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 set 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.

At the request of DOE's Office of Nuclear Physics (ONP), Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has created this planning document to assemble and summarize a planning exercise that addresses the core scientific thrust of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) for the next twenty years and the facilities operation plan that will support this program. The planning work was carried out by BNL in close collaboration with the RHIC user community and within budgetary guidelines for the next five years supplied by the ONP. The resulting plans were reviewed by the BNL High Energy and Nuclear Physics Program Advisory Committee (PAC) at a special RHIC planning meeting held in December 2003. Planning input from each of the four RHIC experimental collaborations was absolutely central to the preparation of this overall Laboratory plan. Each collaboration supplied two key documents, a five-year ''Beam Use Proposal'' and a ten-year ''Decadal Plan''. These plans are posted on the BNL website http://www.bnl.gov/henp/, along with other planning documents germane to this paper, such as the complete written reports from the August and December 2003 PAC meetings that considered the five-year and decadal planning documents of the four RHIC collaborations and offered advice and commentary on these plans. Only in these collaboration documents can the full physics impact of the RHIC program be seen and the full scope of the efforts put into this planning process be appreciated. For this reason, the maximum value of the present planning paper can only be realized by making frequent reference to the collaboration documents.

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.

This White Paper presents the science case of an Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), focused on the structure and interactions of gluon-dominated matter, with the intent to articulate it to the broader nuclear science community. It was commissioned by the managements of Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) with the objective of presenting a summary of scientific opportunities and goals of the EIC as a follow-up to the 2007 NSAC Long Range plan. This document is a culmination of a community-wide effort in nuclear science following a series of workshops on EIC physics over the past decades and, in particular, the focused ten-week program on "Gluons and quark sea at high energies" at the Institute for Nuclear Theory in Fall 2010. It contains a brief description of a few golden physics measurements along with accelerator and detector concepts required to achieve them. It has been benefited profoundly from inputs by the users' communities of BNL and JLab. This White Paper offers the promise to propel the QCD science program in the US, established with the CEBAF accelerator at JLab and the RHIC collider at BNL, to the next QCD frontier.

The advent of heavy ion acceleration with the AGS at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1986 and the proposed Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) for 1990 brings us into a temperature and density regime well above anything yet produced and into a time domain of the early universe of 10−13−1°sup -6/ seconds. The physics of high energy heavy ions range from the more traditional nuclear physics to the formation of new forms of matter. Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the latest, and as of yet, the most successful theory to describe the interaction of quarks and gluons. The nature of the confinement of the quarks and gluons under extremes of temperature and density is one of the compelling reasons for this new physics program at BNL. There are reasons to believe that with collisions of heavy nuclei at energies in the 10 to 100 GeV/amu range a very large volume of approx. 10 fm3 would be heated to 200-300 MeV and/or acquire a sufficient quark density (5-10 times normal baryon density) so that the entire contents of the volume would be deconfined and the quarks and gluons would form a plasma. The kinematic region for the extant machines and the proposed RHIC are shown. At AGS energies the baryons in colliding nuclei bring each other to rest, yielding fragmentation regions of high baryon density. These are the regions in which supernorvae and neutrons stars exist. For energies much higher, such as in RHIC, nuclei are transparent to each other and one can form a central region of almost zero baryon density, mostly pions, and very high temperature. This is the region of the early universe and the quark-gluon plasma. Design parameters and cost of the RHIC are discussed.

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy on Long Island, New York, is a nuclear physics research facility developed by the laboratory. Scientists at RHIC explore the subatomic world and study a rare state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma. Information about the experiments conducted at RHIC is available, as well as a virtual tour of the complex. The RHIC mainly uses gold in its experiments.