The IUCF Cooler was commissioned starting in summer 1987 and is being decommissioned in summer 2002, after a productive life of nearly 15 years. The research output over this period has amply justified the construction and operating costs of this unique facility.

The ring circumference is 86.79m. It has six sides, of which four have housed in-beam experiments at various times over the Cooler lifespan. It is not easy to display the entire ring, as parts are obscured by control racks, power supplies and such. There is however one place where one may stand to view about 1/3 of the ring centered on the north side. A series of snapshots taken from that place can be stitched together into the panoramic view shown below.

In the panorama, beam travels from right to left, starting at the reaction product channel used by the recently completed search for threshold pion production in d + d collisions. Panning left, we see the second and third ring corners (counting starts at the injection straight). On the extreme left, beam passes through two acceleration devices (induction, then rf) just before entering the PINTEX experiment setup, where a long series of (polarized beam) -> (polarized target) experiments began in 1993 and ended in June 2002.

In the center of the panorama, the light blue box houses a superconducting solenoid which straddles the midpoint of the north straight section. Note the reflection symmetry about this midpoint. The solenoid, with the four green quadrupoles (some tilted) on either side, makes up the very first working Siberian snake, in use for accelerator spin physics studies since 1989.

The ring has two dipoles (crimson) in each corner, bracketed by ring quadrupole pairs (cream). Also visible are thin hexapoles (dark blue) and steerers (yellow). The stainless steel vacuum chamber is mostly hidden under thermal insulation, used in baking to achieve the sub-nanoTorr pressures needed for good stored beam lifetime.

Photo by R. E. Pollock 4 Aug. 2002. All rights reserved.

A note about technique. Using a Canon A10 camera in 800x640 pixel, fine compression mode, five overlapping snaps w/o flash were taken. The merger was then accomplished with Canon's Photostitch software (with no manual intervention!) to make this 2257x376 116kb panorama. Some of the four joins are barely visible as reduced resolution stripes seen at picture top or bottom.