  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.
