Copper ions for the 2005 run [1] of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) are accelerated in the Tandem, Booster and AGS prior to injection into RHIC. The setup and performance of these accelerators with copper are reviewed in this paper.

The RHIC spin program requires 2 x 10{sup 11} proton/bunch with 70% polarization. As the injector to RHIC, AGS is the bottleneck for preserving polarization: there is no space for a full snake to overcome numerous depolarizing resonances. An ac dipole and a partial snake have been used to preserve beam polarization in the past few years. Two helical snakes have been built and installed in the AGS. With careful setup of optics at injection and along the ramp, this combination can eliminate all depolarizing resonances encountered during acceleration. This paper presents the setup and preliminary results.

High-energy ion colliders (hadron colliders operating with ions other than protons) are premier research tools for nuclear physics. The collision energy and high luminosity are important design and operations considerations. The experiments also expect flexibility with frequent changes in the collision energy, detector fields, and ion species, including asymmetric collisions. For the creation, acceleration, and storage of bright intense ion beams limits are set by space charge, charge exchange, and intrabeam scattering effects. The latter leads to luminosity lifetimes of only a few hours for intense heavy ions beams. Currently, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL is the only operating high-energy ion collider. Later this decade the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), under construction at CERN, will also run with heavy ions.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider provides not only collisions of ions but also collisions of polarized protons. In a circular accelerator, the polarization of polarized proton beam can be partially or fully lost when a spin depolarizing resonance is encountered. To preserve the beam polarization during acceleration, two full Siberian snakes were employed in RHIC. In 2002, polarized proton beams were first accelerated to 100 GeV and collided in RHIC. Beams were brought into collisions with longitudinal polarization at the experiments STAR and PHENIX by using spin rotators. Optimizing polarization transmission efficiency and improving luminosity performance are significant challenges. Currently, the luminosity lifetime in RHIC is limited by the beam-beam effect. The current state of RHIC polarized proton program, including its dedicated physics run in 2005 and efforts to optimize luminosity production in beam-beam limited conditions are reported.

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The 5th year of RHIC operations, started in November 2004 and expected to last till June 2005, consists of a physics run with Cu-Cu collisions at 100 GeV/u followed by one with polarized protons (pp) at 100 GeV [l]. We will address here the overall performance of the RHIC complex used for the first time as a Cu-Cu collider, and compare it with previous operational experience with Au, PP and asymmetric d-Au collisions. We will also discuss operational improvements, such as a {beta}* squeeze to 85cm in the high luminosity interaction regions from the design value of 1m, system improvements, machine performance and limitations, and address reliability and uptime issues.

We present in this paper a method for evaluating explicitly the contribution of nuclear material accountability upgrades to risk reduction at nuclear facilities. The method yields the same types of values for conditional risk reduction that physical protection and material control upgrades yield. Thereby, potential material accountability upgrades can be evaluated for implementation in the same way that protection and control upgrades are evaluated.

As the first hadron accelerator and collider consisting of two independent superconducting rings RHIC has operated with a wide range of beam energies and particle species. Machine operation and performance will be reviewed that includes high luminosity gold-on-gold and copper-on-copper collisions at design beam energy (100 GeV/u), asymmetric deuteron-on-gold collisions as well as high energy polarized proton-proton collisions (100 GeV on 100 GeV). Plans for future upgrades of RHIC will also be discussed.