1. Dept news: a) Vladimir mentioned an article in Phys.World (Apr'03) which cites "... The Tevatron Dept is a great team of bright and motivated physicists and engineers.." - nice to hear!; b) Jim Volk presented 16-items-long list of the Tev '03 shutdown work, 4 jobs are conditional (like IPM installation); he mentioned that there might not be enough techs to do more than that; c) MikeM, JimS, and Tan will present Tev status and Issues tomorrow, Tue Apr.29, 4pm in 1West (BD Seminar) - please come! 2. Mike Martens summarized last week of the Tevatron: good weekend, last 10 stores with Lumi>30e30 (max 37.6), one store spoiled by a separator spark (pbars blown vertically), usual acceptable lifetimes, effective emittance still seems to be larger than before - probably due to "scallops" (see Vladimir's talk below); record 7.2pb-1 integrated luminosity week of Apr 13-20 - congrats!. 3. Harry Cheung sucessfully measured DC beam in the abort gap by timing SyncLite Monitor: when TEL was turned OFF he observed accumlation of some 2e9 protons in the abort gap shifted by 1mm horizontally inward (Vladimir looked into the IBEAM behavior after the TEL was turned back ON and thinks that there were 1 to 3.6 e9 DC beam protons removed). We'd like to have the DC beam intensity available on-line as it's of an operational importance. 4. Ron summarized analysis of two huge "dancing bunches" data samples taken in Sept'02 and Jan'03 (himself, Bill Ng, Valery Balbekov, IUCF guys): a) oscillations of different bunches at F_s=87Hz are not correlated; b) there are well correlated oscillations at higher frequency of (2-4) times F_s - origin of those is still unknown; c) estimated Z/n=1 Ohm of inductive impedance can keep the bunches dancing forever; d) they will repeat measurements now with C0 lamberston removed and document oscillations in Main Injector (i.e. prior to Tev). Vahid mentioned that he saw higher-than-F_s frequency oscillations while analyzing head-tail oscillations. 5. Tan bumped Tev orbit at vert A16 pickup by few mm's and observed beam position signals from the BPM module with and without additional 53 Mhz quartz filters : a) with filters the postion signal looks much better and much easier to sample (in the abort gap); b) calibration coeff with the filter seems to be right as expected (12.4 mV/mm) while it's 14.1mV/mm without the filters. Next steps: see how reported postion with/without filters depends on bunch length and intensity, compare and decide whether we want these crystals. Andreas wondered whether pbar signal be integrated by crystals as well (and thus mess p-position output) - JimS and Tan pointed that some 10-20dB directionality of the PickUps and 1/6 times smaller pbar intensity should make that not a problem. 6. Alvin addressed recent SBD/FBI calibrations: a) since store 2424 a FIR filter compensates cable dispersion in the SBD and does it well (thus long bunch profiles are symmetric and tails do not spread in neigbor buckets); b) SBDP(A)IS overestimates bunch intensities by few %, FBI underestimates those by few % but the correction varies in stores (due to bunch lengthening?). Alvin recommends to incorporate calibration factors and rely mostly on the SBD for the bunch intensities. 7. Vladimir reported attempt to use TEL for beam-beam compensation by shifting tunes of few pbar bunches and thus reduce emittance blowup in the first 30 min after eliminate collisions (what we cal scallops). Unfortunately (for him), the scallops were greatly reduced by bumping vert pbar tune on pbar helix (corrector magnets) in that particular store when it was attempted so it was unclear whether TEL did any good (but at least it did not do any harm). Future steps: a) understand relative psotions of e,p, pbars in the TEL; b) wait for store(s) with bigger scallops and try again. 8. Jean Slaugter presented comaparative analysis of FW and SL emittances (work done by Kzistoff and heself) with quite clean(statistically) relation Emm_SL=A*Emm_FW+B where a)coefficients A are close to 1 for protons and 0.53-0.72 for pbars (the latter was suspected long before); b) offset B is small only for PVert (3pi) but as larger as 12-21 pi for other 3 channels (that confirms suspicions previosly obtained by Andreas who analised pbar scraping data). Valery also announced that he needs that size offset corrections to explain the calculated effective emittance in real stores. Jean also wondered why vert FV emittance grows after the ramp, while Hor FW emittance becomes smaller. 9. Mike Martens and many others took part in the orbit smoothing which resulted in : a) orbits smoothed ringwide at 150, ramp, squeeze and LB; b) number of correctors running close to the current limit, correctors with dangerously high slew rate and correctors fighting each other is greatly reduced (e.g. before - # of corr with >0.01 mrad change between breakpoints was 30, now - only 4); c) the orbit cahnges required a great deal of tuning afterward (tunes, coupling, chromaticities) - it is mostly done but there are several remaining issues left for the next(i.e. current) week.