PHENIX Detector Commissioning and Prospects for Polarized Proton Running

Kenneth N. Barish

for the PHENIX Collaboration

University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA

E-mail: Kenneth.Barish@ucr.edu

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory will accelerate highly polarized proton beams and collide them at a center of mass energy up to sqrt{s}=500 GeV. PHENIX is one of the major detector systems at RHIC, consisting of two central arms (|h| <0.35 and 2 X 90^of coverage) and two muon arms (1.2<|h|< 2.4). The first spin run is expected in 2001.

The RHIC Heavy-Ion program began earlier this year. In this running period, PHENIX successfully commissioned at least in part 12 subsystems, and first physics from PHENIX have recently been presented at the JPS and DNP meetings. In this talk, I will give an overview of the Heavy-Ion physics run with a particular focus on the detector needs and schedule for spin physics running.