General Colloquium:
General Colloquium:November 29 - 4:00pm Phys 223
(Coffee at 3:30p.m. in room 242)
Professor of Physics
Physics Department
Columbia University
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) began scientific operation in June, 2000. Initial operations collided Au nuclei at a per-nucleon-pair energy of 130 GeV, making RHIC the highest energy terrestrial source of nuclear collisions. A single "central" collision at these energies produces thousands of elementary particles. The four experiments at RHIC provide a broad coverage of these complex reactions, and have produced data on particle multiplicities, species abundances, momenta spectra and energy densities. I will discuss these results, and identify those which suggest new phenomena at these energies.