Summary of the Fall 2015
Dear colleagues,
The Fall run of 2015 was dedicated to the accelerator final commissioning. The hall operations were opportunistic. In total Hall D received about a week of intermittent beam.
Accelerator - the progress:
a) 12 GeV beam in the Hall D tagger (250 MHz)
b) 11 GeV 70 uA beam in Hall A
c) 750 MHz RF beam separation was used for a few days. It is not
completely finished yet.
d) There is progress in commissioning of the Hall D beam Fast Feedback
System (FFS) by the accelerator team.
Accelerator - some tasks still to be done:
e) Fix the issues with the separator.
f) Finish the commissioning of the FFS.
g) Commissioning of the Hall D nA BPMs, beam line optics studies.
h) Improve the beam delivery efficiency (RF trips, PSS issues etc).
On the Hall D side we made progress with the tagger/beam detectors, the trigger systems and the DAQ. The solenoid was off. More details will be provided by Alexandre Deur (the Run Coordinator).
In summary, at the end of 2015 we see a tremendous progress in the commissioning of the accelerator and Hall D. Due to various reasons, Hall D received less beam time than planned initially and our commissioning is not yet complete.
In Spring 2016 Hall D is scheduled for a 2.5 months running, starting on February 4-th. I expect that a part of the time will be actually used by various accelerator tasks. Our goal will be to get fully ready for the GlueX physics run in the Fall 2016, but also to collect good enough data for producing publishable "early physics" results.
I suggest to have a special meeting to discuss the preliminary results of the Fall run, the lessons learned, and the plans for the next run. The tentative date is January 13.
I wish all of us to have wonderful holidays now and happy data taking in 2016!
Eugene Chudakov
