Heavy Ion Experiments at RHIC: The First Year

TL;DR

This paper reviews the initial results from RHIC's first year of heavy ion collision experiments, highlighting the experimental approaches and preliminary findings in the study of hot and dense nuclear matter.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of RHIC's first-year experimental results and discusses the methodologies used by different experiments to explore fundamental physics questions.

Findings

Initial evidence of quark-gluon plasma formation

Diverse experimental approaches to measure hot dense matter

Preliminary results indicating new states of matter

Abstract

We present a written version of four lectures given at the NATO Advanced Study Institute on "CD Perspectives on Hot and Dense Matter"in Cargese, Corsica during August, 2001. Over the last year the first exciting results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the four experiments BRAHMS, PHENIX, PHOBOS, and STAR have been presented. In these lectures we review the state of RHIC and the experiments and the most exciting current results from Run I which took place in 2000. A complete review is not possible yet with many key results still preliminary or to be measured in Run II, which is currently underway, and thus the emphasis will be on the approach experimentalists have taken to address the fundamental physics issues of the field. We have not attempted to update the RHIC results for this proceedings, but rather present it as a snapshot of what was discussed in the workshop. The field is developing very quickly, and benefits greatly from contact and discussions between the different approaches of experimentalists and theorists.