CERN achievements in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Twenty years after a Letter of Intent by the GSI and LBL groups for the "Study of particle production and target fragmentation in central Ne-20 on Pb reactions, at 12 GeV per nucleon energy of the CERN PS external beam" [1], based on the results found by the NA45/CERES, NA49, NA50, and WA97/NA57 experiments at the SPS, CERN announced compelling evidence for the formation of a new state of matter in heavy-ion collisions at CERN-SPS energies [2]. Some of the experiments were indeed the 2nd or 3rd generation successors of the apparatuses originally proposed by the GSI-LBL collaboration. Actually, the CERN ion program initiated at the SPS with the acceleration of oxygen ions at 60 and 200 GeV/nucleon only in 1986, and continued with sulphur ions at 200 GeV/nucleon up to 1993. The rest is history: lead-ion beams at 160 GeV/nucleon became available at the SPS in 1994; the LHC accelerated and collided lead beams at a center of mass energy per nucleon pair root s(NN) = 2.76 TeV in 2010. Heavy ion physics is definitely in the future program of CERN: ALICE will operate a major upgrade of its detectors during the second long shutdown of the LHC, in 2018-2019, and the associated physics program will span the third and fourth LHC runs, till late 2020s.