Minutes of the PS-SPS Users Meeting for Week 31 held on August 3rd, 2023

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

EURO-LABS TA:
Email to all requestors will be sent out today or tomorrow:

1. Financial conditions for PS & SPS Test Beam users (warning: differnt from standard conditions)
2. Names of the visits which have already been approved by the USP
3. Per individual email: details on the number of per diems approved per visit per person

See this codimd location from Tuesday morning onwards for the *News from the FOM (E. B. Holzer

Preview of MDs:

Week 31

• Short parallel MDs moved from Monday/Tuesday to the end of the week
• SPS 8:00 - 8:30 access matrix change (no beam and no access possible)
• Dedicated SPS MD (08:30 - 18:30): crystal shadowing (up to P42) – LHC brightness study in parallel - no access to ECN3
  Week 32
• Dedicated SPS MDs for North Area with extraction to primary targets (T2, T4 and T6) and P42/T10 (up to TCC8)- no access to ECN3
  Week 33
• The scheduled LHC MD (MOnday to Sunday) will not take place
• no parallel MDs on Monday nor on Tuesday (maximise data taking for NA61)
• Under discussion: recuperate lost collimation MD slot on Wednesday 16th August; possibly parallel MDs on Thursday and/or Friday

Intensity split and wobbling

Wobbling change August 9 to August 17:

• Negative polarity in H6 and H8 to allow for higher beam energy in H8 for SND (>180 GeV)
• Reduced intensity on the T10 target to NA62 test measurements (approximately 23 units on T10)

T2 = 50
T4 = 48 / T10 = 28
T6 = 35

PS Machine Report (M. Fraser)

• Availability at 90%
• Following the access on Thursday (where nothing worrying was found for the PS main units), 2h of downtime due to White Rabbit communication issue.
• MTE BB: 3 times during this week the h16 barrier bucket controller was not correctly injecting the frequency bump. Fixed.
• MTE: KFA13 PFN failed this morning: switched to spare generator, beam back very soon. Fixed.
• n_TOF beam currently blocked by SIS on beam size check: under investigation
• On Thursday special test from 3pm – 7pm requested by n_TOF: supercycle with mix of different intensity TOF cycles (2 x 50 + 2 x 100 + 2 x 200 + 2 x 350 + 2x 850 )e10 ppp.
• EAST symmetry affected by PFW on AD: new “degauss” function applied to compensate.

SPS Machine Report (F. Velotti)

• SFTPRO not delivered on Thursday morning due to kicker problem in PS
• Intensity reduced after the MD following user request - running now with target of 27 units on T10
• AWAKE starting only Thursday morning due to commissioning time needed for new plasma cell installed
• Parallel MD requested to be moved to the end of the week as no users available Monday and Tuesday
• EBC test foreseen for Thursday morning (delayed following issue in the PS)
• Investigation still ongoing to understand a recurrent issue on 800 MHz causing some bad spills every so often

Safety / Radiation Protection (Alex Schouten)

• Helmet usage in experimental halls
• Make sure workspace remains organised

n_TOF (M. Bacak)

Physics according to planning:

• EAR1: 243Am(n,f) continues for 3 weeks
• EAR1-NEL: R2E with large (15 cm x 500 um) silicon detector (SY-STI-BMI)
• EAR2: 64Ni(n,g) +1 week (intensity variants)
• EAR3/NEAR: diamond detector with electronics in beam, no RF pickup anymore

Issues:

• Saturday night vacuum pump @ EAR2 downstream/dump
  • vacuum went up to 3 mbar (ok for experiment)
  • no spare available (using the spare right now)
  • recovered on its own Sunday night
  • borrowed spare from colleagues until end of run (merci!)

Proton beam excellent - making use of the different intensity variants now in several experiments (request will come today again).

East Area Beam Status (D. Banerjee)

T9: Beam preliminarily checked on Wednesday evening. Fine tuning to be done on Thursday following the safety clearance.
T10: User reported issues with magnet BHZ027, settled with some resets, otherwise good operation. Beam for ALICE TOF requested for Friday morning.

