Minutes of the September 12, 2008 Tevatron Department meeting.

* Weekly Operations Report (Dean Still) - There were 9 stores put in the Tevatron last week
ranging in luminosity from 223 to 295 e30 cm-1sec-1.  8 stores were terminated intentionally, 
and the 9th died when there was a power glitch in the Mac Room.  The luminosity was down a 
bit from the best machine performances until the two most recent stores.  Losses at B0 
during the squeeze have been a problem.  Much orbit tuning is being done to reduce the 
effects of the beam-beam driven losses at that point.  There have been a couple stores where 
the closure of Pbar injection has not been very good leading to higher Pbar emittances.  
The Pbar intensity MDAT signal at the F49 collimator has died twice in the last couple 
weeks and that is also not understood.

* Status reports on various projects and systems (all) 
	(Dan Bollinger and Bruce Hanna) - The D48 kicker has been 
	observed to have 47 nsec of jitter over many stores, and as much 
	as 15 nsec in an individual store.  The old SRS trigger box could 
	be responsible. A new SRS box has been ordered.

	(Fedor Emanov) - The Longitudinal damper system response was investigate. 
	There seems to be a quadrupole oscillation that is damped by the system 
	although the damper should not be capable of this.  Further investigation 
	is necessary.  Damping time vs gain was measured.  Gains higher than -6 V
	did not reduce the damping time, but noise on the beam did increase at the 
	higher gains.  It is still not clear what happens when instabilities 
	occur even with the damper on.

	(Andreas Jansson) - All of the known bugs on the IPM boards seem to be solved, 
	and the new firmware seems to work to solve the inter-board communication 
	problems.  They are working on simplifying some of the code and things could 
	be ready to install next week.

	(Jim Volk) Alignment for the shutdown will be extremely hard to obtain as they 
	are completely booked up.  Valeri Lebedev re-stated that it would be very 
	beneficial to get quality as founds of the entire b0 Low Beta system.  This 
	conglicts with other work and schedules for the October shutdown.  Jim Volk 
	will be getting traing set up soon for volunteers for quad roll measurements.

	(CY Tan) The electronics for the vertical chromaticity tracker are done, and 
	calibrations are taking place now.  It will be ready for installation next 
	week and then beam studies can take place.  Some OAC programming would still 
	be required before the system would be used routinely by the operators.

	(Todd Johnso) The crystal collimator has had some excercise of the motion 
	controls.  There seems to be a drift in the angle after scanning the angle 
	of the cyrstal.  The nature of the drift seems to be thermal. The laser 
	readback and the LVDTs agree with each other.  Dean reports that initial beam 
	studies can still take place even with this drift issue.

	(Jerry Annala) - The closure program (page T121) has at least two times sent 
	out pbar steering trim settings that are not understood.  If the Struck system
	is read again later, the calculated settings and values that actually reach the 
	cards is different that was sent during the shot.  This problem will have to 
	be observed real time for trouble shooting.

	(Jerry Annala) - The TCHROM OAC sets some timer parameters for the lenght of 
	flattop and the length of the back porch.  These values are used to calculate 
	the curves for the B2 drift correction.  It was discovered that both of these 
	timers were counting up to values larger than they should have.  The flattop 
	time that TCHROM uses for its calculations are about 100 seconds longer than 
	the actaul flattop.  This has little effect following long pre-cycles, but has 
	a larger effect after a shorter pre-cycle.  The magnitude of chromaticity 
	drift seen on the short pre-cycles might be explained by this type of error.

* Plan for Next Week (all) - Studies for next week include:

-Bumper magnet used for abort gap cleaning
-DC beam measurement for single vs multibatch injecion
-T-980 cyrsytal collimation (EOS)
-Damper rate measurements
-B0 aperture scans.


Jerry Annala