Title: From the Bevalac to Rhic: Recent Results and Future Perspectives
Abstract: In the collisions of nuclei at extremely high energies the baryon and energy densities are expected to reach critical values where the quark constituents of the incident nucleons, bound in nuclei, form an extended volume of freely interacting quarks, antiquarks and gluons known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). After formation the system is expected to evolve dynamically from a pure plasma or mixed phase (of plasma and hadronic matter) through expansion, cooling, hadronization and freeze-out. To be able to establish that such a new, transient state of matter has been formed it will be necessary to identify and study QGP signatures and the space-time evolution of the collision process. This requires an understanding of the microscopic structure of hadronic interactions, at the level of quarks and gluons, at high temperatures and high densities.