Processing and Analysis of the Measured Alignment Errors for RHIC

All elements of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have been installed in ideal survey locations, which are defined as the optimum locations of the fiducials with respect to the positions generated by the design. The alignment process included the presurvey of all elements which could affect the beams. During this procedure a special attention was paid to the precise determination of the quadrupole centers as well as the roll angles of the quadrupoles and dipoles. After installation the machine has been surveyed and the resulting as-built measured position of the fiducials have been stored and structured in the survey database. They describe how the alignment errors, inferred by comparison of ideal and as-built data, have been processed and analyzed by including them in the RHIC modeling software. The RHIC model, which also includes individual measured errors for all magnets in the machine and is automatically generated from databases, allows the study of the impact of the measured alignment errors on the machine.