  We investigate the excitation function of directed flow, which can provide a
clear signature of the creation of the QGP and demonstrate that the minimum of
the directed flow does not correspond to the softest point of the EoS for
isentropic expansion. A novel technique measuring the compactness is introduced
to determine the QGP transition in relativistic-heavy ion collisions: The QGP
transition will lead to higher compression and therefore to higher compactness
of the source in coordinate space. This effect can be observed by pion
interferometry. We propose to measure the compactness of the source in the
appropriate principal axis frame of the compactness tensor in coordinate space.
