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Main types of projectile combinations used at RHIC are: p +  p, d +  Au and Au +  Au. The projectiles typically travel at a speed of 99.995% of the speed of light in vacuum. For Au + Au collision, the center-of-mass energy is 200 GeV per nucleon (or 100 GeV per nucleon for each projectile), and a luminosity of 2 × 10²⁶  cmcm redirects here, alternate uses: cm (disambiguation A centimetre (symbol cm American spelling: centimeter is an SI unit of length. One centimetre is: one-hundredth of one metre one-tenth of a decimetre ten millimetres. millimetre << centimetre << decime^-2  sThis article is about the unit of time. See second (disambiguation) for other uses The second (symbol s is a unit for time, and one of seven SI base units. It is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transi^-1 was targeted during the planning. The current luminosity performance of the collider is 2.96 × 10²⁶ cm^-2 s^-1 (Run-4/PHENIX).

The RHIC double storage ringA storage ring consists of a ring of magnets around which charged particles from an accelerator can be kept circulating. For a synchrotron, the magnets are sequenced according to the Chasman-Green lattice. is itself hexagonA regular hexagon A hexagon (also known as "sexagon") is a polygon with six edges and six vertices. Its Schlafli symbol is {6}. The internal angles of a regular hexagon (one where all sides and all angles are equal) are all 120 °. Like squares and equilatally shaped and 3834  mFor other uses of "metre" and "meter", see Metre (disambiguation). The metre is the basic unit of length in the International System of Units (SI: Systeme International d'Unites). It is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in absolute vacu long in circumferenceThe circumference is the distance around a closed curve. Circles The circumference of a circle can be calculated from its diameter using the formula: Or, substituting the radius for the diameter: Where r is the radius and d is the diameter of the circle,, with curved edges in which stored projectiles are deflected by 1,740 superconducting niobium titanium magnets. The 6 interaction points are at the middle of the 6 relatively straight sections, where the two rings crosses, allowing the projectiles to collide. The interaction points are enumerated by clock positions, with the injection point at "6 o'clock". 2 interaction points are unused and left for further expansion.

A projectiles passes several stages of boosters, before it reaches the RHIC storage ring. The first stage for ions is the Tandem Van de Graaff accelerator, while for protons, the 200 MeV linear accelerator (Linac) is used. As an example, Au nucleus leaving the Tandem Van de Graaff have a energy of about 1 MeV per nucleon and have Q = +32 (32 electrons stripped from the Au atom). The projectiles then are continued to be accelerated by the Booster Synchrotron to 95 MeV per nucleon, which injects the projectile now with Q = +77 into the Alternating Gradient Synchrontron (AGS), before they finally reach 8.86 GeV per nucleon and are injected in a Q = +79 state (no electrons left) into the RHIC storage ring over the AGS-To-RHIC Transfer Line (ATR), sitting at the 6 o'clock position, near the STAR detector.

RHIC consists of four detectors: STAR (6 o'clock), PHENIX (8 o'clock), PHOBOS (10 o'clock), and BRAHMS (2 o'clock). While the main objective of the two bigger detectors PHENIX and STAR, and also PHOBOS are the experimental detection and study of quark-gluon plasma, BRAHMS is mainly interested in the so called "small-x physics". There is a further experiment PP2PP, investigating spin dependence in p + p scattering.

The spokespersons for each of the experiments are:

• STAR: Timothy Hallman ( Brookhaven National Laboratory, Physics Department)
• PHENIX: William A. Zajc ( Columbia University, Department of Physics and Nevis Laboratories)
• PHOBOS: Wit Busza ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Physics and MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science)
• BRAHMS: Flemming Videbaek ( Brookhaven National Laboratory, Physics Department)
• PP2PP: Wlodek Guryn ( Brookhaven National Laboratory, Physics Department)

RHIC began its operation in 2000 and is currently the strongest heavy-ion collider in the world. It is expected, however, that the Large Hadron Collider of the Centre Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) will provide significantly higher energy once completed, essentially superseding RHIC.

A recent overview of the physics result is provided by Adcox, et al. (2004), a community-wide effort of RHIC experiments to evaluate the current data in the context of implication for formation of a new state of matter. These results are from the first three years of data collections at the RHIC.