The BNL relativistic heavy ion collider (A new frontier in nuclear physics)

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven is in its second year of construction with a target date for completion in late 1997. In this report, I will describe the status of the project, the designated milestones and the capabilities of this collider that set it apart as the premier facility to probe the new frontier of nuclear matter under extreme temperatures and densities.Two large detectors and a pair of smaller detectors, which are in various stages of approval, form the experimental program at this point. They provide a complementary sets of probes to study quark gluon plasma formation through different signatures. The two ring design of this collider allows for collisions between different ion species ranging from protons to gold.