Quark-gluon plasma : can one see it in relativistic heavy ion-collisions

At sufficiently high temperatures strongly interacting matter is expected to undergo a phase transition to a hitherto unobserved state of matter called quark-gluon plasma. While such a state could have existed in the Universe immediately after the Big Bang, the proposed and ongoing relativistic heavy ion collisions experiments at CERN, Geneva and Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York offer an exciting possibility of creating it in little Big Bangs in the laboratory. This phase transition, starting from first principles and creation of quark-gluon plasma in these experiments are discused. A brief survey of the exciting results from the latest CERN experiments is presented. (author). 12 refs., 7 figs