The effect and correction of coupling generated by the RHIC triplet quadrupoles

This study explores the possibility of operating the nominal RHIC coupling correction system in local decoupling mode, where a subset of skew quadrupoles are independently set by minimizing the coupling as locally measured by beam position monitors. The goal is to establish a correction procedure for the skew quadrupole errors in the interaction region triplets that does not rely on a priori knowledge of the individual errors. After a description of the present coupling correction scheme envisioned for RHIC, the basics of the local decoupling method will be briefly recalled in the context of its implementation in the TEAPOT simulation code as well as operationally. The method is then applied to the RHIC lattice: a series of simple tests establish that single triplet skew quadrupole errors can be corrected by local decoupling. More realistic correction schemes are then studied in order to correct distributed sources of skew quadrupole errors: the machine can be decoupled either by pure local decoupling or by a combination of global (minimum tune separation) and local decoupling. The different correction schemes are successively validated and evaluated by standard RHIC simulation runs with the complete set of errors and corrections. The different solutions and results are finally discussed together with their implications for the hardware