A large and growing community of nuclear and high energy physicists is now embarked on a program of experiments with very high energy nuclear beams. The first round of these experiments will take place late in 1986, with fixed target experiments at the Brookhaven AGS and the CERN SPS. These programs, involving about 300 experimental physicists, will begin with relatively light ions (A approx. = 32 amu) to explore states of compressed nuclear matter in which high energy density is achieved in an environment of high baryon density. Within 2 to 3 years of this initial effort it will be possible with the Booster synchrotron to extend the mass range of AGS beams to cover essentially the entire periodic table. The next goal is then to reach much higher energies with colliding beams of heavy ions, creating thermodynamic conditions with near-zero baryon number which can be directly compared with QCD calculations, exploring the full panoply of phenomena described by Helmut Satz in his physics perspective.

STAR (Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) will be one of two large, sophisticated experiments ready to take data when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) comes on-line in 1999. The design of STAR, its construction and commissioning and the physics program using the detector are the responsibility of a collaboration of over 250 members from 30 institutions, world-wide. The overall approach of the STAR Collaboration to the physics challenge of studying collisions of highly relativistic nuclei is to focus on measurements of the properties of the many hadrons produced in the collisions. The STAR detector is optimized to detect and identify hadrons over a large solid angle so that individual events can be characterized, in detail, based on their hadronic content. The broad capabilities of the STAR detector will permit an examination of a wide variety of proposed signatures for the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), using the sample of events which, on an event-by-event basis, appear to come from collisions resulting in a large energy density over a nuclear volume. In order to achieve this goal, the STAR experiment is based on a solenoid geometry with tracking detectors using the time projection chamber approach and covering a large range of pseudo-rapidity so that individual tracks can be seen within the very high track density expected in central collisions at RHIC. STAR also uses particle identification by the dE/dx technique and by time-of-flight. Electromagnetic energy is detected in a large, solid-angle calorimeter. The construction of STAR, which will be located in the Wide Angle Hall at the 6 o'clock position at RHIC, formally began in early 1993.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL has produced two physics runs with Au+Au collisions since its startup in 2000 at energies sqrt(s) = 130 and 200 GeV/nucleon-pair. The main motivation for the RHIC program is to search for Quark Matter, which may be produced in these collisions. This talk will focus on RHIC results obtained with the STAR experiment, and where we are with the Quark Matter search.