Minutes of the PS-SPS Users Meeting held on May 11th, 2023

!IMPORTANT!!
Next user meeting: Wednesday May 17th, 2023 10:30 CEST

(Please note the different day of the week due to the holiday on Thursday!)

Location will be announced.

News from the PS & SPS Physics Coordinator (E. B. Holzer)

PS Machine Report (B. Mikulec)

Availability of ~94% Thu-Thu

Main issues:

Main activities:

SPS Machine Report (Arthur Spierer)

Information on sequences:

Safety / Radiation Protection (Please Add Your Name Here)

n_TOF (M. Bacak)

Physics:

Beam:

East Area Beam Status (M. van Dijk)

T09: No users. East Target symmetry online monitoring test today for T09.
T10: No news, good beam for users.
T11: CLOUD run continued this week (until Wednesday). No issues from beam side. Access door issue being investigated.

East Area Users Tour de Table

T8: IRRAD / CHARM (F. Ravotti)

Running smoothly, no issues. Weekly access yesterday: removed the active experiment for LHCb, installed EP-ESE and TE-MSC experiment continue targeting very high proton fluence levels in IRRAD. R&D tests of new BPM prototypes also ongoing in IRRAD. In CHARM, TE-MPE experiment continue as weel as weekly tests of electronics components and sensors R&D (BE-CEM). Very good beam all week long and weekly intensity beyond target (see plot below):

Next access on Wednesday. We are happy to profit of the free T9 cycle to T8 whenever possible.

T9 Incoming: CALICE ScW-ECAL + AHCAL (Yong Liu)

Note Also outgoing main user for SPS North Area H2 beamline in week 19

T10 Outgoing: ALICE ITS3 (Paolo Martinengo)

Note Also incoming parallel user for SPS North Area H6 beamline for week 20
Test completed,more than 10 prototypes tested.
One telescope will be removed today/tomorrow (RP clearance pending), the second next week.
Quite stable beam conditions, often 3 spills per cycle, thanks.

T11: CLOUD (Pedro Rato)

CLOUD ended its current campaign Wednesday evening. After a challenging begining to the campaign trying to find the operating settings for our new equipment (FLOTUS), in the last week of the campaign we got some good results and found the optimal way to utilize it. Thank you for all the help of everyone in the PS team. We look forward for our next campaign CLOUD16 scheduled from mid September to late November.

AWAKE (Giovanni Zevi Della Porta)

May proton run started very well.

Average beam for the first 8 days with protons (excl. Thursday MD):

Next week: “semi-dedicated AWAKE run”.

Conditions will be different in July-October:


Incoming: HiRadMat (Please Add Your Name Here)

North Area Beam Status

H2, H4, H6, and H8 Beams (M. van Dijk)

Other Beams P42, K12, and M2 (M. van Dijk)

K12: Issue with CEDAR diaphragm motor. One cog on the drive shaft of the motor for the diaphragm became lose; this was glued in place and is holding since then. However, it now requires a manual intervention on-site for a change of the diaphragm setting. As going to operation is more important at the moment and repairing will most probably require taking the device out, this is postponed.

M2: The leaky inlet valve found on the CEDAR 083 has been exchanged yesterday. This caused a high consumption of He in the past weeks. Scan at 60 GeV/c is planned to be checked today monitoring the consumption. 190 GeV/c hadron beam was also preliminarily aligned with the AMBER setup on Tuesday. It will be re-checked after their survey measurement next week.
Last night after the restart of the BI crate some of the settings were not set correctly and the individual PMTs were not synchronised with the trigger. This was retuned by BI today morning.

North Area Users Tour de Table

P42-K12 and M2

K12: NA62 (Roberto Piandani)

On Monday we were able to fill our CEDAR with H2, the operation went smooth. The calibration and setup of the cedar is almost done.
We had time alignement of all the detectors.
Real data taking still not started, last minutes hardware problems with our straw tracker.
Feed back to the spill structure provided in the slides attached to this meeting

M2: AMBER (Maxim Alexeev)

Thanks to the provided 100 units of beam over the weekend we have successfully concluded the ECAL calibration.
Starting Tuesday our first priority is given to the CEDARs commissioning. We are in constant contact with Dipanwita on the subject and we had already:

  1. Had several visits by colleagues to fix the He leak. Presently a new input valve has been installed and the necessity of a bypass of a leaking servo is being evaluated.
  2. We had the support to steer the 190 GeV beam in the area.
  3. Yesterday it was found that the CEDAR PMT counts were not performing as expected (in CESAR RO). An intervention done this morning and it was found out that the crate was not reloaded. Fixed.
  4. Proceed with the commissioning.

H2

H2 Outgoing: CALICE ScW-ECAL + AHCAL (Yong Liu)

Note Also incoming user for PS East Area T9 beamline for week 20

and 𝜋−

H2 Main: CMS HF (A. Mestvirishvili)

Yesterday, safety inspection was OK. Area was patroled and around 19:30 we started alignment of our aparatus. Since with XTDV closed (muons) we were getting very low number of particles, so we decided during the alignment to remove it and here we are, ~15000 particles per spill, as it was asked. Beamvise we are OK, we are solving our minor internal problems with electronics

H2 Incoming: ALICE FOCAL - Week 20, Main (Please Add Your Name Here)

H4

H4 Outgoing: GIF++ (M. Jaekel)

Sucessful beam time, with most setups (8 in total) able to compete their program.

H4 Outgoing: RD51 (Yorgos Tsipolitis, Eraldo Oliveri)

H4 Outgoing: STRAW Tracker RD (Temur Enik, Katerina Kuznetsova)

H4 Main: NA64e (V. Poliakov, L. Molina-Bueno)

Installation and commissioning is ongoing. Safety visit will be tomorrow 10:00 AM. Third magnet and Veto hadron calorimeter were installed and alignment.

H6

H6 Outgoing: CMS PIXEL (D. Lazic)

Very happy with the taken data. Practically the whole programme for the run was done. Looking forward to the next run in July.

H6 Outgoing: RD42 (Please Add Your Name Here)

H6 Main: CERF (Please Add Your Name Here)

H6 Parasitic: ATLAS ITK PIXEL (Andre Rummler)

Very successful two weeks as main user; four batches scanned; progress on DAQ. Two samples which arrived only on Monday morning were measured and are just now in the moment on their way to irradiation in Karlsruhe. Installed yesterday a fifth batch in the cold box with the following goals (all remotely; partially by expert returning to the US in one week):

H6 Incoming: EP PIXEL - Week 20, Main (Justus Braach)

H6 Incoming: ALICE ITS3 - Week 20, Parallel (Please Add Your Name Here)

H6 Incoming: ATLAS MALTA - Week 20, Parasitic (Please Add Your Name Here)

H8

H8 Outgoing: LHCb VELO (Andrea Lampis, Martin van Beuzekom)

H8 Main: CMS MTD-BTL (Giulia Sorrentino)

Yesterday: succesfull installation of the setup (and some data already taken!)
This morning: setting up the beam

H8 Parasitic: STRAW TRACKER RD (Please Add Your Name Here)

H8 Incoming: TOTEM PPS - Week 20 (Please Add Your Name Here)

AOB

Minutes by the respective speakers, edited by M. Jaekel, E. B. Holzer, and M. Schwinzerl