Summary notes of the LCU meeting on 01/11/2011

Present: JA, HB, LD, OD, MG, BH, JJ, RM, MS

Report from meetings

• SLM and general information -> MG
  The planning of the Evian 12-14 Dec. and Chamonix 6-10 Feb. workshops is in progress. The Evian program is on indico and participants have received invitations.
  One Chamonix session will be co-chaired by Oliver Brüning and Jörg Wenninger.
  The planning for the IPAC 2012 conference scheduled for May 20-24 in New Orleans/USA has started and staff members of our group who want to participate should request this now so that the department head receives the list of people and topics they could cover this Thursday.
  Students require support from their home institute or a grant. As usual, all contribution will require the presence of at least one co-author at the conference.
  Fellow requests for the present committee are out. There is a lack of good candidates with accelerator physics background. Technical student candidate folders are made accessible by request.
  A BE/ABP Christmas party will be organized, likely on the 15 December.
  The deadline for applications for the LD ABP post is over and a board will be prepared.
  Work is in progress to allow for tracking with thick quadrupoles. First test are performed by MG in collaboration with Thys and HB is looking into an upgrade of the MAD-X module makethin to allow the selection of thick or thin quadrupoles. Higher order magnets will remain thin quadrupoles for tracking.
• Ion run -> JJ
  Tests for the upcoming heavy ion run have started. IP2 was successfully squeezed to 1m and beta beating measured and corrected to below 10%. The aperture was measured and found as expected in the triplet. A possible aperture restriction was seen in the TCT region in some measurements and will require further investigation.
  First tests for proton-Lead running were performed very successfully. It was already possible to ramp the p-Pb beams to 3.5 TeV and resynchronize them and measure the central orbits.
• LHC status -> BH
  As generally known and publicized, the LHC proton run just ended very successfully. In addition, several tests where performed last week on high-pile up, 25 ns and head-on collisions in ALICE between main bunches and 25ns satellites.
• LBS -> HB
  The LBS#29 meeting took place on the 17/10. Minutes are on the web. Yngve presented results from elastic beam-gas simulations. Vacuum and beam-gas backgrounds remain an issue at high intensity, in particular for ALICE.
• 90m run -> HB
  The LHC was running with 90m for TOTEM and ATLAS from the 18 - 20 October. All main goals were achieved: adjust roman pots very close to the beam, measuring the optics and providing several hours of quiet physics operation at 90 m with roman pots close to the beam.
  The 90m runs were followed by a special fill for VdM scans for luminosity calibration.
  HB has been contacted by the LHC programme coordinator Massi to co-organize a 2012 Lumi days workshop, probably in the week 27-Feb - 2 March, to discuss between experiments theory and the machine the results from this year and the prospects for future luminosity normalization and total cross section measurements.

MAD-X status -> LD  (slides)

MG announces that the status of MAD-X will become a regular point at the LCU section meetings.

Laurent presented the status and his plans on MAD-X.

He has re-organized the code in smaller modules resulting in faster compile/link after local changes.
Modules are made available for the Linux, MacOS-X and windows 32&64 bit platforms. See the slides for more details on his plans.

A general review on our experience with PTC and MAD-X is scheduled for the 9 November from 8:30-13:00 in 6/2-004. The presentations can be found here.

AOB

The next weeks are very busy with the crab-cavity workshop and LHC upgrade meetings. The next LCU meeting will likely be in 4 weeks from know.

Last update: 02-November-2011

MG & HB

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