We have searched for strangelets in a triggered sample of 61 million central (top 4percent) Au+Au collisions at sqrt sNN = 200 GeV near beam rapidities at the STAR solenoidal tracker detector at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. We have sensitivity to metastable strangelets with lifetimes of order>_0.1 ns, in contrast to limits over ten times longer in BNL Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) studies and longer still at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). Upper limits of a few 10-6 to 10-7 per central Au+Au collision are set for strangelets with mass>~;;30 GeV/c2.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is a proposed research facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory to study the collision of beams of heavy ions, up to gold in mass and at beam energies up to 100 GeV/nucleon. The physics to be explored by this collider is an overlap between the traditional disciplines of nuclear physics and high energy physics and is a continuation of the planned program of light and heavy ion physics at BNL. The machine is to be constructed in the now-empty tunnel built for the former CBA project. Various other facilities to support the collider are either in place or under construction at BNL. The collider itself, including the magnets, is in an advanced state of design, and a construction start is anticipated in the next several years.

In this note we describe a scheme to obtain a high performance relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC) sized to fit within the CBA tunnel at BNL. The project has two parts: the Source of heavy ions and the Collider itself. We keep these two parts separated since a different analysis is done for each. It is obvious that the performance of the total facility depends crucially on the performance of both.