Next user meeting:
For week 23 on Thursday, June 8th, 2023 10:30 CEST
Meeting room 874/1-011
Target intensities T2 / T4 / T6 = 100-105 (until July 5th) / 47-51 / 60
Wobbling change in week 22 for T4:
Week 23 Thursday 8th of June from 7:30 to about 9:00: Next scheduled Booster intervention / beam stop
Thursday starting at 9:00 - empty-bucket channelling test on the operational beam (improve the spill structure)
MD planning for the comming weeks:
This week (week 22):
Next weeks:
Week 23: Crab cavity MDs → no beam sent to North Area
Week 24: LHC MD (Wednesday to Sunday) beams prepared in the injectors
Week 25: Planning MDs during cooldown requires RP authorization and therefore requires planning of the interventions to be known reasonably well in advance.
→ Current plan: COLDEX and crab cavities
A reasonable week for the PS with a few minor faults and 96% of beam availability
Mean issues were coming from extraction kicker KFA71, 10MHz RF cavity trips, a temperature interlock during the week end on our extraction septum SMH57 for EAST AREA.
nTOF version with 28ns bunch length at extraction available. No sign of pre-pulse.
IRRAD/CHARM T8 beam tested at higher intensity (60 -> 80e10 ) without any blocking issue.
MTE: Large H emittance of the core (5th turn) reported by NA62. Reduced in PS by decreasing TFB gain. we started periodic measurements of the beam size at PS extraction.
Physics running according to planning:
Next Wednesday long stop for collimator exchange in EAR2 + 243Am experiment mounting. Potentially Thursday as well to mount the rest of the 243Am experiment if not finished.
Proton Beam:
T10/11: off, no users.
T09: Low momentum configuration installed for ATLAS MALTA (complete vacuum). First beam checks done last night. Further tuning to be done today.
Another very good week with no issues. We had an access on Friday last week for a CHARM user. During the access on Wednesday we exchanged samples for the long-term users (same last week) and installed new experiment (TE-MSC) for irradiation under N2 atmosphere (IRRAD). Removed users from TE-MPE and BE-CEM, new users installed from ATLAS and CMS (CHARM). Stable and intense beam all week long, approaching the weekly target intensity despite the second access on Friday (see below). Next regular access on Wednesday next week.
PS-T09 status in May 25 - 31
beam in 1-15 GeV and 𝑒−
Event display with pion and muon beams
Status in May 31
Very successful beam test campaigns at SPS-H2 and PS-T9 during April and May
Setup:
Goals:
Beam request:
Note: some issues with CESAR yesterday, all consoles will be prompted to restart CESAR.
H2: Smooth operation and transition between ALICE-FOCAL and RADICAL.
H4: NA64-e continues - No changes.
H6: Smooth operation. Note the wobbling change next Monday but will remain 120 GeV for H6, but negatively-charged beams. Some time required on Monday morning for this.
H8: SND Fiber Tracker data taking last week went smoothly. SND HCAL finishing their installation and they should be ready for beam today. Wobbling change foreseen for monday morning, -300GeV protons to H8.
M2: SM2 faults caused some downtime since Monday night. The fault of Monday was recovered on Tuesday noon (cooling issue). Yesterday, after the MD, an external interlock caused a fault. After a long investigation by P. Schwarz, EL piquet, TI, firstline, and the AMBER technical coordinator, the issue was found that a plug was removed from one of the doors of the magnet racks in the area. SM2 was operational from around 1:30 a.m.
P42/K12: Keep TAX settings for now. Request certain flexibility with the T2/T4 sharing on demand when NA62 does tests for their TDAQ at nominal intensity. No beamline-related issues.
We’d like to thank operators for their efforts to improve the SFT spill structure. In addition, we’d like to convey our appreciation of the three-spill, 14.4 s supercycle. Finally, we wish the operators rapid success in solving problems that have dramatically increased the LHC fill time.
