Physics and experiments at RHIC

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), under construction at Brookhaven National Laboratory, will be the site of a series of experiments seeking to discover the quark-gluon plasma and elucidate its properties. Several observables should exhibit characteristic behaviors if a quark-gluon plasma is indeed created in the laboratory. Four experiments are now under construction for RHIC to measure certain of these observables over kinematic ranges where effects due to quark-gluon plasma formation should be manifest