The Quark Gluon Plasma at RHIC Barbara Jacak, Professor of Physics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York

Heating nuclear matter to high energy density recreates the conditions which existed a few microseconds after the Big Bang. This matter, with an energy density of multiple GeV/fm^3, is expected to be a plasma of quarks and gluons not confined into hadrons. The matter undergoes an explosive expansion, developing strong collective motion as expected for a perfect liquid or a plasma in the strongly coupled regime. I will show results from experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, focusing upon transmission of color charged probes through the plasma, multi-particle correlations to measure collective flows, and the fate of heavy quarks produced early in the collision.