'Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI)'
Doi
Abstract
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), with two concentric rings 3.8 km in circumference, uses superconducting magnets to focus the high energy beams. Each sextant of RHIC will have continuous cryostats up to 480 m in length housing the magnets and the cold beam pipes. For an acceptable lifetime of the stored beam, the pressure in the cold beam pipe will be < 10{sup {minus}11} Torr. The characteristics of He pressure front propagation due to He leaks will be of importance for beam lifetimes and for vacuum monitoring due to the high vapor pressure of He at 4.4 K, even with small surface coverage. The travel of the He pressure fronts along a 480 m long, 6.9 cm I.D. stainless steel beam pipe cooled to 4.4 K has recently been measured during the RHIC first sextant test. The experiment was carried out over a 12-day period by bleeding in a calibrated He leak of 3 {times} 10{sup {minus}5} Torr{center_dot}l/s (20 C) while measuring the He pressures along this 480 m cold tube at {approximately} 30 m intervals. The measured speed of the pressure fronts and the pressure profiles are summarized and compared with the calculated ones
