RELATIVISTIC HEAVY ION COLLISIONS: EXPERIMENT

Relativistic heavy ion physics began as a 'no man's land' between particle and nuclear physics, with both sides frowning upon it as 'unclean', because on one hand, hadronic interactions and particle production cloud nuclear structure effects, while on the other, the baryonic environment complicates the interpretation of production experiments. They have attempted to review here the experimental evidence on RHI collisions from the point of view that it represents a new endeavor in the understanding of strong interaction physics. Such an approach appears increasingly justified; first, by the accumulation of data and observations of new features of hadronic interactions that could not have been detected outside a baryonic environment; second, by the maturation of the field owing to the advances made over the past several years in experimental inquiries on particle production by RHI, including pions, kaons, hyperons, and searches for antiprotons; and third, by the steady and progressive increase in the energy and mass ranges of light nuclear beams that have become available to the experiment; indeed the energy range has widened from the {approx} 0.2 to 2 AGeV at the Bevalac to {approx}4 AGeV at Dubna and recently, to the quantum jump in energies to {approx} 1000 equivalent AGeV at the CERN PS-ISR. Accompanying these expansions in the energy frontier are the immediate prospects for very heavy ion beams at the Bevalac up to, and including, 1 AGeV {sup 238}U, thereby extending the 'mass frontier' to its ultimate extent