East Area Users Tour de Table

T8: IRRAD / CHARM (F. Ravotti, S. Fiore)

Very good week, no issue with operation. Cumulative intensity delivered to T8 again well above specifications, thanks! :) (~2.3e16 p/w, see plot below). Beam alignment and center on both X- and Y-axis, under control (more than 91% of the spills were centered within +/- 2mm on the horizontal [x] plane).

During the access on Wednesday, we exchanged dosimetry samples and replaced samples for most of the long-term users: EP-ESE, TE-MSC [including N2 experiment], CMS Pixel, ATLAS ITk Pixel [scanning table], RD50, ATLAS HGTD, etc. and installed a new experiment for SY-BI (setup with optic fibers). This installation and the setup of its DAQ required the T8 beam to be OFF until late in the afternoon (IRRAD). Removed setups by ATLAS and BE-CEM, installed new ones by BE-CEM and TE-MPE (CHARM).

Upcoming access, next week.

T9 Outgoing: WCTE (M. Hartz)

• Completed data collection in the tagged photon configuration
• Found that 200 mm Be+3 mm W target in “hadron” configuration was prefered to configuration with swept charged particles Pb radiator for positron production in sub-GeV/c range. Rate was >10 more with normal configuration.
• All equipment removed from T9 experimental area on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Big thanks to Aboubakr, the transport team and the RP team.
• Working on beam data based calibration of lead glass calorimeter and hodoscope-based spectrometer for measurement of gamma energies.
• Thanks to everyone for the support during our beam time!

T9: TECHNO CLS (S. Carsi)

• Yesterday we mounted our detectors in the experimental area
• This morning we had the safety visit and everything went fine
• The plan for today and tomorrow is to aling our detectors, test different beam configuration, calibrate and equalize our detectors
• We want to ensure that the two cherenkov threashold detectors are working
• Then we orient our crystals using a 5-axes goniometer
• Finally we procede with the test of the crystals for the prototype of the calorimeter

T10 Outgoing: BL4S (Sarah Zoechling)

Thank you very much for the additional week in T10 - we could really benefit from the extra beam time!

• Composition of the T10 beam: Building up on the XCET pressure scans for positive beam polarity in T10 by Maarten, we also conducted XCET pressure scans to reproduce 1-2 selected points from the previous measurements. We also performed measurements for negative beam polarity at various energies.
• Halbach magnet: We successfully tested our miniature Halbach array magnet in combination with the DWC and the finger scintillators. The deflection aligns with our predictions based on measured field strength of the magnet.

However, some issues to address or keep an eye on during our testbeam in September:

• Our calorimeters are not sufficient to stop all particles at higher beam energies. Thus, our dedicated muon counter is not really a muon counter.
• There was a light leak in the low pressure cherenkov detector of T10 that has been worked-around by the BI team. However, the efficiency of the low-pressure threshold Cherenkov is still not great. Thus, we can not tag all particles of interest in T10 across all momenta.
• Our plan to perform the pressure scans with a single cherenkov detector unattended over night does not work at the moment; two different issues seem to prevent us from doing the scan (e.g. case 1: software gets stuck => luckily, we can try to dig out the data from timber)
• Our data taken with the DWCs still has some weird features that don’t seem to be correlated to the specific chamber but to the finger scintillators instead (we use them right after the DWCs in coincidence as a trigger).
• Issue with the BHZ027 magnet: its rectifier gets stuck but this may have occured because of overheating (too many slots scheduled in one cylce in too short of a sequence)

Huge thanks to Maarten van Dijk for his patient support and advice! And also to Inaki Ortega Ruiz to help us a lot on debugging the DWCs. And to everyone else who fixed whatever problems we experienced. BL4S would not be possible without many helping hands, including Dipanwita Banerjee, Johannes Bernhard and everybody else from the BE-EA group; the mechanical engineering department; Michael Lazzaroni, Aboubakr Ebn Rahmoun, David Jaillet et al from infrastructure services; Jocelyn Tan and everybody else at BI; and E. Barbara Holzer.

