Bunched beam electron cooler for low-energy RHIC operation

Electron cooling was proposed to increase the luminosity of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) operation for heavy ion beam energies below 10 GeV/nucleon. The electron cooling system should be able to deliver an electron beam of adequate quality in a wide range of electron beam energies (0.9-5 MeV). An attractive option is to use electron bunches produced with the superconducting RF (SRF) injector. Such a scheme of cooling with bunched electron beam is also a natural approach for high-energy electron cooling which requires RF acceleration. In this paper, we describe the requirements and design aspects of such an approach.