Spin flipping a stored vertically polarized proton beam with an RF solenoid

A recent experiment in the IUCF cooler ring studied the spin flip of a stored vertically polarized 139 MeV proton beam. This spin flip was accomplished by using an RF solenoid to induce an artificial depolarizing resonance in the ring, and then varying the solenoid’s frequency through this resonance value to induce spin flip. We found a polarization loss after multiple spin flips of about 0.00±0.05% per flip and also losses for very long flip times. This device will be useful for reducing systematic errors in polarized beam‐internal target scattering asymmetry experiments by enabling experimenters to perform frequent beam polarization reversals in the course of the experiment.