Outlook: Testbeam in September (Weeks 37 & 38) where two winning teams perform their experiements at CERN => If you would like to meet the students (e.g. just to say ‘hello’ or to support them during the data analysis), please let us know. The students and us, we would be super grateful and happy to meet you!

T10: ALICE ToF (Y. baek)

• Materials moved in the beam area and the installation is completed. but gas circulation can not start because of missing 2 mass flowmeters in the gas system. Gas support team has been contacted to find a way.
• Test a MRPC with Low Resistive glasses and a MRPC with common glasses, to compare their performance in high rate of beam condition.

AWAKE (Giovanni Zevi Della Porta)

First week of proton run.
Commissioning of new Plasma Source is now complete, but took 3 days longer than expected, delaying the start of the proton run.
First beam expected today: diagnostics and alignment.
Tomorrow (Friday) we will load Rubidium in the system and begin the physics run.

North Area Beam Status

H2, H4, H6, and H8 Beams (D. Banerjee)

H2: NA61 continues with 120 GeV/c. Movement of the beam when other lines change files still present (less in 120 GeV/c). SY/EPC and TE/MSC following.
H4: Normal operation, CMS ECAL --> CMS HGCAL. No issues.
H6: Higher intensity week and PPE156 and PPE146 zones put together with access system change - now back to normal. After T4 target change on Monday we had to reduce the rate a bit in H6 to around 3.5e6 particles / spill in PPE156 to stay with in radiation alarms. Beam checks done and aligned on the CEDARs and alignment checked downstream.
H8: Extensive use of electron beams show strong correlation with T4 target length, good operation for POKER. First files prepared Wednesday evening for QFIB, and first test with beam performed with SND. Remaining files to be created and tested Thursday.

Other Beams P42, K12, and M2 (D. Banerjee)

M2: Stable operation continues. The MBPLs installed for NA64mu had wrong configuration of the power converters in CESAR which was fixed on 25th July, however the server held the old config so the change only took effect after the restart of the CESAR server on 2nd August during the MD. This was confirmed with the CESAR support.
P42/K12: Stable operation without issues. Smooth going back to kaon mode last Monday.

North Area Users Tour de Table

P42-K12 and M2

K12: NA62 (B. Velghe)

• Switched back to Kaon mode with ~28 units on T10 Monday afternoon. Very successful dump mode run. Thanks to Johannes, and all the people involved with this work.
• We would like to have a period with 22–24 (value to be confirmed) units on T10, probably starting from next week. This is to facilitate a comparison with the 2018 data and confirm how some rate-dependent effects scale with the beam intensity.
• Thank you for accommodating our access request yesterday. Short scheduled accesses to ECN3 during MDs are important to perform regular maintenance operations and planned interventions.

M2 Main: NA64mu (Vladimir Poliakov)

• Electromagnetic calorimeter calibration with 40 GeV electron beam.
• Detectors alignment with 80 and 160 GeV hadron beams.
• Smooth data taking with 160 GeV muon beam and final trigger configuration from Friday.
• Thanks SPS team, very stable beam, three spills, average amount of spills 4700 per day.
• The total accumulated MoT is 8.4x10^10.

H2

H2: NA61/SHINE (Piotr Podlaski)

• K+C @ 60 GeV/c data taking:
  • we finished yesterday morning with satisfactory statistics
  • due to many problems we collected additional datasets that will produce physics results
  • beam jumps made our lifes difficult during this beam time
• p+Ti @ 120 GeV/c
  • we started yesterday after MD
  • strange issue with CEDAR pressure scan (we are following up with Nikos and BI)
  • 120 GeV/c beam is very nice (proton content, spot size)

H4

H4 Outgoing Main: CMS ECAL (Chiara Amendola)

Spare CMS ECAL supermodule partially equipped (225 channels) with Phase2 electronics (front-end and back-end)

• MCPs as timing reference
• Hodoscopes for beam position monitoring

Scope:

• test the DAQ chain
• assess time and energy resolution
• test the laser monitoring readout

We took a large amount of data with electron beam spanning in 20-300 GeV and tested the whole map of channels.

