PS-SPS Users Meeting for Week 35 held on August 29th, 2024

News from the PS & SPS Physics Coordinator

E.B. Holzer, M.R. Jäkel

• 2024 injector schedule released EDMS 2872566
  2024 approved LHC schedule EDMS 2872429

Reminder: Beam time exceeding the limits of 2 weeks PS beam time and 1 week SPS beam time per year need the approval of one of these CERN committees: SPSC, LHCC, DRDC, INTC, RB or IEFC. Consider joining a DRD collaboration, if you require more beam time.

Target intensities:

• Please update

News from the Facilities Operations Meeting (FOM) (M.R. Jäkel)

Multiple interventions grouped on Wednesdays to minimize the interruption. Beam stop NA at 23h for RP cool down.
Please see intervention report in the PS/SPS reports.

Upcoming SPS MDs next weeks :

https://be-dep-ea.web.cern.ch/content/md-planning-north-area
Dedicated SPS MDs - if not anounced differently - are taking place from 8:00 to 18:00

• Week 35: Crystal shadowing (beam to TT20 TED) - (to be confirmed what was possible)
• Week 36: hysteresis compensation MD (no beam to North Area)
• Week 37: Crystal shadowing
• Week 38: No dedicated MD
• Week 39: Slow extraction with transverse noise + TT20 optics (beam to P42)

PS Machine Report (E.H.Maclean)

Good availability 95.1% (Thu-Thu)

Main activities

• beam stop 8am - 10am Wednesday morning for PSB leak inspections
  – various PS interventions performed in shaddow
  – unable to perform key intervention on 200MHz cavities as experts required for SPS intervention in same period
  – may be necessary to request another 2h stop next week if no convenient moment arises before. Monday morning expect LHC beam-stop - would this be a good time?
• inital tests of ION cycle injections. Looks good (75% transmision). Ion commissioning expected to begin next week.
• settup of LHC BCMS 12b cycle
•  

Main issues

• OP continues to need to make regular adjustements for TOF beam position (responding to changes in supercycle). Worse recently - suspected to be due to higher beta functions for 44ns cycles to increase beam-size with smaller dp/p spread.
• Inconsistencies found betwen orbit corrector settings in PS ring and F61-63 between T9/TN cycles. Ring settings and orbit regularized. TL needs to be checked.
• Large beam-losses at extraction on east and TOF cycles from Tuesday morning - Wed evening. Settings for extraction kickers adjusted after module failed, but not restored once module came back.
• High AD losses on Wednesday fixed by RF team
• Few short cavity and kicker issues

SPS Machine Report (T. Levens, reported by K. Li)

• Overall NA availability 83% (Thu-Thu)
• Beam stopped at 23h on Tuesday night to allow cooldown for inspection of T4 BEND02 which was completed at 16h on Wednesday
  • Resistance to ground lower on magnet side (25kohm) than cable side (512kohm) – but this is expected
  • Visual inspection of magnets did not identify any issue
  • After intervention the current to ground stabilised at 30mA but this should not have tripped the circuit (limit 100mA)
  • No further action planned for now, we will keep an eye on the evolution and try to foresee further investigation in YETS if needed
• Currently no ventilation in ECN3 – there is no access possible until it is working (repaired this morning)
• Outlook:
  • Long parallel MD today
  • LHC filling as required
  • AWAKE run ongoing until 15/09

Safety (A. Schouten)

• On Tuesday the evacuation alarm rang in the east area. However not all the zones evacuated following the alarm and stayed in the zone/control room. When the evacuation alarm rings, all people should evacuate to the nearest assembly point.
• Several people found without helmets and wearing flip flops in experimental areas. To remind for the requirement of PPE and if you are not wearing your PPE, you are not authorized to be in the experimental area and you will be asked to leave.
• Reminder for inspection requests.

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

Smooth data taking in all experimental area.
EAR1: 238U(n, g)
EAR2: 88Zr(n, g)
NEAR: Activation measurements

These measurements will run in parallel up to week 37.

Measurements are profiting of dedicated intense proton beams; thanks to the PS for continuous delivery of high proton flux, critically important for radioactive samples and mandatory for the 88Zr case.

East Area Beam Status (J. Bernhard)

On-call phone number: 67500

General: Evacuation alarm in the East Hall on Tuesday morning following an alarm from a gas sensor (vehicle in the building).

