The most recent conceptual design manual for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven was published in May 1986 (BNL 51932). The purpose of this workshop was to review the design specifications in this RHIC reference manual, and to discuss in detail possible improvements in machine performance by addressing four main areas. These areas are beam-beam interactions, stochastic cooling, rf and bunch instabilities. The contents of this proceedings are as follows. Following an overview of the workshop, in which the motivation and goals are discussed in detail, transcripts of the first day talks are given. Many of these transcripts are copies of the original transparencies presented at the meeting. The following four sections contain contributed papers, that resulted from discussions at the workshop within each of the four working groups. In addition, there is a group summary for each of the four working groups at the beginning of each section. Finally, a list of participants is given.

This book provides in a pedagogical way some up-to-date reviews of properties of strongly interacting matter produced at RHIC, analytical approaches to QCD, and nuclear and high-energy astrophysics. It also contains schematic outlines of topics on high-precision non-perturbative QCD, first results from RHIC, and heavy-ion collisions at LHC with the ATLAS detector.The proceedings have been selected for coverage in: OCo Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings)"

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.