A selection of recent data referring to P b + P b collisions at the SPS CERN energy of 158 GeV per nucleon is presented which might describe the state of highly excited strongly interacting matter both above and below the deconfinement to hadronization (phase) transition predicted by lattice QCD. A tentative picture emerges in which a partonic state is indeed formed in central P b + P b collisions which hadronizes at about T = 185 M eV , and expands its volume more than tenfold, cooling to about 120 M eV before hadronic collisions cease. We suggest further that all SPS collisions, from central S + S onward, reach that partonic phase, the maximum energy density increasing with more massive collision systems.
Relativistic Nuclear CollisionsAstrophysical objects and processes, both connected with very early and very late phenomena in the cosmological evolution of strongly interacting matter, present an enormous challenge to modern nuclear and particle physics: we can recreate the conditions prevailing during the late nanosecond era of the cosmological expansion (when free quarks and gluons hadronized to isolated protons and neutrons), or during the late stages of a violent supernova stellar implosion (when the properties of highly compressed nuclear matter decide the final avenue leading either into a superdense neutron star or into a black hole) in experiments carried out in the terrestrial laboratory, by colliding heavy nuclei at relativistic energy.These studies culminate, for the time being, in the CERN SPS 208 P b beam facility which accelerates P b nuclei to 158 GeV per nucleon (about 33 T eV total energy). Ongoing programs at BNL and CERN will vastly extend the energy domain from √ s ≈ 17 GeV at the SPS to collider mode experiments with √ s = 200 GeV (RHIC) and √ s ≈ 5 T eV (LHC).The common idea of these investigations is to create extended "fireball" volumes of strongly interacting matter in head-on collisions of heavy nuclei, creating an average energy density reaching (at the SPS) or far exceeding (at RHIC and LHC) the "critical" value of about 1.5 GeV /f m 3 , at which modern Lattice QCD theory predicts a sudden departure, concerning the specific heat, the number density of degrees of freedom, the constituent quark mass scale etc., away from the expected behaviour of a densely packed liquid of hadrons. Does the hadron degree of freedom melt away at this transition point, giving rise to a continuous QCD state in which massive "constituent" quarks turn into nearly massless "current" (QCD)quarks -a phenomenon associated with the concept of chiral symmetry restoration -and in which colour carrying partons acquire a finite mobility, i.e. they approach deconfinement in an extended plasma state of nuclear dimension, i.e. 10 f m, large in comparison to typical confinement scales of about 1 f m.The present state of the art in lattice QCD finite temperature calculations [1] is illustrated in F ig. This interpretation is supported by a concurrent steep jump in the energy density E/T 4 (not illustrated).We t...