• M. Bai, L. A. Ahrens, J.G. Alessi, G. Atonian, A. Bazilevsky, J. Beebe-Wang, M. Blaskiewicz, J.M. Brennan, K.A. Brown, D. Bruno, J.J. Butler, R. Connolly, T. D'Ottavio, K.A. Drees, W. Fischer, G. Ganetis, C.J. Gardner, R.L. Gill, J.W. Glenn, Y. Hao, T. Hayes, H. Huang, R.L. Hulsart, A. Kayran, J.S. Laster, R.C. Lee, A.U. Luccio, Y. Luo, W.W. MacKay, Y. Makdisi, G.J. Marr, A. Marusic, G.T. McIntyre, K. Mernick, R.J. Michnoff, M.G. Minty, C. Montag, B. Morozov, J. Morris, P. Oddo, B. Oerter, F.C. Pilat, V. Ptitsyn, D. Raparia, G. Robert-Demolaize, T. Roser, T. Russo, T. Satogata, V. Schoefer, K. Smith, D. Svirida, S. Tepikian, D. Trbojevic, N. Tsoupas, J.E. Tuozzolo, G. Wang, M. Wilinski, A. Zaltsman, A. Zelenski, K. Zeno, S.Y. Zhang
  BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York

Funding: Work supported by Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-98CH10886 with the U.S. Department of Energy.

After having provided collisions of polarized protons at a beam energy of 100 GeV since 2001, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider~(RHIC) at BNL reached its design energy of polarized proton collision at 250 GeV. With the help of the two full Siberian snakes in each ring as well as careful orbit correction and working point control, polarization was preserved during acceleration from injection to 250~GeV. During the course of the Physics data taking, the spin rotators on either side of the experiments of STAR and PHENIX were set up to provide collisions with longitudinal polarization at both experiments. Various techniques to increase luminosity like further beta star squeeze and RF system upgrades as well as gymnastics to shorten the bunch length at store were also explored during the run. This paper reports the performance of the run as well as the plan for future performance improvement in RHIC.

Slides

• F.C. Pilat, M. Bai, D. Bruno, P. Cameron, K.A. Drees, V. Litvinenko, Y. Luo, N. Malitsky, G.J. Marr, A. Marusic, V. Ptitsyn, T. Satogata, S. Tepikian, D. Trbojevic
  BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York

The reduction of beta* beyond the 1m design value at RHIC has been consistently achieved over the last 6 years of RHIC operations, resulting in an increase of luminosity for different running modes and species. During the recent 2007-08 deuteron-gold run the reduction to 0.70 from the design 1 m achieved a 30% increase in delivered luminosity. The key ingredients in allowing the reduction have been the capability of efficiently developing ramps with tune and coupling feedback, orbit corrections on the ramp, and collimation at injection and on the ramp, to minimize beam losses in the final focus triplets, the main aperture limitation for the collision optics. We will describe the operational strategy used to reduce the b*, at first squeezing the beam at store, to test feasibility, followed by the operationally preferred option of squeezing the beam during acceleration, and the resulting luminosity increase obtained in the Cu-Cu run in 2005, Au-Au in 2007 and the deuteron-Au run in 2007-08. We will also include beta squeeze plans and results for the upcoming 2009 run with polarized protons at 250 GeV.

• T. Satogata, L. A. Ahrens, M. Bai, J.M. Brennan, D. Bruno, J.J. Butler, K.A. Drees, A.V. Fedotov, W. Fischer, M. Harvey, T. Hayes, W. Jappe, R.C. Lee, W.W. MacKay, N. Malitsky, G.J. Marr, R.J. Michnoff, B. Oerter, E. Pozdeyev, T. Roser, F. Severino, K. Smith, S. Tepikian, N. Tsoupas
  BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York

Funding: Work supported by Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-98CH10886 with the U.S. Department of Energy.

There is significant interest in RHIC heavy ion collisions at center of mass energies of 5-50 GeV/u, motivated by a search for the QCD phase transition critical point. The low end of this energy range is nearly a factor of four below the nominal RHIC injection center of mass energy of 19.6 GeV/u. There are several operational challenges in the low-energy regime, including harmonic number changes, longitudinal acceptance, magnet field quality, lattice control, and luminosity monitoring. We report on the results of beam tests with protons and gold in 2007–9, including first RHIC operations at √{(s_NN)=9.2} GeV and low-energy nonlinear field corrections at √{(s_NN)=5} GeV.