NA49 evidence for the onset of deconfinement

Abstract

We review the experimental results obtained by the NA49 collaboration in the context of its beam energy scan programme. The data on particle yields and spectral distributions suggest that the deconfinement phase transition is first reached in central collisions of heavy nuclei at about 30A GeV beam energy. Hadron-string transport models as well as the hadron gas model fail to describe the observed energy dependences unless additional parameters or unmeasured states are included.