In a medium energy proton synchrotron, strong enough partial Siberian snakes can be used to avoid both imperfection and vertical intrinsic depolarizing resonances. However, partial snakes tilt the stable spin direction away from vertical, which generates depolarizing resonances associated with horizontal tune. The relatively weak but numerous horizontal intrinsic resonances are the main source of the residual polarization losses. A pair of horizontal tune jump quads have been used in the Brookhaven Alternating Gradient Synchrotron to overcome these weak resonances. The locations of the two quads have to be chosen such that the disturbance to the beam optics is minimum. The emittance growth has to be mitigated for this method to work. In addition, this technique needs very accurate jump timing. Using two partial Siberian snakes, with vertical tune inside the spin tune gap and 80% polarization at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron injection, polarized proton beam had reached 1.5 × 10 11 proton per bunch with 65% polarization. With the tune jump timing optimized and emittance preserved, more than 70% polarization with 2 × 10 11 protons per bunch has been achieved. The polarization transport efficiency is close to 90%.

Here, &I is the unit vectors pointing radially outward and An ac dipole with horizontally oriented oscillating magnetic field (spin flipper) was installed in FU-IIC to reverse the spin direction in the presence of two full Siberian snakes, thereby reducing the systematic errors for the spin physics experiments in RHIC. With two full snakes, the spin vector completes one full precession around the vertical direction in two revolutions, and the spin depolarization resonances due to the machine imperfections and betatron oscillations are eliminated. Since the spin flipper provides an oscillating horizontal dipole field, a "spin resonance" can occur if the spin flipper frequency is placed in the neighborhood of the spin precession frequency [ 1,2,3]. By slowly sweeping the spin flipper frequency across the spin precession frequency, a full spin flip can be achieved. This paper reports the results of the FZUC spin flipper commissioned during the RHIC 2002 polarized proton run. By running the spin flipper at a slightly different configuration, one can also measure the spin precession tune.

In polarized proton collision experiments, it is highly advantageous to flip the spin of each bunch of protons during the stores to reduce the systematic errors. Experiments done at energies less than 2 GeV have demonstrated a spin-flip efficiency over 99%. At high energy colliders with Siberian snakes, a single magnet spin flipper does not work because of the large spin tune spread and the generation of multiple, overlapping resonances. A more sophisticated spin flipper, constructed of nine-dipole magnets, was used to flip the spin in the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. A special optics choice was also used to make the spin tune spread very small. A 97% spin-flip efficiency was measured at both 24 and 255 GeV. These results show that efficient spin flipping can be achieved at high energies using a nine-magnet spin flipper.

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