The effect of head-on beam-beam compensation on the stochastic boundaries and particle diffusion in RHIC

To compensate the effects from the head-on beam-beam interactions in the polarized proton operation in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an electron lens (elens) is proposed to collide head-on with the proton beam. We used an extended version of SixTrack for multiparticle beam-beam simulation in order to study the effect of the e-lens on the stochastic boundary and also on diffusion. The stochastic boundary was analyzed using Lyapunov exponents and the diffusion was characterized as the increase in the rms spread of the action. For both studies the simulations were performed with and without the e-lens and with full and partial compensation. Using the simulated values of the diffusion an attempt to calculate the emittance growth rate is presented.