Study of the Polarization Deterioration During Physics Stores in RHIC Polarized Proton Runs

As the only high energy polarized proton collider in the world, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has achieved a great success in colliding polarized proton beams up to 255GeV per beam energy with over 50% average store polarizations for spin physics studies. With the help of Siberian snakes as well as outstanding beam control during the acceleration, polarization loss during acceleration up to 100 GeV is negligible. However, about 10% polarization loss was observed between acceleration from 100 GeV to 255 GeV. In addition, a mild polarization deterioration during long store for physics data taking was also observed. In this paper, studies in understanding the store depolarizing mechanism is reported, including the analysis of polarization deterioration data based on the past couple of RHIC polarized proton runs.