Construction of the sPHENIX Detector and Performance from Its First Year of Operation

sPHENIX is the first new major detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL in over twenty years. Its design has been optimized to measure a comprehensive set of jet, open heavy flavor and upsilon observables with both large statistics and broad kinematic reach in RHIC collisions of AA, pA and pp. The detector is composed of a set of hadronic and EM calorimeters, tracking subsystems, strip and pixel silicon detectors, and trigger detectors readout through a fast, high-bandwidth Data Acquisition system. At the detector’s core is a 1.4 T superconducting solenoidal magnet formerly of the BaBar experiment. Construction of sPHENIX was completed in April 2023, and sPHENIX has commissioned and taken first data in the RHIC 2023 Run. This talk will discuss the challenges associated with building sPHENIX during a global pandemic, the race to complete sPHENIX assembly before the start of the RHIC run, and the performance of sPHENIX during its first year of operation at RHIC.