The RHIC injection fast kicker

The purpose of the injection kicker is to provide the ultimate deflection to the incoming beam from the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) into the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The beam is kicked in the vertical direction to place it on the equilibrium orbit of RHIC. Each bunch in the AGS is transferred separately, and stacked box-car fashion in the appropriate RHIC RF bucket. In order to achieve the required deflection angle four magnets powered by four pulsers will be used for each ring of RHIC. When the bunches are stacked in RHIC the last few RF buckets are left unfilled in order to provide a gap in the beam to facilitate the ejection or beam abort process. This also means there is not a severe constraint on the fall-time of the injection kicker. One prototype pulser has been built and tested. Much of the development effort has gone into the magnet design. Although lumped ferrite magnets are simpler to build and require less power to reach full field a transmission line magnet was developed because of the very fast rise-time requirement and the tolerances imposed on the field variation and ripple