The physics emphases of the PHENIX collaboration and the design and current status of the PHENIX detector are discussed. The plan of the collaboration for making the most effective use of the available luminosity in the first years of RHIC operation is also presented.

We present measurements of e+e- production at midrapidity in Au+Au collisions at sNN=200 GeV. The invariant yield is studied within the PHENIX detector acceptance over a wide range of mass (mee<5 GeV/c2) and pair transverse momentum (pT<5 GeV/c) for minimum bias and for five centrality classes. The e+e- yield is compared to the expectations from known sources. In the low-mass region (mee=0.30-0.76 GeV/c2) there is an enhancement that increases with centrality and is distributed over the entire pair pT range measured. It is significantly smaller than previously reported by the PHENIX experiment and amounts to 2.3±0.4(stat)±0.4(syst)±0.2(model) or to 1.7±0.3(stat)±0.3(syst)±0.2(model) for minimum bias collisions when the open heavy-flavor contribution is calculated with pythia or mc@nlo, respectively. The inclusive mass and pT distributions, as well as the centrality dependence, are well reproduced by model calculations where the enhancement mainly originates from the melting of the ρ meson resonance as the system approaches chiral symmetry restoration. In the intermediate-mass region (mee=1.2-2.8 GeV/c2), the data hint at a significant contribution in addition to the yield from the semileptonic decays of heavy-flavor mesons.

We report a measurement of e+e- pairs from semileptonic heavy-flavor decays in d+Au collisions at sNN=200 GeV. By exploring the mass and transverse-momentum dependence of the yield, the bottom decay contribution can be isolated from charm, and quantified by comparison to pythia and mc@nlo simulations. The resulting bb¯-production cross section is σbb¯dAu=1.37±0.28(stat)±0.46(syst) mb, which is equivalent to a nucleon-nucleon cross section of σbbNN=3.4±0.8(stat)±1.1(syst)μb.

The PHENIX experiment at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider has measured second- and third-order Fourier coefficients of the azimuthal distributions of direct photons emitted at midrapidity in Au+Au collisions at sNN=200 GeV for various collision centralities. Combining two different analysis techniques, results were obtained in the transverse momentum range of 0.4

The PHENIX collaboration presents first measurements of low-momentum (0.41  GeV/c) direct-photon yield dN_{γ}^{dir}/dη is a smooth function of dN_{ch}/dη and can be well described as proportional to (dN_{ch}/dη)^{α} with α≈1.25. This scaling behavior holds for a wide range of beam energies at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider, for centrality selected samples, as well as for different A+A collision systems. At a given beam energy, the scaling also holds for high p_{T} (>5  GeV/c), but when results from different collision energies are compared, an additional sqrt[s_{NN}]-dependent multiplicative factor is needed to describe the integrated-direct-photon yield.