Polarized protons in HERA

Abstract

Polarized proton beams at HERA can currently only be produced by extracting a beam from a polarized source and then accelerating it in the three synchrotrons at DESY. In this paper, the processes which can depolarize a proton beam in circular accelerators are explained, devices which could avoid this depolarization in the DESY accelerator chain are described, and specific problems which become important at the high energies of HERA are mentioned. At HERA's high energies, spin motion cannot be accurately described with the isolated resonance model which has been successfully used for lower energy rings. To illustrate the principles of more accurate simulations, the invariant spin field is introduced to describe the equilibrium polarization state of a beam and the changes during acceleration. It will be shown how linearized spin motion leads to a computationally quick approximation for the invariant spin field and how to amend this with more time consuming but accurate non-perturbative computations. Analysis with these techniques has allowed us to establish optimal Siberian Snake schemes for HERA.