Electron Cooling Dynamics for RHIC

Research towards high-energy electron cooling of RHIC is presently underway at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In this new regime, electron cooling has many unique features and challenges. At high energy, due to the difficulty of providing operational reserves, the expected cooling times must be estimated with a high degree of accuracy compared to extant low-energy coolers. To address these high-energy cooling issues, a detailed study of cooling dynamics based on computer codes and experimental benchmarking was launched at BNL. In this paper, we present an update of the high-energy cooling dynamics studies. We also include a discussion of some features of electron cooling relevant to colliders, such as the effects of rapid cooling of the beam core and an accurate treatment of the intra-beam scattering for such cooled ion distributions.