Minutes of the April 10, 2009 Tevatron Dept Meeting

http://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=2506

* News (Ron) - Beware the nesting geese - recently a goose attacked a person
near the Booster East Gallery resulting in injury and days away from work.

* Weekly Operations Summary (Dean Still) - Last Saturday, CHL lost a turbine
in their operational cold box, so they lost the ability to make LHe.
Consequently, the Tevatron warmed up until they could bring the other cold box
online.  In total, the Tevatron was down ~4 days.  We delivered 25.5 pb^-1
to the experiments over the past 7 days.  There have been 4 stores with initial
luminosities between 254 and 318 ub^-1/s.  All stores were terminated
intentionally.  The occasionally jittering pbar injection kicker pulser was
successfully replaced during the downtime.  The QFA4 transistor regulator was 
reinstalled with additional monitoring.  The CDF alpha bump put into the
low-beta slot a while ago was partly (50%) implemented in the previous slot
to eliminate a slewing problem in a low-beta trim.  A D0Q5 lead flow orifice
was changed during the startup.  Overall, the startup went smoothly and we are
back to HEP operations.

* Automated Calibration of SBD & FBI (Ron) - A 10 second long "clean window"
(after cogging, before pbar jacking) was established for the automatic 
intensity calibration of SBD and FBI for store 6907 onwards.  The OAC is just
calculating new scale factors, not implementing them.  The variation for the 
SBD and proton FBI is <~0.5%.  The pbar FBI varation is ~2% and possibly
correlated with pbar intensity; more investigation is needed.  If we do 
implement changing the scale factors store-by-store, we may want tighter limit
checks.  But, the calibrations seem pretty stable so far (excepting pbar FBI),
so perhaps just monitoring for step changes over time (as one might expect from
a failed resistor on the pick-up) is all that is needed.  All of the relevant
devices are being datalogged - perhaps they should go into SDA as well.  The
automated notification emails from the OAC should be improved and go to the
proper responsible individuals.

* Report from Trip to CERN (Jim Volk) - Jim attended a workshop at CERN on 
alignment needs for CLIC or ILC.  The nanometer scale beam sizes will require
component alignment tolerances of ~10 um - a factor of 10 better than current
techniques.  Jim showed his slides on the various hydrostatic level sensors he
has on-site at FNAL, the LaFarge mine in Aurora, and the Homestake Mine in SD.
He mentioned what other labs are doing in this field.  He also showed some
of his HLS data - ground motion will certainly be a challenge to keeping a CLIC
or ILC aligned.

* Report from Trip to CERN (Dean Still) - Dean gave a few highlights from the 
crystal collimator workshop he attended at CERN.  In addition to the ongoing
crystal studies in the Tevatron, CERN will be experimenting with a crystal in 
the SPS and characterizing various crystal designs in the H8 fixed target area,
IHEP has 9 crystals in operation at Protvino for beam splitting and also for
reducing beam halo and localizing losses.  Italian collaborators are trying
to build custom crystals with lattices designed to focus beam akin to a FODO
magnet lattice - very interesting!

* Plan for Next Week (All)

   - Deliver luminosity.
   - Crystal collimator (Dean et al., end HEP)
   - Lattice measurment (Alex, proton-only)
   - Bumper magnet as abort gap cleaner (Bruce et al, proton-only)
   - Electron column (Alex and Alex, proton-only)
   - Chromaticity Tracker (Tan, proton-only)