Heavy ions in RHIC — How to get to higher luminosities?

Luminosity mainly depends on the beam intensity of the circulating beams and the beam profiles at the interaction points. By either increasing the total beam current or decreasing its size the instantaneous luminosity can be increased. In addition any method to slow down beam growth and debunching processes will further improve the luminosity which can be integrated over a store. Optimizing beam cleaning procedures such as collimation or abort gap cleaning will further increase the amount of usable luminosity for experiments. This paper will give a brief introduction to some accelerator basics of interest and the luminosity as a function of beam parameters. Limitations to the achievable integrated luminosity as well as future upgrades to overcome these limitations are presented.