QCD and Heavy Ions: RHIC Overview

Nowadays, the most violent heavy ion collisions available to experimental study occur at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. There, gold ions collide at psNN = 200 GeV. The early and most striking RHIC results were summarised in 2005 by its four experiments, BRAHMS, PHENIX, PHOBOS and STAR, in their so-called white papers [1, 2, 3, 4] that will be largely referenced thereafter. Beyond and after this, a wealth of data has been collected and analysed, providing additional information about the properties of the matter created at RHIC. It is categorically impossible to give a comprehensive review of these results in a 20 minutes talk or a 7 pages report. Here, I have made a selection of some of the most striking or intriguing signatures: jet quenching in Section 2, quarkonia suppressions in Section 3 and thermal photons in Section 4. A slightly longer and older version of this review can be found in [5]. Some updates are given here, as well as emphasis on new probes recently made available.