Measurement of linear coupling resonance in RHIC

Linear coupling is one of the factors that determine beam lifetime in RHIC. The traditional method of measuring the minimum tune separation requires a tune scan and can't be done parasitically or during the acceleration ramp. A new technique of using AC dipoles to measure linear coupling resonance has been developed at RHIC. This method measures the degree of coupling by comparing the amplitude of the horizontal coherent excitation with the amplitude of the vertical coherent excitation if the beam is excited by the vertical AC dipole and vice versa. One advantage of this method is that it can be done without changing tunes from the normal machine working points. In principle, this method can also localize the coupling source by mapping out the coupling driving terms throughout the ring. This is very useful for local decoupling the interaction regions in RHIC. A beam experiment of measuring linear coupling has been performed in RHIC during its 2003 run, and the analysis of the experimental data is discussed in this paper.