The main goal of this work is a comprehensive description of the fireball created in current ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. This has to be a three-step process: In the first step, properties of hot and dense hadronic matter are investigated, culminating in the introduction of a phenomenological quasiparticle model for the description of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) phase. In a second step, this information is used as input into the construction of a thermodynamically self-consistent model of the fireball. Hadronic observables are shown to yield tight constraints on the formulation of such a model. In the last step, the model is shown to describe several different other sets of observables, such as the emission of dileptons and photons and the suppression of charmonium production. Summarizing all information from different observables, there is strong evidence for a partonic phase being created already at the CERN SPS accelerator.
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The main goal of this work is a comprehensive description of the fireball created in current ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. This has to be a three-step process: In the first step, properties of hot and dense hadronic matter are investigated, culminating in the introduction of a phenomenological quasiparticle model for the description of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) phase. In a second step, this information is used as input into the construction of a thermodynamically self-consistent mod...
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