Minutes of the LIS Section meeting held on 26^th September 2011

Present: G. Arduini, H. Bartosik, C. Carli, S. Gilardoni, M. Newman, G. Prior

General Information (Gianluigi)

The deadline for the applications for the two physicists positions: optics and PSB Injectors is expired yesterday.

Preparations for the publication of the flexibility posts are ongoing.

A BE retreat will take place on Friday 30/9. The opening of the posts for the ELENA project will be discussed.

A meeting will take place on 28/9-29/9 to discuss ELENA's workpackages.

An MTE workshop will take place on Monday 6/10 afternoon with a summary on Wednesday 8/10. The agenda is available at: https://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=153628

The VIA 2011 promotion exercise is currently blocked due to an administrative issue with the MAEE in France. Possible temporary solutions are being investigated.

LHC: Reached a luminosity of ~3.3x10³³ cm^-2s^-1 with bunch population of 1.4x10¹¹ p after having squeezed to a beta* of 1m. More than 500 pb-1 have been accumulated during last week and almost 1 fb-1 in 2 weeks. The total integrated luminosity is now close to 3.8 fb^-1.

Round table (all)

Hannes

Hannes has discussed with Ralph Steinhagen for the observations performed with the 25 ns beam in the LHC. Ralph cannot explain why we did not see any sign of instability in the BBQ when we had fast instabilities measured with the damper pick-ups.

The trigger of the head-tail monitor based on the on BBQ signal is available and Ralph has explained Hannes how to activate it. The option of triggering it at injection is also available. Gianluigi suggested to use this option monitoring only the last 10-20 bunches of a train so that a total of 1000 or more turns could be recorded.

Hannes is studying possible options to cope with the closed orbit distortion observed in the Q20 optics and resulting from the voluntary misalignments in the injection and dump area of the SPS to allow sufficient aperture for the dumped beam.

Gersende

K. Long and S. Berg suggested to publish the Neutrino Factory Interim Design Report as CERN Yellow report. Gianluigi noted that it would be better to consider publishing the final report taking into account that  this should be issue in less than one year.

Gersende is completing the simulations with the 44/88 MHz RF cavities. The performance looks rather poor. Gianluigi suggested to compare the outputs form PATH and ICOOL with a simple input distribution to identify possible differences in the codes.

Christian

Christian is investigating the possibility of publishing the Chamonix proceedings as Yellow report as agreed with Steve.

LEIR: working well. The intensity of the nominal beam is still marginal. Losses are still observed after each of the seven injections. Some gain has been obtained at injecton. Christian suspects that the electron cooling is not yet optimized. The loss observed at the beginning of the ramp since the commissioning of LEIR with the nominal beam is still visible and should be further studied (is this due to space charge?).

Another attempt of a slow extraction form the PS at injection energy has taken place. The proton beam was extracted but spikes were observed. The spikes have been later correlated with the chirp excitation for the tune measurement. After stopping the excitation the extraction efficiency was still rather low. The impact of the emittance and of the extraction bump amplitude should be investigated.

S. Damjanovic (RP) has run some simulations to study the radiological impact of Oxygen acceleration in LEIR in view of delivering it to the East Hall (via the PS machine). The results seem to indicate that shielding on top of LEIR would be required. This might be an issue for a potential test next year. Christian will follow that up.

NA61 could be interested in using Oxygen for their physics programme. Christian has discussed with Detlef and it might be possible for the source to deliver O²⁺ and Pb²⁷⁺ in PPM mode. Oxygen would be then fully stripped at the LINAC3 exit. In that case NA61 could operate with oxygen in parallel to LHC operation.

Myriam

No solution has been found yet for the MTE extraction using the electrostatic septum.

Simone

Antoine has completed the analysis of the beamlet trajectory data from turn-by-turn BPM data. These show that the beamlet trajectories depend not only on the cycle preceding the MTE cycle but more generally in the full supercycle composition.

Goward road: a meeting with the civil engineering company selected for reinforcing the shielding on top of the PS tunnel will take place next week. 

Next meeting

Monday, 10^th October 2011 at 14:00 in room 6-R-012

Agenda to be defined

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