Performance summary of the helical magnets for RHIC

A series of four Snake and eight Rotator superconducting helical magnet assemblies has been built and installed in RHIC to control the polarization of protons during acceleration and storage in that machine. Each of these assemblies consists of four 2.4 m long dipole magnets in each of which the field rotates through 360 degrees along the magnet's length. The magnets were made by winding one millimeter diameter superconducting 7-strand cable into slots milled into thick-walled aluminum tubes. The magnets produce 4 Tesla field at a current of 320 amperes and are quench-protected with 0.050 ohm resistors placed across the winding in each slot. A total of 48 of these 2.4 m magnets has been built, tested and installed. This paper summarizes their quench performance as well as their field uniformity, of which the integral field is the most critical. All magnets reached the required operating field level of 4 T, and the integral field of the magnets was generally about half of the maximum permissible level of 0.050 Tesla meters.