Summary notes of the LCU meeting on 22/01/2013

Present: FB, HB, JJ, RDM, LD, OD, MG, PH, BH, EM, MS, GV, RV

Report from meetings

• SLM and general information -> MG
  Requests for summer students should be sent soon and for well defined short projects. About 10 summer students can be expected for the BE department. For projects which have do to with program coding, it might be possible to get students funded by Google (it was the case until summer 2012).
  As presented by Paul Collier in his recent presentation to the department, there is also the possibility to get some funding from knowledge transfer "KT". An obvious example for KT funding is in the area of medical accelerators. Another area is software. Riccardo and Massimo will try to get support for SIXTRACK.
  To allow advance planning, please tell Massimo about any plans for 2013 to attend training courses like CAS or conferences. A special general CAS will be organized this year close to CERN (Chavannes de Bogis) and mainly be targeted in training operators.
  People going to IPAC'13 should reserve their plane tickets as soon as possible.
  For the staff members, please tell Massimo your availability between 30 January and 25 of March for the MARS exercise.
  Ghislain Roy, currently in the OP group, will join this group this year.
• Collimation status -> GV (slides)
  Gianluca reported about recent activities related to collimation. The collimation team is closely involved in the present LHC operation.
  A collimator alignment campaign was performed with proton beams this year. The results compare well with the results obtained in the last such campaign done in March 2012. TCTs (tertiary collimators) where also aligned with beams squeezed to the target values for the pPb operation and the apertures checked and found close to 14 sigma as expected.
  Regular CWG and ColUSM (collimation and collimation upgrade) working group meetings will resume soon and be continued during shutdown.
• MAD-X status -> LD
  Laurent said that an agreement on collaboration with Etienne for PTC is being prepared.
  Feedback from module keepers is incorporated and may lead to a new release later this month.
• SIXTRACK status -> RDM
  Similar to MAD-X, we will now also have regular reports on SIXTRACK in this meeting.
  Riccardo said the latest release has the code of Javier for crab cavity tracking included. There is also an effort to clarify the license for SIXTRACK for wider use and development, probably going to GPL.
  A technical student will work on the implementation of exact hamiltonians in SIXTRACK to improve off-momentum particle tracking. There is also collaboration with FLUKA activities on a module which should allow for time dependent tracking to simulate fast kickers. Ideas to speed up tracking using GPUs have not yet been materialized. SIXTRACK will be more open for further development and proposals and we are encouraged to come up with proposals in this subject.

WP8 activities -> FB (slides)

Frederic, who recently joined our group, reported about the activities in the working package 8 for the HL-LHC on machine detector interface and on his  contributions to this work.
For the HL-LHC it will be important to include the experiments requests in a coherent planning and to avoid last minute changes. One key point and starting point for his work is to study the consequences of opening up the TAS radius as required for the HL-LHC to a radius which will be much larger than the reduced central detector beam-pipes.
He started to collect the available aperture information and estimates for the HL-LHC as input for tracking studies. These studies will be done in close collaboration with other HL-LHC working packages like collimation and energy deposition.
Laurent warned that we should be aware that MAD-X is currently not always precise in the prediction of the intersection of tracks with apertures. 

Ion commissioning status -> RV (slides)

Reine presented an overview of the ion commissioning with input from Michaela and John.

The commissioning started on Friday, 11 January, when first Pb ions were injected in the LHC this year. 
A lot of detailed work has been done since, including the commissioning of the squeeze to the p-Pb target values (0.8, 0.8, 0.8, 2.0 m for IPs 1,2,5,8) and collimation and machine protection. First stable beams were reached on the 20/1. Over the weekend  and on Monday, the number of bunches was increased and just reached the nominal value of 338 bunches. Beta-beating was measured and corrected including the off-momentum knob test and correction. Close parasitic beam-beam encounters around ALICE seem not to cause problems.
The p-Pb run started well. 

AOB

None

Last update: 25-January-2013

MG & HB

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