Acceleration of Polarized Protons in the AGS With Two Helical Partial Snakes

The RHIC spin program requires 2×10
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.