Minutes of the May 16, 2008 Tevatron Dept Meeting http://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=1819 * News (Ron) - Per the Fermilab Today notice, layoffs will *not* occur next week, either. The next rolling furlough period begins June 2 - please start submitting furlough and vacation requests for the summer. * Weekly Operations Summary (C-Y Tan) - The Tevatron delivered a record 56.1 pb^-1 to CDF and D0 for the official Monday-to-Monday reporting period; today's Friday-to-Friday delivered luminosity is 58.2 pb^-1. There have been 10 HEP stores with initial luminosities between 235 and 282 ub^-1/s; all were terminated intentionally. Since identifying VA47 dipole corrector and orbit problem last week, there has been a lot of (successful) effort on making orbit bumps and orbit smoothing to lower losses around B0 during the squeeze. A new sequencer ACL script was developed to check the dipole ramp cards for various errors; the first time it was run, it did flag 3 cards with clock errors. The script will be extended to check all ramp cards. The F49V pbar target collimator started to take a chunk out of protons during scraping; that collimator will now stop based on feedback from proton losses. The AAK1 pbar abort has been failing-to-fire at 150 GeV during proton tune-up, although it is OK at higher voltage. One of the E3 power leads (in tunnel) has been creeping toward its (warm) trip limit; we've turned on its high-energy lead flow earlier and adjusted the trip limit a little to provide more margin during the ramp, but the underlying problem remains unknown. * Recent Changes to E17 Schottky System (Ralph Pasquinelli) - Ralph described new electronics (like for the LHC 4.7 GHz Schottky) installed into our 1.7 GHz system. A new variable attenuator and lower gain amplifier should prevent saturation that prevented reliable tune measurements, particularly early in HEP stores. We should even be able to see proton and pbar tunes up the ramp - needs someone to analyze the data. The proton tunes certainly seem reliable; the pbar tunes were occasionally weak, so Ralph removed the attenuators from their signal path - still need to evaluate the results. * Plan for Next Week - Keep up the great luminosity delivery! - Additional orbit tweaks, lower D0 IP for collisions. - Low-beta optics measurements (Alex, Eliana, proton-only) - Chromaticity tracker (Tan, proton-only) - AC Dipole (Ryoichi, proton-only)