Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider spin flipper commissioning plan

Abstract

The commissioning of the RHIC spin flipper in the RHIC Blue ring during the RHIC polarized proton run in 2009 showed the detrimental effects of global vertical coherent betatron oscillation induced by the 2-AC dipole plus 4-DC dipole configuration [1]. This global orbital coherent oscillation of the RHIC beam in the Blue ring in the presence of collision modulated the beam-beam interaction between the two RHIC beams and affected Yellow beam lifetime. The experimental data at injection with different spin tunes by changing the snake current also demonstrated that it was not possible to induce a single isolated spin resonance with the global vertical coherent betatron oscillation excited by the two AC dipoles. Hence, RHIC spin flipper was re-designed to eliminate the coherent vertical betatron oscillation outside the spin flipper by adding three additional AC dipoles. This paper presents the experimental results as well as the new design.