CONFERENCE: Quark Matter '95

High energy heavy ion collisions have become one of the major growth areas of modern physics. Providing common ground between particle and nuclear physics, it has produced a wave of new interest and a series of major projects to provide beams of higher energies and increasing nuclear complexity. Reflecting this interest, and despite record rainstorms, over 450 enthusiastic high energy heavy ion followers met in Monterey, California, at the 11th International Conference on Ultra-relativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions. Named Quark Matter '95, the meeting was characterized by its own flood of new results from experiments studying collisions of gold nuclei at the Brookhaven Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) and with silicon beams at the CERN SPS synchrotron, as well as preliminary results from the first run with lead beams at CERN late last year (December 1994, page 15). A striking aspect of the Conference was the growth in attendance and, in particular, the large number of young physicists who attended the meeting, underlining the vitality and appeal of this important field. The new preliminary data from CERN experiments NA44, NA49, NA52, WA97, and WA98, made available with remarkable speed following the initial lead beam run in November and December 1994, represent a significant step in the study of heavy ion collisions. Physicists have finally come close to conditions where it is possible to consider event-by-event analysis of these very complex final states. The importance of this emerging approach to relativistic heavy ion collisions was emphasized by Reinhard Stock (Frankfurt) and other speakers in a pre-conference workshop devoted to physics with the collider detectors at big new projects now in the pipeline - RHIC at Brookhaven and LHC at CERN. The study of collisions of heavy nuclei at relativistic energies is dominated by the search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma, the 'soup' of free quarks and gluons expected to have played an important role in the early Universe. This plasma results from a phase transition and is predicted by calculations using lattice quantum chromodynamics. Although the Quark-Gluon Plasma has not yet been found, the experiments reported a number of signatures incompatible with the picture of simple hadron-hadron interactions in these nuclear collisions. The signatures, enhanced strangeness and enhanced dilepton production, were reviewed by Carl Dover (Brookhaven) and Itzhak Tserruya (Weizmann)