BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
RHIC operation as the polarized proton collider presents unique challenges since both luminosity and spin polarization are important. With longitudinally polarized beams at the experiments, the figure of merit is LP4. A lot of upgrades and modifications have been made since last polarized proton operation. A 9 MHz rf system has been installed to improve longitudinal match at injection and to increase luminosity. The beam dumps were upgraded to allow for increased bunch intensities. A vertical survey of RHIC was performed before the run to get better magnet alignment. The orbit control has also been improved this year. Additional efforts were put in to improve source polarization and AGS polarization transfer efficiency. To preserve polarization on the ramp, a new working point was chosen such that the vertical tune is near a third order resonance. The overview of the changes and the operation results are presented in this paper.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
RHIC operated at energies below the nominal ion injection energy of E=9.8 GeV/u in 2010. Earlier test runs and magnet measurements indicated that all defocusing sextupole unipolar power supplies should be reversed to provide the proper sign of chromaticity. However, vertical chromaticity at E=3.85 GeV/u with this power supply configuration was still not optimal. This uncertainty inspired a new machine configuration where only half of the defocusing sextupole power supplies were reversed, taking advantage of the flexibility of the RHIC nonlinear chromaticity correction system to mimic bipolar sextupoles. This configuration resulted in a 30 percent luminosity gain and eliminated the need for further polarity changes for later 2010 low energy physics operations. Here we describe the background to this problem, operational experience, and RHIC online model changes to implement this solution.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
JLAB, Newport News, Virginia, USA
All physics stores at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider are now established using simultaneous orbit, tune, coupling, and energy feedback during beam injection, acceleration to full beam energies, during the “beta-squeeze” for establishing small beam sizes at the interaction points, and during removal of separation bumps to establish collisions. In this report we describe the major changes made to enable these achievements. The proof-of-principle for additional chromaticity feedback will also be presented.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
As part of the search for a phase transition or critical point on the QCD phase diagram, an energy scan including 5 different energy settings was performed during the 2010 RHIC heavy ion run. While the top beam energy for heavy ions is at 100 GeV/n and the lowest achieved energy setpoint was significantly below RHICs injection energy of approximately 10 GeV/n, we also provided beams for data taking in a medium energy range above injection energy and below top beam energy. This paper reviews RHIC experience and challenges for RHIC medium energy operations that produced full experimental data sets at beam energies of 31.2 GeV/n and 19.5 GeV/n.