We continue our TDAQ studies and believe we are close to isolating the problems resulting in little tolerance for high and varying instantaneous rates. For the time being, we expect to retain the present beam sharing. TAX settings provide sufficient flexibility for our tests.
We have had a smooth running till 29.05.23 (Monday) late evening when we lost ~12 hours due to a failure of SM2 (power converter?, cooling?) and the absence of beam.
During the MD on 31.05.23 we had the intervention from EN-AA-AC to repair the access system on the door YDPZ01 in the 888 and to exchange the keys panel that had one broken key. Completed successfully.
At the restart we had an issue with the CESAR (new software). Then SM2 iterlock was present due to an unknown origin. After a combined effort of first line piquet power converters, TI operation and Philip Schwarz. “Magnet doors” error was found to be a hardware element in the 888 area.
We plan to proceed in the present configuration with a 60 GeV beam till the beginning of the next week. A 3 spill delivery could help to compensate for the lost time.
We have had a very successful run, covering electron energies from 25 < E < 150 GeV. One Beam Wire Chamber was fully functioning and provided good particle position information at the location of the RADiCAL module. Runs were taken with the fast organic wavelength shifter DSB1 and the rad hard ceramic waveshifter LuAG:Ce and in various combinations. For reference with mip and hadron signals in the RADiCAL module, data was also taken with 50 and 100 GeV positive beam. In total, over 30M triggered events were written to disk. Of all the beam energies, the most difficulty was noted at low energy, 25 GeV beam where possibly SEU in the CAEN DRS DAQ may have played a role.
Setup (reported last week) and take down (31 May) went smoothly. The RADiCAL Module will undergo gamma spectroscopy,to assess release for shipment to the US.
We thank Nikos for providing us the 150 GeV electron tune file over the holiday weekend so that we could reach higher energy than originally indicated. And thank you to all the PS/SPS personnel who contributed to the success of our RADiCAL beam test.
Yesterday (31 May) we succesfully installed all the apparatus: ECAL module with laser system, chiller, electronics, DAQ, etc. Everything went smoothly without major problems.
Operation with the NIKEF table is easy.
From yesterday evening we got the beam, electrons at 150 GeV. We start collecting and looking at the data.
Difficult to say anything about the beam quality at this moment, it is too early. Yesterday we stored about 2E3 events/spill, maybe we can increase the beam rate a little bit, in the next days.
We are ready to start our program of data collection.
Smooth data taking during last week. Around 1.3x10^11 was recorded until this Wednesday.
parti./spill, 0.5-1 cm2
All participants arrived throughout the day on Wed. The data taking computer and ATLAS BCM’ setup arrived and were installed on Wed. MALTA telescope was turned on and configured on Wed.
The first ATLAS BCM’ Module using the new Calypso_D ASIC arrived on Wed and was installed. Some noise issues need to be resolved. Data taking commenced with the module at +500V. No HV issues were noticed when the module was raised to +1000V. It was decided to take data at +1000V overnight.
MALTA experts will look over the telescope on Thurs morning.
One issue is the location of the terminal to access H6a. Perhaps this can moved?
Installed yesterday, so far so good
We would need one more person with patrol rights, only at present
We had a very successful test beam, with lots of data collected for many irradiated and non irradiated modules, both with TOFHIR2X and TOFHIR2C. My gratitude to Laza and Maarten for all the help provided before, during and after the operations.
Thanks to the extra week (24-31 May) of data-taking, we have completed our plan for summer and we would like to cancel our parasitic slot in Week 23 (7-14 June). Our setup has been removed yesterday from the beamline.
One extra request: we would anyway need access to PPE158 next Wednesday (7 June), to take out some materials (mainly power supplies and cables) we left inside.
Yesterday we installed our muon planes between iron blocks and connected all the cables and readout. Saftey clearance approved this morning. Today we will calibrate and debug our detector. Data taking starting at 180 GeV is planned for tomorrow.
Reporting for parasitic users is optional, please add your name below:
Minutes by the respective speakers, edited by E. B. Holzer and M. Schwinzerl