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
IAP, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
The construction and initial commissioning phase of a new heavy ion preinjector was completed at Brookhaven in September, 2010, and the preinjector is now operational. This preinjector, using an EBIS source to produce high charge state heavy ions, provided helium and neon ion beams for use at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory in the Fall of 2010, and gold and uranium beams are being commissioned during the 2011 run cycle for use in RHIC. The EBIS operates with an electron beam current of up to 10 A, to produce mA level currents in 10 to 40 μs beam pulses. The source is followed by an RFQ and IH linac to accelerate ions with q/m > 0.16 to an energy of 2 MeV/amu, for injection into the Booster synchrotron. The performance of the preinjector is presented, including initial operational experience for the NASA and RHIC programs.
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.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
The RHIC polarized proton physics program requires high luminosity and high polarization which depends directly on the intensity, emittances and polarization delivered to RHIC by the injector chain. In the AGS, two partial snakes create gaps in the realized spin-tune around the integers which allows an accelerating beam with sufficiently small vertical emittance and near-integer vertical tune to avoid the imperfection and vertical intrinsic resonances. The same strategy strengthens the many (82) weak horizontal intrinsic resonances crossed during AGS acceleration. A system speeding up these resonance crossings – the AGS JumpQuad system: 82 tiny (0.04) fast (100usec) betatron tune shifts – has been commissioned and evolved during RHIC Runs 09, 10, and 11. Subtle properties of the AGS geometry and lattice, magnified into relevance by the high vertical tune can result in polarization-damaging emittance growth when combined with the Jump Quad gymnastics. Orbit stability is critical. Some aspects of the JumpQuad system, of this commissioning effort and related developments will be described.