Five Years of Tracking Heavy Ion Collisions at RHIC

Five years have passed since the first collisions of Au nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island. With nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energies of up to sqrt(s_NN)=200GeV RHIC provides the highest energy heavy ion collisions at any existing collider. To study the dynamics of nuclear matter at extreme temperatures and pressures hundreds of produced particles need to be tracked and identified, which provides a sizable challenge to the four experiments. This article tries to summarize these first years of RHIC operation from the detector point of view and give a glimpse at the future of the accelerator and its experiments.