RHIC Low-Energy Challenges and Plans

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 the search for a possible 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 {radical}s = 19.6 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 these challenges during beam tests with gold beams in March 2008. This includes first operations at {radical}s = 9.18 GeV/n, first beam experience at {radical}s = 5 GeV/n, and luminosity projections for near-term operations.