RHIC: The World's First High-Energy, Polarized-Proton Collider (423rd Brookhaven Lecture)

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL has been colliding polarized proton at a beam energy of 100 billion electron volts (GeV) since 2001. In addition to reporting upon the progress of RHIC polarized-proton program, this talk will focus upon the mechanisms that cause the beam to depolarize and the strategies developed to overcome this. As the world first polarized-proton collider, RHIC is designed to collide polarized protons up to an energy of 250 GeV, thereby providing an unique opportunity to measure the contribution made by the gluon to a proton's spin and to study the spin structure of proton. Unlike other high-energy proton colliders, however, the challenge for RHIC is to overcome the mechanisms that cause partial or total loss of beam polarization, which is due to the interaction of the spin vector with the magnetic fields. In RHIC, two Siberian snakes have been used to avoid these spin depolarizing resonances, which are driven by vertical closed-orbit distortion and vertical betatron oscillations. As a result, polarized-proton beams have been accelerated to 100 GeV without polarization loss, although depolarization has been observed during acceleration from 100 GeV to 205 GeV.