An introduction to the main ideas used in the physics of ultra-realistic heavy-ion collisions, this book covers topics such as hot and dense matter and the formation of the quark-gluon plasma in present and future heavy-ion experiments

Central S+S, S+Ag and S+Au collisions at 200 GeV/nucleon were studied in experiment NA35 at the CERN SPS. Recent results on strange particle production as well as the preliminary results on antiproton production are presented and discussed. Enhanced strangeness production relative to the pion and antiproton yields is observed in nucleus-nucleus collisions relative to p-p and p-A. Microscopic string models fail to consistently describe the available set of data.