PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The ultimate aim of high energy heavy ion collisions is to study quarkdeconfinement and the quark-gluon plasma predicted by quantum chromodynamics.This requires the identification of observables calculable in QCD andmeasurable in heavy ion collisions. I concentrate on three such phenomena,related to specific features of strongly interacting matter. The observedpattern of hadrosynthesis corresponds to that of an ideal resonance gas inequilibrium at the pseudo-critical temperature determined in QCD. The criticalbehavior of QCD is encoded in the fluctuation patterns of conserved quantumnumbers, which are presently being measured. The temperature of the quark-gluonplasma can be determined by the dissociation patterns of the differentquarkonium states, now under study at the LHC for both charmonia andbottomonia.