Phase diagram of strongly interacting matter: the last 20 years at the CERN SPS

Abstract

Twenty years ago, on February 10, 2000, the CERN Director General Luciano Maiani announced: The combined data coming from the seven experiments on CERN’s Heavy Ion programme have given a clear picture of a new state of matter. This result verifies an important prediction of the present theory of fundamental forces between quarks. This report briefly reviews studies of the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter with relativistic nuclear collisions at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron which followed the CERN’s press release on the quark-gluon plasma discovery. An attempt to formulate priorities for future measurements at the CERN SPS closes the paper. The report is dedicated to David Blaschke who celebrated his 60th birthday in 2019. David’s contribution to the studies presented here was very significant.

Transverse momentum and pseudo-rapidity density distributions of charged particles produced in pp and Au–Au collisions at $$\sqrt{{s}_{NN}}=200$$ GeV at RHIC

“…We have compared the simulated data with RHIC experimental data for both pp and Au-Au collisions [27][28][29]. These measurements of p T and pseudo-rapidity distributions are very crucial to study the heavy-ion collisions at ultra-relativistic energies in which shortlived deconfined matter at extremely high temperature and energy density is known to be created [2,30]. So the main purpose of these measurements is to investigate the modification of particle production in the presence of the produced hot and dense medium in Au-Au collisions by comparing to pp collisions at the same energy.…”