• we finished everything we had planned for the data-taking
• the first look at data shows gives a term of the time resolution below 25 ps even across different readout units, which is well within the Phase2 target

The ECAL supermodule will stay installed in H4 until the end of august (safety clearance already extended), and will stay operational for data-taking in pedestal and laser mode (while the rest of the equipment is disconnected).

Thanks for the support to everyone, in particular to Nikos and Bastien for H4 and to the safety team - we have been running smoothly and we consider the campaign very successful.

H4 Main: CMS HGCAL A. Steen

Installed HGCAL detectors (2 silicon detectors) yesterday in PPE134.
Installation went fine. Safety clearance visit done at 4PM.
Successfull operation of the detector from the control room but unfortunately only with internal trigger.
Plan for the next hours:

• debug the DAQ to be able to run with “physics” trigger
• time in and fine tune latencies with electron beam

H4 Incoming Main: CMS ZDC EM S. Popescu

Preparation for test beam on-going:

• Main plans: calibration of the two sections with electrons beam from 50 to 150 GeV and proton beam from 100 to 200 GeV
• ISIEC form submitted
• ZDC EM sections, currently at P5, will arrive at H4 on August 8 and will be installed August 9
• DAQ and Trigger will be installed on August 9
• Patrol training finished August 3
• checking today the control room: screens, space, ok, some worries on network expressed by current users.

H6

H6 Outgoing Main: EP PIXEL (Justus Braach)

• Efficient data taking at high rates (initially ~5E6/spill in H6B and ~4E6/spill after target change on Monday) thanks to great support and tuning by Laurie.
• Completed all planned measurements for three different devices: rotation scans for Timepix3 iLGAD and FASTPIX, CFD timing characterization measurements.
• Good collaboration with parallel / parasitic users (ALICE ITS3, MONOLITH). Trying to minimise and combine accesses, and to schedule them during low-duty-cycle periods during the day.

H6 Outgoing Parallel: ALICE ITS3 (Paolo Martinengo)

quite successful data taking, excellent beam conditions
thanks a lot to our main/co-user for collaboration (we had a number of accesses)

H6 Main: ATLAS ITK PIXEL (Andre Rummler)

Setup finished yesterday with re-installation of secondary cooling circuit for one quad. Safety visit passed in the late afternoon. Unfortunately, there was an issue with the chiller which was stuck at -2°C. Recovered itself and was cold this morning but have to thermal cycle now as not enough cold delivered to HX (ice build up). More material arriving hopefully in the next couple days; will need another long access.

Meanwhile fixing (reinstalling) the ACONITE gateway computer which was reported during HGTD beam time.

H6 Incoming Main: ATLAS ITK STRIP (Jiri Kroll, John Keller)

Testbeam campaign is scheduled between August 9 and 16, the uploaded slides summarize out plans

• DUTs - main plan and backup options
  • main DUTs to be tested: R0 and R1 modules irradiated at IRRAD to 2.7E15 p/cm2
  • backup DUTs are still being discussed (probably some irradiated modules tested already or to be tested at DESY II)
• DUTs - logistics
  • R0 and R1 modules will be transported from IRRAD to SPS testbeam by the RP group
  • Other DUTs coming with Prague group (activation is negligible and measured already at DESY II)
• Beam parameters and infrastructure
  • Beam parameters are specified in slides (120 GeV charged pions, 10mm x 10mm, beam intensity of 1E4)
  • cluster multiplicity in individual Mimosa planes will be hopefully lower than in 2022 (>60)
  • ACONITE telescope with 6 Mimosa planes to be used, AIDA TLU
• FE-I4 timing plane for efficiency measurement
  • We will bring our FE-I4 detector with USBPix readout (MultiIO board)
  • Will bring also the holders for this FE-I4 but the holder provided by Andre in 2022 would be still very much appreciated if available
• MPI cold box and module holder
  • DUTs will be tested cold in MPI coldbox - will bring the holders for our modules compatible with MPI box
  • We need to get with the temperature hopefully below -40C (hope that the powerful chiller from 2022 is available)
  • Gasseous nitrogen will be needed to decrease RH
• Other necessary equipment will come with us
  • All other necessary equipment (HV and LV power supplies, readout systen, …) will be brought
• Dates, people, shifts, patrol rights, …
  • We are a bit low with number of shifters but believe that we will be able to cover all the shifts, incl. night shifts of course
  • Requirements on dosimeters are clear
  • Training for patrol rights will be discussed with Bastien
  • ISIEC form was submitted by John Keller on August 1

