RHIC Low-Energy Challenges and Plans

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and ongoing efforts to operate RHIC at low energies (5-50 GeV) for QCD phase transition studies, including beam tests and potential improvements.

Contribution

It reports on the current status and progress in addressing low-energy operation challenges at RHIC, with experimental results and proposed solutions.

Findings

Successful beam tests with protons and gold at low energies.

Identification of key operational challenges such as magnet field quality.

Potential improvements from different beam cooling scenarios.

Abstract

There is significant interest in RHIC heavy ion collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=$5--50 GeV, motivated by a search for the QCD phase transition critical point. The lowest energies for this search are well below the nominal RHIC gold injection collision energy of $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=19.6$ GeV. There are several operations challenges at RHIC in this regime, including longitudinal acceptance, magnet field quality, lattice control, and luminosity monitoring. We report on the status of work to address these challenges, including results from beam tests of low energy RHIC operations with protons and gold, and potential improvements from different beam cooling scenarios.