Commissioning of a first-order transition jump in RHIC

When accelerating gold ions in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) the transition energy must be crossed. RHIC uses a set of special quadrupoles and power supplies which can reverse polarity in less than 40 milliseconds. These quadrupoles are used to produce dispersion bumps which increase the transition energy as the beam approaches transition. The change of polarity will then jump the transition energy across the beam energy. This paper describes the commissioning of the RHIC transition crossing system.