Minutes/Action items of "Instrumentation-Systems-SDA" monthly meeting October 1, 2008 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- K. Cahill, D. Capista, S. Chaurize, M. Convery, C. Gattuso, A. Jansson, I. Kourbanis, V. Lebedev, T. Meyer, D. Morris, V. Papadimitriou, J. Patrick, L. Prost, D. Slimmer, C.Y. Tan, R. Thurman-Keup, M. Wendt, J. Zagel, D. Zhang We discussed the following: -------------------------- 1) Multibatch proton loading at test store 6441 (what worked and what not, what can we do better for next test store) 2) What is the latest we know about 8 GeV horizontal emittances at Main Injector 3) RFT board status 4) What we know about bunch to bunch variations for Tevatron Flying Wires 5) Recent progress in TeV IPM 6) Main Injector IPM (data qualifier and Acnet Interface) 7) Labview front-ends and occasionally missing data in SDA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Conclusions-Action Items: 1) In test store 6441 where we did two-batch proton loading, the coalescing efficiency was ~80%. Tevatron saw with low intensity two-batch proton loading twice the DC beam they see at single batch high (regular) intensities. They would benefit from repating this measurement and high intensities, like we have in a regular store. Data collection/SDA wise the intensity data look good in general but the Flying Wire and SBD data have several problems both at 8 GeV and 150 Gev. Part of the problem seems to be that we were not in a consistent data taking mode for the duration of the test. Intensities: ------------ a) we do not know for the time being how to handle properly the Booster intensity in two-batch loading. This has to do with the intensity device itself (I:852HLD). The best we can do for now is multiply the intensity we read for the Booster by a factor of 2. b) missing SDA data during "Accelerate protons in MI" were addressed by adding the I:P2IN(W)G devices in that case. c) The summary table code is being currently adjusted to address some indexing issues that have to do with two-batch loading. Emittances: ----------- For the Flying Wires the 8 GeV emittances have some problems for the 2nd bunch, 2nd fly (big numbers, ~ 40-50 pi). For the 150 GeV emittances we got no data in SDA at the place the data should be. The SBD data looked OK in the first injection but not later into the test. All problems are under more investigation. The plan is that tomorrow morning, Wednesday, Oct 2., we will repeat such a test around 8:30 am provided that the store conditions cooperate. 2) The problems we had a few weeks ago with the horizontal 8 GeV Main Injector emittances (erratic values bunch to bunch) seem to have disappeared after replacing the RFT board with one from pbar (old design board). 3) The work on the layout of the new design VRFT board continues. The ordering of components is also being finalized. the requisition for the manufacturing of the board is expected to coem within the next few days. 4) As can be seen in the attached file by Tan the Sync Lite and Flying Wire bunch by bunch comparison for pbar vertical emittances does not look consistent. The FW emittance behaviour looks suspicious, exchibiting a sinusoidal type pattern. There were questions on how do the FW sigmas themselves look and Tom confirmed that he has seen such unphysical behaviour in the sigmas as well. There was also a question on how the SBD intensities looked bunch to bunch and Tan provided an SBD intensity plot which is also attached and which indicates that the problem we see is not related to the intensities. We need to think how to understand and address this problem. 5) New firmware has arrived for the horizontal Tevatron IPM to address syncronization issues. This firmware has been already tested in the testand. We expect to have additional testing results of the system in a few days. 6) Main Injector IPM a) Valeri needs a few days to finish the development of an algorithm that will allow for easily qualifying the data to store. There are 8 parameters/numbers as a result of this algorithm combining information on amplitude, phase and frequency. When the algorithm is complete Jim will produce some ACNET device(s) with the desired information and these devices will be introduced into SDA. b) Tom needs a few days to finish the IPM Acnet Interface page for the Main Injector which is to display the front-end data on a console. 7) We discussed the fact that we have occasional loss of Tevatron Flying Wire data in SDA. (I remember two such cases in the past 3 weeks). This has been sometimes in the past traced to the V:MFWRDY signal not being available but we had a recent case in mid September (store 6426) where the data has been lost because of an unimplemented feature in Labview front-ends. Kevin mentioned that: "Periodically the path from a front-end to a requester will lose its route, and a portion of a large udp packet that reestablishes the route is lost (by design in the router). Our front-ends are directed to send a request to the 'null' task periodically to active requesters to keep the route open. The Labview front-ends have never implemented this feature and suffer infrequent packet loss as a result." We will think on what improvements can be possibly implemented for this. Our next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, November 5, 2008.