Heavy ion physics : Exhibition Lepton-Photon 2001

High-energy Heavy Ion Physics studies strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities.QCD predicts that at such densities hadronic matter turns into a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons,the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP).Matter in the Universe must have existed in this state up to about 10 ms after the Big Bang.Today QGP might exist in the c re of neutron stars.The study of the phase diagram of matter is a new approach to investigate QCD at its natural scale,L QCD ,and to address the fundamental questions of confinement and chiral-symmetry breaking.The combined results obtained by the SPS heavy ion experiments,in particular those obtained with the Pb beam,pr vide compelling evidence for the existence of a new state of matter featuring many of the characteristics predicted for the QGP.The ALICE experiment will carry this research into the LHC era.