Minutes of the Nov 8, 2008 Tevatron Dept Meeting

http://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2206

* News (Ron) - Tevatron Dept. personnel are reminded to report their weekly effort to the appropriate tasks.  
See me or Debbie to update your pick lists if needed.

* Weekly Operations Summary (Dan Bollinger) - The Tevatron has delivered nearly 90 pb^-1 to the experiments over 
the past 2 weeks. There have been 15 stores with initial luminosities between 78 and a new record 332 ub^-1/s.  
Two shots were lost before reaching HEP: one by a PAK5 prefire at flattop (1st store lost by prefire in ~3 years) 
and the other was lost as a result of very high proton losses due to an errant tune change.  Two stores were ended 
unintentionally: store 6529 aborted after 7 hours on a spurious vacuum valve status @ C3 and record store 6541 was 
lost after 23 hours due to a site-wide power outage when a static line fell onto one of the 345 kV power lines near 
Casey's Pond.  We are still recovering from the outage.  The damaged power line was repaired, but the biggest issue
is cryogenics - the Tevatron warmed up enough to require purification of the helium system.  Presently, it seems
the Tevatron could be cold by Sunday evening/Monday morning.  The recent record initial luminosities are the 
result of smaller pbar emittances - we eliminated the deliberate steering error for pbar injections into the 
Tevatron after improving the aperture downstream of CDF so that we can evaluate beam losses during the squeeze 
with brighter pbars - so far so good.

* IPM Status (Andreas Jansson) - The new firmware, currently in the 
horizontal system, seems to be OK.  There seems to be more electronic noise in the horizontal system relative 
to the vertical system, and they are investigating the timing board as a cause.  They will likely push the new 
firmware to the vertical system soon.

* Plan for Next Week
   - Wait for the Tevatron to be cold and deemed ready for beam.  Condition separators and kickers.  Once we get 
beam, we'll see what needs to be done for orbits and general tune-up.  Next HEP store late Monday?