From SPS to RHIC: Maurice and the CERN heavy-ion programme

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development of the heavy-ion collision program from CERN SPS to RHIC, highlighting Maurice Jacob's pivotal role in advancing the field and summarizing key discoveries and future prospects at LHC.

Contribution

It documents the historical progression and Maurice Jacob's influence in establishing and advancing relativistic heavy-ion physics from SPS to RHIC and beyond.

Findings

Discovery of quark-gluon plasma signatures at RHIC

Significant contributions to heavy-ion collision understanding

Influence on future collider experiments at LHC

Abstract

Maurice Jacob played a key role in bringing together different groups from the experimental and theoretical nuclear and particle physics communities to initiate an ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collision program at the CERN SPS, in order to search for the quark-gluon plasma. I review the history of this program from its beginnings to the time when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) started operation. I close by providing a glimpse of the important discoveries made at RHIC and giving an outlook towards heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). During Maurice's life and not least through his perpetually strong influence, relativistic heavy-ion physics has matured and led to discoveries that radiate into many other fields of physics. Heavy-ion physicists owe a great deal to Maurice Jacob.