Minutes of the Nov 30, 2007 Tevatron Dept Meeting http://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=1410 * News (Ron) - There will be a Crystal Collimation Workshop at Fermilab on Dec 6-7 next week. (http://tdserver1.fnal.gov/project/workshops/crystal%5Fcollimation) Next week's Tevatron Dept meeting is cancelled. * Weekly Operations Report (Xiaolong Zhang) - Over the past 2 weeks, there have been 14 HEP stores with initial luminosities of 107-171 ub^-1/s and a total of 42.5 pb^-1 delivered. As beam intensities were raised, we once again suffered from proton losses during the injection-to-collision helix transition at LBSEQ 14 in the squeeze. One shot was even lost when high losses (>12.5 rad/s) caused the D0 SMT BLMs to pull the abort. Good progress has been made by orbit bumps to push the loss away from D0, speeding up that troublesome step, and by increasing horz separator voltages 20% at LBSEQ 14 to reduce the beam loss significantly; we are ready to start raising beam intensities again. Other notable problems include: the repair of broken hoses on power feedcans stemming from the widespread LCW problem in early November; an errant pulse of protons in the P1/P2 line heading to the pbar target that caused a Tevatron quench and vacuum leak affecting the common vacuum in the F0 Lambertsons and P1/P2 lines; a failed clock repeater that caused many controls problems and loss of an HEP store. * Store-by-Store Analysis Software (Alex Valishev) - Proton lifetime early in HEP stores has been poor given the recent beam intensities. Using java software tools to compare stores to a model without beam-beam effects, it seems clear that pbar emittances have been smaller recently, leading to stronger head-on beam-beam effects on the protons. In fact, head-on tune-shifts for protons have been as high as 0.028! Part of the proton lifetime problem arises from the non-uniformity of pbar bunch intensity and emittances - the wide range of bunch-by-bunch tune shifts can make it difficult to set the tunes appropriately for all proton bunches. We can help the protons by blowing up the pbar emittances - immediately before collisions would be best, but we may request larger emittances from the Recycler as a temporary measure. Devising a robust scheme to blow-up pbar emittances in a controlled manner (without affecting protons) is an interesting problem. The analysis software will be made operational to make plot relevant plots automatically for each store. * Plan for Next Week - Increase proton and pbar intensities and making necessary adjustments (tunes, orbit bumps to reduce losses, etc.) - Implement F0 vertical angle bump to prevent longitudinal instabilities. - Lower vertical position at A0 to allow cleaner aborts. - Check C17V separator power supplies (minus putting out too much voltage?) - Update orbit reference files and smooth orbits. - Test chromaticity tracker (Tan) - Verify operation of pinger and BPM timing for TBT optics measurements.