Stopping, heating, thermalization and expansion at SPS energies

The Pb beam at 158AGeV from the CERN SPS accelerator which was taken into use in the fall of 1994 has opened a new dimension in the study of highly excited nuclear matter in heavy ion reactions. It has now become possible to form reasonably large volumes (containing more than 300 nucleons) in central collisions between heavy ions, with energy and matter densities in some parts of the volume exceeding those expected for the phase transition from hadronic matter to deconfined quark and gluon matter. In this talk we discuss some features of the expansion of the hot and compressed system that may be learned by analysing the single particle spectra of baryons and mesons with emphasis on data from the NA44 experiment.