Session A1 - Plenary Session I.
INVITED session, Saturday morning, April 20
Kiva Auditorium, Albuquerque Convention Center
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory began physics operation in the summer of 2000 with Au-Au collisions at an energy per nucleon-nucleon pair of \sqrts_NN = 130 GeV. The physics results obtained by the four RHIC experiments in this "Run-1" are in striking agreement, establishing that unprecedented energy densities are created in these collisions, and suggesting a new suppression pattern in the particle production at high transverse momenta. I will discuss the implications of these results on the search for the quark-gluon plasma and on our understanding of QCD at high temperature. Preliminary results from RHIC Run-2 at \sqrts_NN = 200 GeV, and on the prospects for spin structure function measurements with polarized protons in RHIC, will also be presented.