The Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider: Present Performance and Future Capabilities

As the first hadron accelerator and collider consisting of two independent superconducting rings RHIC has operated with a wide range of beam energies and particle species. Machine operation and performance will be reviewed that includes high luminosity gold-on-gold and copper-on-copper collisions at design beam energy (100 GeV/u), asymmetric deuteron-on-gold collisions as well as high energy polarized proton-proton collisions (100 GeV on 100 GeV). Future operation with polarized protons at 500 GeV center-of-mass energy as well as plans for luminosity upgrades and the addition of high luminosity collisions with a 10 GeV electron beam will also be discussed.