Probing the Big Bang at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) (or Probing the Big Bang 13.7 billion years later)

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the USA is a variable energy proton-proton and ion-ion collider that is the first accelerator capable of colliding heavy ions. RHIC was designed to do experiments that provide important information about the Standard Model of particle physics, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). QCD predicts that in the early part of the Universe just after the Big Bang the world consisted of a Quark Gluon Plasma, a weakly interacting collection of quarks and gluons. At RHIC we can recreate the conditions of the early Universe by colliding heavy ions at 200 GeV. This paper will give a general overview of the physics motivation for studying the QGP, how our experiments are designed to study the QGP, what we have learned over the last 9 years, and what the future holds.