Cooling of beams of gold ions using electron bunches accelerated with radio-frequency (RF) systems was recently experimentally demonstrated in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). Such an approach is new and opens the possibility of using this technique at higher energies than possible with electrostatic acceleration of electron beams. The challenges of this approach include generation of electron beams suitable for cooling, delivery of electron bunches of the required quality to the cooling sections without degradation of beam angular divergence and energy spread, achieving the required small angles between electron and ion trajectories in the cooling sections, precise velocity matching between the two beams, high-current operation of the electron accelerator, as well as several physics effects related to bunched-beam cooling. Here we report on the first demonstration of cooling hadron beams using this new approach.
Beam profiles in the two storage rings of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) are measured with ionization profile monitors (IPMs). Each ring has a vertical and horizontal detector. An IPM measures the distribution of electrons produced in the beam line by beam ionization of background gas. These detectors have been developed at BNL in a program that began in 1996. The current detectors are a design that was based on a prototype built in 2007 and used in RHIC from 2007 to 2012. During the 2012 shutdown we refurbished this prototype and installed it into the Alternating-Gradient Synchrotron (AGS). This paper describes the new AGS IPM and shows data from the detector commissioning.
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