NEAR INTEGER TUNE FOR POLARIZATION PRESERVATION IN THE AGS

The high energy (T = 250 GeV) polarized proton beam experiments performed in RHIC, require high polarization of the beam. In order to preserve the polarization of the proton beam, during the acceleration in the AGS, which is the pre-injector to RHIC, we have installed in AGS two partial helical magnets which minimize the loss of the beam polarization caused by the various intrinsic spin resonances occurring during the proton acceleration. The minimization of the polarization loss during the acceleration cycle, requires that the vertical tune of the AGS is between the values of 8.97 and 8.985 during the acceleration. With the AGS constrained to run at near integer tune {approx}8.980, the perturbations to the beam caused by the partial helical magnets are large and also result in large beta and dispersion waves. To mitigate the adverse effect of the partial helices on the optics of the AGS, we have installed in specified straight sections of the AGS compensation quads and we have also generated a beam bump at the location of the cold partial helix. In this paper we present the beam optics of the AGS which ameliorates the adverse effect of the two partial helices on the beammore » optics.« less