As part of a new heavy ion preinjector that will supply beams for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Space Radiation Laboratory, construction of a new electron beam ion source (EBIS) is now being completed. This source, based on the successful prototype Brookhaven National Laboratory Test EBIS, is designed to produce milliampere level currents of all ion species, with q/m=(1/6)-(1/2). Among the major components of this source are a 5 T, 2-m-long, 204 mm diameter warm bore superconducting solenoid, an electron gun designed to operate at a nominal current of 10 A, and an electron collector designed to dissipate approximately 300 kW of peak power. Careful attention has been paid to the design of the vacuum system, since a pressure of 10(-10) Torr is required in the trap region. The source includes several differential pumping stages, the trap can be baked to 400 C, and there are non-evaporable getter strips in the trap region. Power supplies include a 15 A, 15 kV electron collector power supply, and fast switchable power supplies for most of the 16 electrodes used for varying the trap potential distribution for ion injection, confinement, and extraction. The EBIS source and all EBIS power supplies sit on an isolated platform, which is pulsed up to a maximum of 100 kV during ion extraction. The EBIS is now fully assembled, and operation will be beginning following final vacuum and power supply tests. Details of the EBIS components are presented.

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Heavy ion cross sections totaling several hundred barns have been calculated previously for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These total cross sections are more than an order of magnitude larger than the geometric ion-ion cross sections primarily due to Bound-Free Pair Production (BFPP) and Electro-Magnetic Dissociation (EMD). Apart from a general interest in verifying the calculations experimentally, an accurate prediction of the losses created in the heavy ion collisions is of practical interest for the LHC, where some collision products are lost in cryogenically cooled magnets and have the potential to quench these magnets. In the 2012 RHIC run uranium ions collided with each other at √ sNN = 192.8 GeV with nearly all beam losses due to collisions. This allows for the measurement of the total cross section, which agrees with the calculated cross section within the experimental error.PACS numbers: 25.75. Dw, 29.20.db

Precision measurement and control of the betatron tunes and betatron coupling in RHIC are required for establishing and maintaining both good operating conditions and, particularly during the ramp to high beam energies, high proton beam polarization. While the proof-of-principle for simultaneous tune and coupling feedback was successfully demonstrated earlier, routine application of these systems has only become possible recently. Following numerous modifications for improved measurement resolution and feedback control, the time required to establish full-energy beams with the betatron tunes and coupling regulated by feedback was reduced from several weeks to a few hours. A summary of these improvements, select measurements benefitting from the improved resolution and a review of system performance are the subject of this report.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is designed to provide collisions of high energy polarized protons for the quest of understanding the proton spin structure. Polarized proton collisions at a beam energy of 100 GeV have been achieved in RHIC since 200.1. Recently, polarized proton beam was accelerated to 250 GeV in RHIC for the first time. Unlike accelerating unpolarized protons, the challenge for achieving high energy polarized protons is to fight the various mechanisms in an accelerator that can lead to partial or total polarization loss due to the interaction of the spin vector with the magnetic fields. We report on the progress of the RHIC polarized proton program. We also present the strategies of how to preserve the polarization through the entire acceleration chain, i.e. a 200 MeV linear accelerator, the Booster, the AGS and RHIC.