Minutes from the 21 Nov 2008 Tevatron Dept Meeting

* News (Ron) - Tevatron personnel who want to attend the PAC09 conference should let me 
know ASAP; funds are limited.  The deadline for submitting PAC09 abstracts is Dec 9.

* Weekly Operations Summary (Dan Bollinger) - The Tevatron delivered 52.1 pb^-1 to the 
experiments this week.  There have been 8 stores with initial luminosities between 270 and 
318 ub^-1/s.  (Four of those stores were in the top 10 initial luminosities.)  Two stores 
ended unintentionally: store 6566 ended with a quench after 16 hours when the VB47 dipole 
corrector suddenly ramped to 0 and back up soon afterward moving beam into a collimator; 
store 6578 ended with a quench during end-of-store crystal collimator studies when the 
crystal was mistakenly moved into the beam.  There have been 3 dipole correctors that 
misbehaved during the week - it's not clear if the control cards or the regulators are to
blame.  The C3 wet engine required a complete overhaul.  The E48 pbar injection kicker is 
still suffering from problems with the air drier system.  PAK5 pre-fired during studies.  
TRF3 tripped on PA LCW.  The Kautzky valve on a C45 dipole got stuck again after a quench;
 that was the second time in recent weeks - it will need to be replaced.

* Searching for Misbehaving Dipoles (Todd Johnson) - In an effort to help us catch and 
diagnose the recent DFG problems, Operations has added all DFG references and output 
currents to dataloggers.  Wally also created links to automatically-generated datalogger 
plots for all the DFGs and their references - it's available via the memopad on the Tev 
eLog web page.

* Losses during the Squeeze (Jerry Annala) - Jerry started looking at the elevated loss 
spikes and integrated losses around CDF and D0 during the squeeze.  D0 is concerned about
the spikes at the current level damaging power supply components.  Not surprisingly, both 
the proton loss spike at LBSEQ 15 (helix transition, minimum beam separation) and 
integrated loss are correlated with luminosity/pbar intensity.  Jerry proposed inserting 
the E01H collimator prior to the squeeze to catch the lost beam.  Other ideas to try to 
reduce the beam loss: increase the pbar jacking time (since we eliminated the pbar 
injection steering error) to blow-up the pbar emittance some more, investigate using 
second-order chromaticity sextupoles at LBSEQ 15, enlarge the helix at LBSEQ 15 (risk of 
sparking), scrape off-momentum protons at flattop.  Running the jacker longer can be done 
immediately; the other ideas will need some development time.

* Discussion on Plan for Next Week (All)

   - Deliver luminosity.
   - Eat turkey and all the trimmings and give thanks on Thanksgiving Day.
   - Watch out for DFG problems.
   - Chromaticity Tracker (Tan, proton-only)
   - TBT and/or ORM lattice measurements at low-beta (Yuri, Eliana, Alex proton-only)
   - TEL-2 studies (Seva, during HEP)
   - Bumper Magnet as abort-gap cleaner (Bruce, Elmie, proton-only)
   - Crystal Collimator (Dean et al., end-of-store (not end-the-store))