The commissioning status of RHIC

The construction and commissioning status of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC, is discussed. Those novel features of a heavy ion collider that are distinct from conventional hadron colliders in general are noted. These features are derived from the experimental requirements of operation with a variety of ion species over a wide energy range including collisions between ions of unequal energies. The paper notes other challenging issues for the collider including intrabeam scattering, interaction-region error compensation, magnet alignments, and matched transition-energy jump. The project is in the final few months of a seven-year construction cycle and is entering the commissioning phase. A review of the superconducting magnet program is given together with the status of the machine construction and commissioning.