NA49 event display of the reconstructed tracks emanating from the "little bang" created in a central collision of Lead projectile with a Lead nucleus

When a 33 TeV Lead nucleous projectile hits head on a Lead target it creates for a brief instant of time a system of quarks and gluons that more than 100'000 times hotter than the sun. As this fireball expands it reconstitutes normal matter creating thousands of particles (pions, kaons, protons, ....). The NA49 Time Projection Chambers extending over 13 m can record a large majority of the produced charged particles. The result of a complex analysis is shown here in a event display of the reconstructed tracks. The blue lines represent the boundaries of the detectors in a perspective view from the far end of the experiment towards the interaction point, where all the tracks originate.