Spin flipping with an rf dipole and a full Siberian snake

We recently used an rf dipole magnet to study the spin flipping of a 120 MeV horizontally polarized proton beam stored in the presence of a nearly full Siberian snake in the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility Cooler Ring. We flipped the spin by ramping the rf dipole's frequency through an rf-induced depolarizing resonance. After optimizing the frequency ramp parameters, we used multiple spin flips to measure a spin-flip efficiency of 86.5±0.5%. The spin-flip efficiency was apparently limited by the field strength in the rf dipole. This result indicates that spin flipping a stored polarized proton beam should be possible in high energy rings such as the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and HERA where Siberian snakes are certainly needed and only dipole rf-flipper magnets are practical.