PS-SPS Users Meeting for Week 12 held on March 28th, 2024

The agenda for this meeting is based upon user schedule v1.0.0, please cf. here.

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

Planning:

Very high overbooking, in particular at the end of the proton run
–> Even if the run get’s extended not all the requested beam time can be scheduled!
–> Users scheduled in parallel are often not fully compatible - requiring to operate in ‘time share’ mode!
–> Consider taking one of the available slots in the first half of 2024!
–> The slots which are currenlty marked as DRAFT in v1.1.0 are very likely to be moved by several (order of 6) weeks.
–> Should the proton run not get extended, several of the slots currently marked as DRAFT will have to be cancelled or shortened!

News from the Facilities Operations Meeting (FOM) (M. Jaekel)

TI : Friday 2 electrical pertubations. Cryo lost at point 6, beam stop for PS/SPS.

LINAC4 :

PSB : Not a good week

PS Machine Report (Denis Cotte)

Not the best week for the PS witth only 65% of beam availability.
The main cause of the beam absence came from the CCDTL03/04 of the LINAC 4. -> alsmost 2 days intervention for CCDTL klystron exchange on Monday, Tuesday.

Difficult restart after LINAC4 intervention because of PS injection kicker issue on KFA45 module 3.
Following thyratron exchange on module 3 during LINAC 4 stop, several other problems have been discovered.
-> PLC issue-> restart of PLC has consequences on settings.
-> ABT expert discovered an oil leak and degradation of contacts.
At the end KFA45 m3 was back to OP only yesterday afternoon 15h30.

SPS Machine Report (Please Put Your Name Here)

Safety / Radiation Protection (A. Schouten)

Reminder for PPE usage in the halls and ISIEC requests.

nToF (M.Bacak and P.M.Milazzo)

Beam settings have been recovered at physics beam conditions after LINAC4 intervention:
TOF @ 850e10, 28 ns width (4s)
EAST parasitics @ 300-350e10, 28 ns width (4s)

Physics/Experiments: first days of the week (beam stop) have been used to detector calibrations and for an upgrade in EAR2: a downstream pipeline has been removed and a new sample holder has been installed (aim of this action is a background reduction).
Data taking has started on all the experimental areas: EAR1 (28,29Si(n,g)), EAR2 (209Bi(n, g)), NEAR (diamond detector for beam characterization).

East Area Beam Status (J. Bernhard)

General: Successful beam commissioning and start of physics in the East Area on time.
T09: Normal operation. No issues.
T10: Good operation.
T11: Off, no user.

East Area Users Tour de Table

T8 Main: IRRAD/CHARM (F. Ravotti)

IRRAD-BPM timing tests, spill measurements, intensity calibrations and testing of new OPWT display pages until the weekend (before LINAC4 problem). Installed first user experiments in IRRAD (iFAST, TE-MPE) for very high fluence levels (>1E17 p/cm^2) and electronics components in CHARM (BE-CEM). User run 2024 started on Wednesday lunch time with 80E10 pps. We will stop next wednesday (planning e-mail restart beginning of next week).

T9 Main: SHiP (Annika Hollnagel)

Link to PS East Area T9/T10 Beamline Meeting 2024-03-06 (slides):
https://indico.cern.ch/event/1387993/contributions/5835292/attachments/2813737/4911523/2024-04-06_ship-sbt_hollnagel.pdf

Currently set-up and taking data in PS EA T9!

-> All hardware and software improvements implemented! detector working great! :)
-> Beam issues, little data taken so far… :(

Detector decommissioning & disassembly draft schedule:

T10 Outgoing Main: ALICE ITS3 (Paolo Martinengo)

Overall smooth and successful data taking, excellent beam since the very beginning
Issues with BHZ027 after restart
We would like to keep the set-up in the area till April 10th, when next slot starts

T10 Outgoing Parallel: ALICE FoCal (Tommaso Isidori)

Goals

Setup

**Beam parameters **

Measurements

NOTES

North Area Beam Status (Johannes Bernhard)

General: Beam commissioning started on Friday, some work on the weekend before the Linac4 stop. Mostly good progress on all lines. Activation foil test for BSI calibration completed on Friday 22/03, now being assessed.

H2:Commissioning on going smoothly.Stopped has planned for the scaffholding dismantling.

H4:Commissioning ongoing smoothly, H4-VLE triggers almost OK

H6: Commissioning progressing well with beam spot size as last year. Studies to reduce final spot size in PPE156 coming up and e± beam preparation.

H8: Commissioning going well, beam steering ongoing.

M2: Commissioning progressing well. Hadron beam (both positive and negative 190 GeV/c) checked. Today CEDAR commissioning with BI is scheduled. Muon and electron beams and other hadron energies to be checked in the coming days.

P42/K12: Very good progress, P42 already done and only some more tests coming up. Now concentrating on K12. Some issues with power supplies (MNP33 and K12 Trim5).

North Area Users Tour de Table

M2:

No operation yet

P42-K12:

No operation yet

H2:

No operation yet

H4:

No operation yet

H6:

No operation yet

H8:

H8 Outgoing: MADMAX (Pascal Pralavorio)

Physics run ended Monday 25-Mar 2024 after more than 410 hours taken with Bfield on during 35 days, 1/3rd of it at the nominal 1.6 T field – due to some problem with the magnet cryogenics. Two prototypes (CB100 and CB200) had been tested with success at room and cold temperatures. Enough data taken to obtain competitive ALP limits at 3 different frequencies.

MADMAX team had left the Morpurgo area on Monday 25-Mar. The upstream and downstream floors had been put back in place.

H8: STRAW TRACKER RD (Temur Enik, Katerina Kuznetsova)


AoB

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