Minutes of the LIS Section meeting held on 21st September 2009

Present: G. Arduini, H. Bartosik, E. Benedetto, O. Berrig, C. Hansen, M. Martini, E. Métral, N. Mounet, Y. Papaphilippou, D. Quatraro, M. Scholz, E .Wildner, C. Zannini.

General Information (Gianluigi) 

During the morning of Monday 28 September, HR Department will hold a public meeting in the BE auditorium to present the new contract policy to the staff (an official message will be sent by HR at a later date). Clementine to be contacted concerning additional information on the LD/IC conversion.

From IEFC:

A first estimate of the material and personnel costs for HIE-ISOLDE has been done. The project has been approved by the research board provided the required resources (both for material and personnel) are found and additional contributions from other institutes are being sought. AEGIS: approved by the research board. The required resources are available The PAX experiment at AD is going to be discussed at the next SPSC at the end of September. HiRadMAT has been approved in principle and I. Efthymiopoulos is going to collect the information concerning the resources requirements The upgrade of the vacuum sublimation system in the PS (to have automatic sublimations) required for the ion operation has been approved (cost of 200-250 kCHF). S. Maury has presented a preliminary estimate of the resources required for the implementation of the NA61 (fixed-target ion programme in the SPS North Area). The required resources are not available in BE. The SPS will run for fixed target physics at low intensity for AMS North Area starting on 7th December.

LHC:

Powering phase 1 is going very well in Sector 12. Phase 2 powering cannot be started before the long week-end due to a failure of the cryogenics in point 2 and as a consequence of a failure to ground detected after the installation of the new QPS system. Investigations are ongoing to detect the point of failure (very likely in the new QPS because no fault was detected before its installation). It is difficult now to plan the phase 2 powering before the origin of the failure is identified.

Sector 56 and 78 are in powering phase 1 and are progressing well.

More information can be found in the HWC web page

Round Table

Elena Wildner: Michaela and Jacob got the highest grade for their BSc thesis work on beta beams. Elena is working at the preparation of the yearly report for FP7. She also attended a pilot training related to her activity as member of the Equal Opportunity Panel. Elena Benedetto is in contact with GSI colleagues (at CERN for a workshop) to get additional information on the gas jet target developed at GSI. This is required for the production ring.

Elena is also working on the correction of the trajectories of the beamlets for the MTE based on measurements performed at the SPS.

Yannis mentioned that the extraction elements of the CT extraction were not stable in the last few days and affected the quality of the fixed target beam delivered to the SPS.

Y. Senichev will help for the study of a PS2 lattice with a three-fold symmetry. This can be possible with the new design of straight sections which are shorter. This will have to be finished by the end of October. An external review is planned at the end of November. The design of the lattice is based on normal conducting magnets.

Katchenko will also help for the study of the lattice. Elena Wildner is going to investigate the requirements in terms of aperture for the PS2 magnets in view of using the PS2 as part of the accelerator chain for the Beta-Beams production.

Yannis met a team of people involved in the plasma wake field acceleration experiments to be conducted in the SPS west extraction. Support from CERN has been requested for the design of the transfer line. Yannis is willing to help. The implementation might require using bunches with 1011 protons and 10 micron long. It is proposed to use the LHC bunches extracted at 450 GeV. Already with cm long bunches a proof of principle could be done. A low energy  electron beam could be used as probe beam in the West area. A working meeting will be organized in November in Munich.

Neutrino coffee meetings are taking place weekly among the persons involved in the Neutrino Factory and Beta beams Studies. Minutes are written.

Olav has been working in inserting the new squeeze and pre-squeeze optics for IP2 and IP8 in the LHC optics DB. Together with Sandra he has also looked at the BTP line where an inconsistency has been found between the survey and layout drawings (1  m length difference that could explain some of the inconsistencies between optics model and measurements). Tobias Dobers will verify that at the next occasion of an access (tentatively during the next technical stop). The sequence definition of the line from LINAC2 to PSB is being reviewed to update some of the instrumentation names in view of implementing YASP for the correction of the trajectory in this line.

Elena Wildner, Michel Martini and co-workers will be involved in the Neutrino Physics workshop on 1-3 October.

Michel Martini reported that the code MOCAC to study the evolution of the beam distribution under the effect of Intra-Beam Scattering has been updated to include radiation damping and quantum excitation and first results for the CLIC damping ring will be available for the forthcoming CLIC meeting in October. The preliminary results seem to indicate that non-gaussian tails are not developing. Michel Martini added that in the mean time a bug in a Mathematica notebook written by M. Korostelev had been found in the mean time by Yannis (hardcoded length of the damping ring) and the expected blow-up was no more a factor 6 but more in the range of 50-60%. 

Simulations of the evolution of the emittance of the LINAC4 beam in the PSBooster are continuing, There are indications that the emittance blow-up is saturating 50 after injection but this result needs to be confirmed. No significant difference is observed when the non-linear terms (e.g. fringe fields on magnets) are included.

Simulations are been performed also for the ISOLDE beam with 500000 macroparticles with aperture limits included.

Matthias is working on the study of active compensation of the tune shift induced by the collapsing of the injection bump with ORBIT. The required correction on some of the main quadrupoles are compatible with those calculated with MADX. He has also studied the beam behaviour at injection for two different working points (4.28/4.55) and (4.28/4.47) and he could not seen any significant difference in the first 3000 turns.

Elena Benedetto is working on the correction of the trajectories of the beamlets for the MTE based on measurements performed at the SPS.

Carlo is going to update the simplified model of the SPS kickers with the characteristics of the 8C11 ferrites. The existing model can already explain at least qualitatively the positive slope observed in the horizontal detuning with intensity in the SPS.

Christian Hansen has studied a possible barrier bucket scheme for the decay ring. SPS-type cavities (travelling wave) have been considered studied but the required filling time is too short (150 ns as compared to 700 ns for the existing cavities). This scheme has probably to be abandoned in view of the latest requirements coming from the experimental physicists requiring short bunches to allow noise subtraction.

Nicolas has finished the note on the resistive wall on multi-layer pipes. Gianluigi has to read it still! He has begun the work on the muti-bunch instability starting from the work done by Elias and Giovanni and summarized in a note. Experiments have been performed for the LHC beam in the horizontal plane and vertical plane. Gianluigi suggested to conduct some studies also with the fixed target beam for which no strong electron cloud effects are expected. The same could be done with 50 and 75 ns LHC beam.

Elias: There were some problems with the last MD scheduling. Quite some re-scheduling had to be done. He also reminded that the date of the technical stop has been changed. The status of the MDs can be consulted at: https://ab-mgt-md-users.web.cern.ch/ab-mgt-md-users/2009/StatusOfMDs/StatusOfMDsIn2009.htm

Elias is also busy in writing a contribution on the PS transition crossing as part of the paper on the 50 years of the PS and in preparing the CAS lectures.

Yannis mentioned that some more tests with nominal LHC beam intensity need to be performed in the PS in order to conclude the studies on possible cycles with slower ramp rates in case of a failure of the PS rotating machine. The feasibility of that solution for the fixed target has been demonstrated for intermediate intensities and no clear show stoppers have been identified for higher intensities (CNGS type).

 Next meeting

Monday, 5th October 2009 at 14:00 in room 354-1-001

Agenda

 

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