T09: Good operation. Beam to be set up with the users today.
T10: New CESAR version tested, rolled back to previous version, will continue testing during the week for next users.
T11: No user.

East Area Users Tour de Table

T8 Main: IRRAD/CHARM (S. Fiore)

Overall, another good week in terms of beam delivery to T8.
Intensity and dose goals reached in both IRRAD and CHARM.
During yesterday’s access, in IRRAD we are continuing with long-term irradiation experiments (TE-MSC, EN-MME).
Starting with the LHCb (KURARAY scintillation fibers) and HGCAL samples.

In CHARM we did only minor modifications to existing setups (BE-CEM), without moving the user rack from the irradiation point. SY-RF continue their tests.

T9 Outgoing Main: NP06 ENUBET (Please Put Your Name Here)

T9 Main: EIC ePIC LFHCal (Friederike Bock)

• Installation went fine yesterday after some initial mechanical challenges with our detailed setup (Thanks for the support!)
• Safety inspection received yesterday
• Electronics had small hickups over night, thus we couldn’t yet run. But this is fixed now.
• Dipanwita just optimized the beams for us and we’ll start taking data in a few minutes.

T10 Outgoing + Incoming Main: ALICE ITS3 (Week 36)(Please Put Your Name Here)

T10 Parallel: BE-EA (Please Put Your Name Here)

T10 Main: BI XBPF (Inaki Ortega(SY-BI))

Hello, I’m sorry I can’t attend the meeting as I have an important BI Project Board meeting about LS3 Readiness. Here’s an update on our beam test:

• The installation went smoothly, thanks to the help of Aboubakr and the BE-EA team.
• We successfully installed the new XBPF and collected data overnight. Everything is working as expected so far.
• About 75% of the scintillator tile setup has been installed. We’ll complete the rest of the setup today. We haven’t started data collection with the scintillators yet, but everything is on track.
• The straw-tube detector has been installed, is fully operational, and is taking data.
• The safety inspection went well; the only comment was to improve the grounding of the XBPF tank, which we have addressed. I will install the safety information panel on the beam user area at noon.
• We are coordinating with the parasitic users regarding access and beam sharing.
  
  
  

Inaki

T11 Outgoing No beam: P349 (Please Put Your Name Here)

North Area Beam Status (J. Bernhard)

On-call phone number: 67500

Protons on target

General: Intervention on T4 wobbling magnet on Wednesday done, needed stop of SPS beam at 23:00 on Tuesday for radiation cooldown (9 h beam time lost). Reminder: Requests for experimental gases have to be done well in advance, also for the XCET Cherenkov counters.

H2/H4/H6/H8/M2: Good operation.
P42/K12: Good operation. Intervention for smoke detection yesterday took longer than anticipated, about 1h beam time lost. After intervention, some troubles for the ECN3 ventilation appeared which are being handled at the moment.

AWAKE (M. Bergamaschi)

On Monday 26/08/2024 started forth proton run of the year for 3 weeks.

Monday spent on ebeam and pbeam checks
Tuesday plasma and laser diagnostics check
Wedneday: access

North Area Users Tour de Table

P42-K12:

NA62 (Sergey Kholodenko)

• Stable data-taking during the week, with good beam quality (spill structure).
• Yesterday there was an intervention to change the smoke detection system in ECN3. Finished (one out of the three smoke detectors) around 19h15. First beam beam arrived 19h35. Back to normal data-taking from 19h50.
• Similar intervention expected next Wed?

M2:

Main: NA64mu (Vladimir Poliakov)

• Smooth data taking during the week. There were recorded 85k spills and 2.8x10^11 muons on target.
• The survey measurement was started yesterday, continue today and may be tomorrow.
• The dismounting will start at next Wednesday September 4.

