Little bang at big accelerators: heavy ion physics from AGS to LHC

The field of ultra-relativistic heavy ion physics, which started some 10 years ago at the Brookhaven AGS and the CERN SPS with fixed target experiments, has entering today a new era with the recent (July 2000) start-up of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider RHIC and preparations well under may for a new large heavy ion experiment at the Large Hadron Collider LHC. This overview, which is the combined write-up of talks given at this conference will sketch a rough picture of the heavy ion program at current and future machines and concentrate on a few important topics, in particular the question if current results show any of the signs predicted for the phase transition between normal hadronic matter and the quark-gluon plasma. (14 refs).