Results of the NA49 experiment on the search for the quark-gluon plasma at the CERN SPS

Experiment NA 49 at the CERN SPS has performed large acceptance measurements of hadron production in Pb+Pb collisions at 40 and 158 A-GeV beam energies. These data allowed a study of the space-time evolution, the hadro-chemical composition and event-by-event fluctuations of average event properties of the created hadron system. Results at top SPS energy are consistent with the existence of a transient deconfined phase in the early stage of the reaction.