Creating a Little Big Bang

Sangyong Jeon

For the last few decades, the foremost goal of high energy nuclear physics has been creation of the Quark-Gluon Plasma which existed only within micro-seconds after the Big-Bang. Since the year 2001, physicists have been attempting to create such a hot and dense matter by accellerating heavy nuclei at 99.996% of the speed of light and then colliding them. We have now ample evidences that we have indeed achieved temperature exceeding a billion times the temperature of the surface of the sun. At this hot temperature, nuclei can `melt' to form such a new state of matter. In this talk, I will review what has been achieved both theoretically and experimentally in simple terms.