2018-2019, and the associated physics program will span the third and fourth LHC runs, till late 2020s
Summary
In October 1980, at the initiative of Rudolf Bock and Reinhard Stock, a Workshop on Future Relativistic Heavy-Ion Experiments took place at GSI Darmstadt [3]. This event is considered as the first of Quark Matter Conferences, the major series of international meeting in the field of ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. The existence of a different phase of the vacuum, in which quarks are not confined into hadrons, was suggested: when temperatures or densities become very high, strongly interacting quarks and gluons become free and give rise to a new, deconfined phase of matter, for which the term ’quark-gluon plasma’ (QGP) was coined later on These findings brought to the idea of studying the collisions of heavy ions, accelerated at ultrarelativistic energies, with the hope to increase sufficiently the temperature and the density of nuclear matter.
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