Minutes of the Jan 12, 2009 Tevatron Dept Meeting

http://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2313

* News (Ron) - There have been several slip-and-fall incidents around the lab
recently - be vigilant when walking around outside since there may be ice 
beneath the snow.

* Weekly Operations Summary (Andreas Jansson) - (Editor's note - since this
was our first meeting in 3 weeks, Andreas reported on all of those weeks, but
I will mention details of just this past week.)  To wrap up running in 2008, 
the Tevatron delivered a monthly record 260 pb^-1 in December (previous record
221 pb^-1 in May 2008).  The new record initial luminosity of 360 ub^-1/s was 
set in store 6683 on Dec 26. The Tevatron delivered 60.6 pb^-1 to the 
experiments over the past 7 days.  There were 9 stores with initial 
luminosities between 271 and 353 ub^-1/s.  All stores were terminated 
intentionally except store 6698 that ended after 14.3 hr due to a still 
mysterious trip of the main bus supplies.  (A similar event happened 13 months
ago.)  Various cryo maintenance was done this week.  The first 2 pbar 
injections for store 6707 had large steering errors that caused large 
emittance growth; there were several odd things that had occured, some of which
may be preventable with additional safeguards in the sequencer.

* Speeding Up Remove Halo (Dean Still) - Dean has been testing how to speed up
collimation to shave possibly a few minutes from the typical ~11 min scraping
process.  The idea is to move to collimators rapidly close to the beam using
real-time readings from the BPMs instead of the slower, two-step process.  As 
safety features, the collimators will still use loss monitor feedback, and 
saved default values will be used in the event of an error from the BPM
reading.  The first attempt in an HEP store was ~90 sec faster than typical.
While testing the scheme on previous stores, Dean noted that there seems to be
a small "blob" of beam ~10 mm from the core.  The collimators can plow through
it safely, but it is an interesting feature to explore.

* Plan for Next Week (All)

   - Deliver quality luminosity.
   - Lattice measurements at 150 GeV (Alex, proton-only)
   - Bumper as abort-gap cleaner (Bruce, Elmie, Jim, proton-only)
   - HEP tune mult calibration (Ron, end of HEP)
   - Chromaticity Tracker (Tan, proton-only)
   - Crystal Collimator (Dean et al., end of HEP)