Critical review of quark gluon plasma signatures

Abstract Nonequilibrium models (three-fluid hydrodynamics and UrQMD) are used to discuss the uniqueness of often proposed experimental signatures for quark matter formation in relativistic heavy ion collisions. It is demonstrated that these two models — although they do treat the most interesting early phase of the collisions quite differently (thermalizing QGP vs. coherent color fields with virtual particles) — both yield a reasonable agreement with a large variety of the available heavy ion data. Hadron/hyperon yields, including J/Ψ meson production/suppression, strange matter formation, dileptons, and directed flow (bounce-off and squeeze-out) are investigated. Observations of interesting phenomena in dense matter are reported. However, we emphasize the need for systematic future measurements to search for simultaneous irregularities in the excitation functions of several observables in order to come close to pinning the properties of hot, dense QCD matter from data.