Victoria Greene
                                           Vanderbilt University

                                         Quark-Gluon Liquid?

After the Big Bang, the universe was extremely - hot and dense. Under such extreme conditions, matter is believed to have existed in a state in which the quarks and gluons were not bound into colorneutral hadrons as we find them today. This state of deconfined quarks and gluons, or partons, is called the quarkqluon plasma. By studying collisions between heavy ions at relativistic energies, we can create conditions that lattice QCD calculations indicate are sufficiently hot and dense to produce partonic matter.

Over the past four years, the PHENIX experiment has recorded data from high-energy nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. A comprehensive set of measurements includes charged particle multiplicities, transverse energy, yield ratios, spectra of identified hadrons, isotropic flow, suppression of particle production at high transverse momentum, and heavy quark production. In this talk, I will discuss these results and their implications for the nature of the state of matter produced in these collisions.