Log entry time 23:31:51 on April 17, 2004

Entry number 82415

Run Coordinator's Report for 16 April Swing to 17 April Swing

Summary

Production on LH2 data during owl shift. Fast Position Feedback has been turned on to improve beam quality. Magnet fast dump at 11:30am. Resumed production data taking on LH2.

Significant News

• Production data taking with parity quality beam on LH2. Frequent beam trips. MCC is unable to keep the orbits stable and asked us to run with the Fast Position Feedback on. After consultation with Kaz we agree to give it a try. Our Feedback still seems to converge and beam quality and stability improve. We will keep running like this over the weekend.
• IOC SE20 board was changed, but the problems with it flatlining seem to continue. PD will ask to put in an alarm that warns MCC when the IOC crashes. They will then notify us so we can stop the run and have the IOC rebooted. That way we may catch the crashes faster than in the past. This will be done beginning of next week, since the software people have to implement this Paul King has written a alarm script that gives an audibale alarm when the IOC gets stuck. The script runs on jeffylab in an independent window. See Paul's log-entry number 82375 for details. The system has a sort of "hiccup" (a single alarm) when beam goes away, but seems to work well otherwise (continuous alarm when the IOC gets stuck).
• Magnet fast dump at 11:30am. Magnet was filled and ramped up by 2:20. See log entry number 82377 by Steve Williamson. We went back to production running after that.
  Angela postponed her deadtime study until Sunday day shift because of the magnet dump.
• Good beam quality during swing shift.

Short term Plans

• Deadtime study on Sunday: 3 Runs at different currents with interleaved FB/TED.
• Continue with LH2 production running.
• Moller/IHWP insertion/Moller every three days. This will put us on schedule to take another Moller on Sunday, but we probably will wait until after the CD-0 tour on Monday for the next one.
• Beam energy measurement next week during the day shift. Mark Jones will be present for this.

Longer term Plans

• Green block measurement during Monday's tour. This was proposed by Louis. Since we do not need target or magnet for this, but only HV and DAQ this may be something useful we could do during the time.
• Schedule for the CD-0 tour on Monday:
  07:00 Beam OFF
  08:00 Survey of Hall
  10:00 to 11:00 Tour of accelerator and Hall
  11:00 Sweep of the Hall and accelerator
  12:00 Beam restoration
  13:00 Resume Physics beam
  There is some differing statements about whether the tour will be visiting the Hall C counting room. The latest statement says that the tour will NOT be coming into the counting rooms. Stay tuned .....
  Please limit time in the Hall to absolute minimum. No work should be done during the time of the tour.
• A long (restricted) access is planned for next week to pump the cryo line for the magnet (Damon). Contacted PD to rearrange the beam studies schedule in order to get a 4 hr long Beam studies periond one day next week during which we can access the hall. This way we won't lose any beam time for production running. Date of access will be probably be either Wednesday or Thursday.
• Beam energy measurement of the beam into Hall C (Mark Jones).
• PMT gain calibration at 1uA (6hrs at Julie's request)

Concerns

• Even after replacing the IOC SE20 controller board there are still rather frequent IOC SE20 crashes. The IOC crashes in way that makes it hard to detect: The EPICS values freeze at a non-zero value. If this happens the IOC has to be rebooted. Paul King has written a script that gives an audible alarm if the G0 BPM flatline and the PD will talk to the software people to get an alarm implemented at the MCC. We will also try to find out if the IOC can be moved to a more radiation safe area in the Hall during the long access next week.
  When the IOC crashes the run should be immediately stopped and a note put in the end-of-run comments and in the run summary that states that the IOC crashed at the end of the run.
• Temperature in the electronics cage was rising in the afternoon. See log-entry number 82391. By 11pm it was almost back to normal again. We are unsure where this fluctuation came from since the AC seems to have been working the whole time.
• Spikes in French electronics, possibly caused by a network problem. Paul King claims that the buffer of ROC3 may not be big enough (currently ~2sec) and could be increased up to ~3sec, but then we would have to boot ROC3 every time we change the configuration. Shift crew should also clearly mark runs with spikes.
• NA LTD errors still occurring at a small rate. Brian has generated a "HowTo" document for trouble shooting.
• Herbert voiced concerns about the length of the coil-pulsing at thye beginning of each run . See log-entry number 82271. This has apparently been fixed.