The relativistic heavy ion collider project at Brookhaven

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) facility will provide collision energies of 100 GeV/nucleon per beam for heavy ions as massive as gold. RHIC will use the existing Brookhaven AGS and Tandem Van de Graaff as injector. The new accelerator facility, which is a nuclear physics initiative, will utilize the existing facilities of the partially completed CBA project. This report discusses the physics motivation for such a facility, the status of the machine design, R and D work and preparations for experiments at RHIC.