H6 Incoming Parallel: MEDIPIX (Please Add Your Name Here)

H8

H8 Outgoing Main: POKER (L. Marsicano)

Very productive beam time!

• Installation and the safety inspection done on Wednsday, July 26th
• Trigger and DAQ commissioning on Thursday, July 27th
• POKERINO calorimeter characterization started on Friday, July 28th. First data with 180 muon beam to obtain a pre-equalization of the crystals completed.
• Weekend and following Monday dedicated to characterization with positron beam at different energies: 10 GeV, 20 GeV, 30 GeV, 40 GeV, 60 GeV, 80 GeV, 100 GeV, 120 GeV. Very good beam purity in all configurations.
  – At low beam energy (E<= 40 GeV) XCET detector signals integrated in DAQ for later analysis.
• Tuesday, August 1st dedicated to intensity scan with 180 GeV hadron beam.
• Radiation survey and disassembly on Wed August 2nd.morning.

H8 Main: QFib (Suat Ozkorucuklu suat@cern.ch)

Trigger and DAQ commissioning comleted
previous week. Already started taking data. Beam files we requested are almost
ready.

Started with 180 GeV pions 60k delivered, 48k obtained with coindences (3 beam defining conters of 10x10 mm each).
Once we complate 180Gev run plans, will change to 140GeV pios.

Later we will change to 50,75,100,125 GeV electron this weekend weekeed.

H8 Incoming Main: SND@LHC (marco.dallavalle@cern.ch)

see text further down

Parasitic Users

Reporting for parasitic users is optional, please add your name below:

M2 Outgoing: AMBER (Please Add Your Name Here)

M2 Outgoing: MUonE tracker+ECAL (Please Add Your Name Here)

H6 Outgoing: ATLAS MALTA (Please Add Your Name Here)

H6 Outgoing: MONOLITH (Please Add Your Name Here)

H6 Outgoing: CEDAR-N (Please Add Your Name Here)

H6: RD42 (Please Add Your Name Here)

H8: SND@LHC Hcal (Marco.Dallavalle@cern.ch)

Many thanks to QFIB colleagues that agreed to run at lower intensities for allowing SND@LHC to take data. The radiation monitor just outside the control room would go off with more than 10^5 particles/spill.
Many thanks to Maarten Van Dijk and colleagues that prepared and tuned the beam for ~5x10^4 particles/spill, and organized for a test yesterday evening, allowing for the beam reaching our detector.

On the bright side, the radiation monitor did not complain.
Unfortunately our DAQ does not stand the high rate and collapses after a few minutes.
However it was enough for collecting some sizable amount of data at 180 GeV; we failed at 140 GeV. This allow us to check the beam alignment.

We are making modifications to the DAQ but we do not know what our limit is. Past test beams worked at a few KHz. We would be grateful to collect 180 and 140 (and 100?) GeV data.

Thanks all concerned experiments for accepting the change in beam polarity next week.

H8: QFib (Suat Ozkorucuklu)

As parasitic user last week, we had set up our test system, align and took some data with 180GeV/c pions.

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

H8: CMS RPC (Please Add Your Name Here)

AOB

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