The relativistic heavy ion collider project: A status report

The relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC) is a proposed facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory for very high energy collisions of nuclear beams. The project has had a substantial amount of R and D effort and is ready to begin construction within the next year of two, as funding permits. We describe the parameters of the machine, discuss the current status of development work on the project, and describe the requirements for experiments at such a facility.