INTENSITY DEPENDENT EFFECTS IN RHIC

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is currently under commissioning after a seven-year construction cycle. Unlike conventional hadron colliders, this machine accelerates, stores, and collides heavy ion beams of various combinations of species. The dominant intensity dependent effects are intra-beam scattering at both injection and storage, and complications caused by crossing transition at a slow ramp rate. In this paper, the authors present theoretical formalisms that have been used for the study, and discuss mechanisms, impacts, and compensation methods including beam cooling and transition jump schemes. Effects of space charge, beam-beam, and ring impedances are also summarized