Astrophysical objects and processes, both connected with very early and very late phenomena in the cosmological evolution of strongly interacting matter, present an enormous challenge to modern nuclear and particle physics: can we recreate – in experiments carried out in the terrestrial laboratory – the conditions prevailing during the first microseconds of the cosmological expansion, or during the late stages of the violent supernova stellar implosion? These investigations culminate, for the time being, in the BNL RHIC experiments where Au nuclei are accelerated to centre-of-mass energy of 200 GeV per colliding nucleon pair and soon in the CERN LHC experiments where Pb nuclei will be accelerated at a centre-of-mass energy of about 6 TeV per nucleon pair – almost thirty times the RHIC energy. The LHC will lead us into a region comparable only to the highest energy cosmic ray events. RHIC’s experiments and LHC’s ALICE experiment are built to detect a new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, where quarks and gluons are no longer bound inside individual hadrons but are released into a much larger volume. Confirming the existence of the quark-gluon plasma would have a major impact on the fundamental questions common to nuclear physics, particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. This achievement would surely be one of the most exciting in the history of science.
The path to the quark-gluon plasma, a journey from Bevalac to LHC, will be the presented in this talk.