RECENT RESULTS FROM THE HEAVY ION PROGRAM AT RHIC

For over 10 years the experimental operations at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider had provided access to the collisions data for a variety of beam species and center-of-mass energies. The scientific program that was initially devoted to the discovery of the deconfined state of partonic matter, the Quark Gluon Plasma, has expanded vastly, and now encompasses advanced studies of the properties of the novel matter created, as well as systematic studies of the QCD phase diagram, searching for an on-set of the deconfinement. In this work only selected recent results from RHIC are presented for the RHIC top energy (200 GeV) Au+Au data, and the medium properties illuminated through such studies will be discussed. Additionally, new measurements from d+Au data at the same center-of-mass energy, are included for a comparison to address the potential cold nuclear mater effects. Unexpected similarities in the di-hadron correlation measurements between the two systems are discussed in the context of possible constraints on the initial state properties.