ABSTRACT
One of the fundamental questions in the field of subatomic physics is what happens to matter at extreme densities and temperatures as may have existed in the first microseconds after the big bang and exist, perhaps, in the core of dense neutron stars. The aim of heavy-ion physics is to collide nuclei at very high energies and thereby create such a state of matter in the laboratory. The experimental program started in the 1990s with collisions made available at the AGS and SPS with energies up to 20 GeV per nucleon in the centre of mass, and continued at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven, USA with energies of up to 200 GeV per nucleon. Collisions of heavy ions at the unprecedented energy of 5.5 TeV will soon be made available at the LHC collider at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. In these lectures I will give a brief introduction to the physics of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions and review some selected highlights of the current and future experimental program. The material covered in these lectures is published in, amongst others, [1-8], to which I refer the reader for more details.
