Colloquia

It has now been seven years since a new era in relativistic heavy ion research began with the first beams at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The primary goal of this effort was to heat a small volume of space so high that normal matter, comprised of protons and neutrons, dissolves into their constituent parts, the quarks and gluons, thus possibly creating a quark gluon plasma and perhaps even providing a window into how the universe may have looked in the first micro-seconds of its birth. In this talk, I will review the motivation and foundations for this endeavor, discuss several discoveries since RHIC began, explore a few of the more recent measurements, and look forward to what the very exciting and promising future will bring, especially in light of the startup of the new Large Hadron Collider in CERN.