BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The head-on beam-beam interaction is the dominant luminosity limiting effect in polarized proton operation in RHIC. To mitigate this effect two electron lenses were installed in the two RHIC rings. We summarize the hardware and electron beam commissioning results to date, and report on the first experience with the electron-hadron beam interaction. In 2014 RHIC is operating with gold beams only. In this case the luminosity is not limited by head-on beam-beam interactions and compensation is not necessary. The goals of this year’s commissioning efforts are a test of all instrumentation; the demonstration of electron and gold beam overlap; the demonstration of electron beam parameters that are sufficiently stable to have no negative impact on the gold beam lifetime; and the measurement of the tune footprint compression from the beam overlap. With these demonstrations, and a lattice with a phase advance that has a multiple of 180 degrees between the beam-beam interaction and electron lens locations, head-on beam-beam compensation can be commissioned in the following year with proton beams.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
As the last missing step in phase 1 of the beam energy scan (BES-I), aimed at the search for the critical point in the QCD phase diagram, RHIC collided gold ions at a beam energy of 7.3 GeV/nucleon during the FY 2014 run. While this particular energy is close to the nominal RHIC injection energy of 9.8 GeV/nucleon, it is nevertheless challenging because it happens to be close to the AGS transition energy, which makes longitudinal beam dynamics during transfer from the AGS to RHIC difficult. We report on machine performance, obstacles and solutions during the FY 2014 low energy run.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
After running uranium-uranium and copper-gold collisions in 2012, the high energy heavy ion run of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) for Fiscal Year 14 (Run14) is back to gold-gold (Au-Au) collisions at 100 GeV/nucleon. Following the level of performance achieved in Run12, RHIC is still looking to push both instantaneous and integrated luminosity goals. To that end, a new 56 MHz superconducting RF cavity was installed and commissioned, designed to keep ions in one RF bucket and improve luminosity by allowing a smaller beta function at the interaction point (IP) due to a reduced hourglass effect. The following presents an overview of these changes and reviews the performance of the collider.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
In this article, we study the beam-beam interaction in the possible future gold-gold collision with different particle energies in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). With different particle energies, the center-of-mass of collision is moving in the longitudinal direction during collision. Since the RF harmonic numbers are different for the two RHIC rings, bunches collide in 110 turns followed by 10 turns without collision. In this study, the stability of particles and the beam emittance growth are calculated through numeric simulations based on a 6-D weak-strong beam-beam interaction model.