Signals of quark-gluon plasma

Production and observation of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is one of the most ambitious goals of the ultrarelativistic heavy ion experiments being carried out at CERN's super proton synchrotron (SPS) and at Brookhaven's Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS). Future experiments at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will give a new dimension to this search. In this review, the physics of QGP is presented with particular emphasis on its promising signatures existing in the literature. We hope that the present survey will lead us to identify some unambiguous signatures of QGP before the advent of RHIC and LHC experiments. (orig.)