Beam lifetime and limitations during low-energy RHIC operation

The low-energy physics program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), motivated by a search for the QCD phase transition critical point, requires operation at low energies. At these energies, large nonlinear magnetic field errors and large beam sizes produce low beam lifetimes. A variety of beam dynamics effects such as Intrabeam Scattering (IBS), space charge and beam-beam forces also contribute. All these effects are important to understand beam lifetime limitations in RHIC at low energies. During the low-energy RHIC physics run in May-June 2010 at beam γ = 6.1 and γ = 4.1, gold beam lifetimes were measured for various values of space-charge tune shifts, transverse acceptance limitation by collimators, synchrotron tunes and RF voltage. This paper summarizes our observations and initial findings.