RHIC low energy tests and initial operations

Future Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) runs, including a portion of FY10 heavy ion operations, will explore collisions at center of mass energies of 5-50 GeV/n (GeV/nucleon). Operations at these energies is motivated by a search for the QCD phase transition critical point. The lowest end of this energy range is nearly a factor of four below the nominal RHIC injection center of mass energy of {radical} s = 20.8 GeV/n. There are several operational challenges in the RHIC low-energy regime, including harmonic number changes, small longitudinal acceptance, lowered magnet field quality, nonlinear orbit control, and luminosity monitoring. We report on the experience with some of these challenges during beam tests with gold in March 2008, including first RHIC operations at {radical}s = 9.18 GeV/n and first beam experience at {radical}s = 5 GeV/n.