Minutes of the June 13, 2008 Tevatron Dept Meeting http://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=1875 * News (Ron) - Ron passed on congratulations from AD Headquarters on the continued good safety record in FY08 - no recordable injury cases. * Weekly Operations Summary (Xiaolong Zhang) - The Tevatron delivered 44.4 pb^-1 to the experiments over the past 7 days. There have been 9 stores with initial luminosities between 121 and 295 ub^-1/s. There were fewer pbars available as a result of 3 Tevatron stores aborted early, accesses into Booster and Main Injector for maintenance, and a pbar target replacement. Store 6204 was aborted after 5.5 hrs when there was a spurious abort on vacuum in the C3 house; this has happened ~1/year, so is difficult to diagnose. Store 6207 aborted after only 1 hr as a result of a fake D0 silicon microvertex detector abort caused by a nearby lightning strike as strong thunderstorms rolled through the lab. Store 6210 was aborted manually and the ramp dumped to avoid a quench after the A1 wet engine tripped off. The D0 IP vertical position and angle were moved closer to nominal. Mechanical techs accessed E1 to check cryo vacuum and inspect turbo pumps. The Struck injection closure system did not work for store #6216 so the pbar emittances were diluted more than desired - settings had been disabled on an MCR console that runs a background application which communicates with the Struck system. * Low-Beta Optics Measurement (Alex Valishev) - The optics were measured for the first time since Feb 21. Overall the results are close to the Februrary measurment. The vertical dispersion at B0 increased slightly, while the dispersions at D0 decreased slightly. The D0 beta* value decreased a little, too. Alex credits the consistency with maintaining the orbits better. George Ginther (D0) showed beta* and z* measurements that also support consistent behavior since February. * Proton Scraping @ 8 GeV (Cons Gattuso) - After noticing occasionally smaller proton emittances coming out of Booster, Cons described several attempts to deliberately scrape protons at 8 GeV in the Main Injector using their collimators. It looks like they can easily scrape enough to reduce the transverse emittance ~10% and still deliver close to the "usual" proton bunch intensities to the Tevatron. The smaller proton emittances may reduce losses during pbar injections, up the ramp and through the squeeze, as well as resulting in lower effective emittances. (More instantaneous lumi / beam particle.) The proton lifetime during collisions may be improved, too, but recent stores have had lower pbar intensities. Evaulation of this scraping will continue. * Plan for Next Week (All) - Luminosity, luminosity, luminosity - P1 line matching (Alex, Jerry - proton only) - Chromaticity Tracker (Tan - proton only) - Bumper as Abort Gap Cleaner (Bruce, Steimel - proton only) - Beam Separation for CDF (Jerry - EOS) - New BLM electronics (Dean, Marv - between stores) - Test new 460 firmware (Jerry, controls - dry squeeze) - Fast abort for Low-Beta QPM (EE support) + others should we be lucky enough to get all the time