Siberian Snake Experimentst

We began studying Siberian Snakes at the 1985 Ann Arbor Workshop on Polarized Protons at the SSC l . Fig. 1 is a diagram of how a polarized SSC might appear with Siberian Snakes installed in the various rings. By the end of the Workshop it appeared that it would be practical to have polarized protons at the SSC, but only if the Siberian Snake Concept worked as everyone hoped. The Workshop's first conclusion was that polarized beam acceleration would probably be possible at the SSC. The second conclusion was that one must test the Siberian Snake Concept, which had been invented around 1974 by Derbenev and Kondratenko2• While most of the world's distinguished accelerator theorists were quite convinced that the concept would work, we felt that it would be difficult to convince the SSC Director and the funding people to spend tens of millions of dollars on Siberian Snakes, if it was an untested theoretical concept.