BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
As the world’s only high energy polarized proton collider, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) has been providing collisions of polarized proton beams at beam energy from 100~GeV to 255~GeV for the past decade to explore the proton spin structure as well as other spin dependent measurements. With the help of two Siberian Snakes per accelerator plus outstanding beam control, beam polarization is preserved up to 100~GeV. About 10% polarization loss has been observed during the acceleration between 100~GeV and 255~GeV due to several strong depolarizing resonances. Moderate polarization loss was also observed during a typical 8 hour physics store. This presentation will overview the achieved performance of RHIC, both polarization as well as luminosity. The plan for providing high energy polarized He-3 collisions at RHIC will also be covered.
This work is on behalf of RHIC team.