H2:

Outgoing Main: TECHNO CLS (Stefano Carsi)

Please, see attached slides

• This week everything went smoothly and was dedicated to the collection of statistics
• The data acquired looks very promising, even though a deep analysis may be performed in the next months to have a correct estimation of the undulator radiation
• This experiment was kind of complicated: the whole first week was spent only in the alignment of the sample and in choosing of the operational condition. The second week we obtained turned out to be much more important than what we were expecting, making the conclusion of the beamtest possible

Main: FASER PRESHOWER (Please Put Your Name Here)

Incoming Main: ALICE FOCAL (Week 36) Tommaso Isidori

- Test of FoCal-H H2GCROC based readout. FoCal-H is a 9 modules (6.5cm2 x 110 cm) detector for a total of ~400kg. The detector will be hold on a special aluminum bar on top of the DESY table. 
- Test of FoCal-E pixel layers prototypes. Prototyoes inherited by pCT design, they are hosted inside a movable stack of tungsten absorbing layers. Measurement of the shower profile and containment while applying back bias on the sensors. 
- The Setup will be on top of the concrete platform next to the Nikhef frame. The beam pipe will have to be extended closer to the detector surface
- Beam request: 
    - Hadrons: 60 - 400 GeV
    - Electrons: 20 - 350 GeV
    - rates: 10^4 - 10^5 
- Misc. request: 
    - tables for power suppliers and electornics
    - 19-inch rack
    - large control room (~10 people during shifts)

H4:

Main: NP04 (Christos Touramanis)

Smooth data taking, stable detector.
The beam needs a bit of centering after stops, thank you to Bastien Rae and operators on shift for doing that for us.
Completed running at 5 GeV, collected 2M beam events with kaon & (anti)proton trigger, equally split between the two polarities.
Now back at 1 GeV to compelte our pion sample.

H6:

Main: ATLAS ITK PIXEL (Martina Ressegotti)

21/22 installation, our most powerful cooling system typically takes at least 1 day to be set up, we needed a second day also due to some DUTs not working.
Taking good data since Friday.
We are now moving to the second batch (accessed yesterday 28/8), need to access again today in the morning due to connections issues. We hope to be able to move to a third batch in the weeked (so another 1-day access probably expected)

Incoming Main: ATLAS ITK STRIP (Week 36) (Lennart Huth)

• Test of two strip modules after irradiation to end of life dose.
• Telescope + timing layer + Modules in cold box
• Aiming to validate operating window: >99% efficiency at < 10^-3 noise per event

H8:

Main: DRD6 IDEA DRC (Iacopo Vivarelli, Seungkyu Ha)

• Swapped calorimeter prototypes on Wednesday 28th. Our prototype expected to be aligned with the beam (thanks to beam geometers).

• Spent the day cabling the prototype. The DUTs are:

  • A pixel detector (Quad module ATLAS pix 3)
  • A dual readout calorimeter

• Debugging data acquisition with beam now. We do see signals in the ancillary detectors, but weak signals in the calorimeter: under investigation.

• DRD6-DRC Korean team (outgoing)
  DRD6-DRC Korean team successfully completed the test beam by Wednesday. In the meantime, we have received 5 million events (6TB). We are analyzing the data we received and will do various analysis such as EM energy performance and hadron energy performance and so on.

  • RP-check was completed on Wednesday.
  • Thanks to CCC, and the SPS and PS coordination for their help.
  • Overall, We would like to thank Maarten for his help, and I would also like to thank Vincent for helping me when there was a problem with the sapphire table.

Incoming Main: CMS MTD BTL (Week 36) (Please Put Your Name Here)

Incoming Parallel: CMS PPS (Week 36) (D. Lazic for Francisco Garcia)

Participation confirmed, tests of new ETROC detectors foreseen.

Parasitic Users

H6: ATLAS MALTA (Please Put Your Name Here)

H6 Incoming: CMS MTD ETL (Week 36) (Murtaza Safdari)

Apologies for the absence of our team during this meeting once again, due to time zone differences this time (everyone now back in the US).

For week 36, we will be testing new assemblies in a 3 plane telescope setup (for time resolution studies) mounted to the AIDA telescope PI stage in PPE156. We have completely new assemblies to test, along with assemblies previously tested at Fermilab (with cosmics) that need to be verified in beam. During this week we will also be coordinating with the CMS PPS test beam (H8 parallel) to continue the bias voltage scan that we started during our previous test beam in week 33.

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

• installation at H8 dump:
  • AZAELA: 30.08
  • sMDT mini-chambers: 02.09
• safety visit is asked for 03.09 9 am (combining the straw, AZAELA and sMDT expert availabilities)

T10: ALICE ITS3 (Please Put Your Name Here)

AoB

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