Run Coordinator report: Spring 2020 w1-2

RC summary Jan 3rd-Jan 15th:

The accelerator resumed operations ahead of time, with first test beam arriving in Hall D on Jan. 8th instead of Jan. 10th. This is thanks to the short break between Fall and spring runs. During the break, the RF had stayed on and was babysitted by dedicated MCC ops. We expected this and thus Hall D was ready and locked by the 6th. However, on the 7th near 18:40, the solenoid ramped down, triggered by a communication problem with the cryogenics. It is the third ramp down for the Fall2019-Spring2020 period. This particular event did not caused beam-time loss since the beam did not arrive until after the magnet was ramped back to nominal field. The first tune beam came to Hall D around Jan. 8th 20:00, with physics quality beam ready by Jan. 9th around 3:30am. We went on to proceed with the standard beamline, DAQ/trigger and detector checkouts. By the very end of the day (past 23:30 of Jan. 9th), we were ready and start Gluex-II production data taking on the 0-90 degrees orientation of diamond JD70-105. Early Jan. 10th, Hovanes optimized the photon beam transmission and then aligned the two JD70-105 remaining orientations that had not been aligned in the Fall run (45 and 135 degrees). On Jan 14th, a good TAC run was performed by A. Somov. Otherwise, production runs at 150 nA were performed. It was decided to spend the first 10 days at the GlueX low luminosity current (150 nA) until Friday Jan 17th when we will increase the current to an intermediate 250 nA. Then after another 10 days, we will go to the nominal high luminosity, with 350 nA.

For the whole time, the transmission and beam focusing was good and stable. This is in contrast to previous run periods (this improvement is assigned to a transport quadrupole problem that had been identified in 2019 by M. Tiefenback).

During the Jan 9th-Jan 15th period, we ran 55h out of the scheduled 106h (52% ABU, very good for a start week). This represents 4.3% of the expected total amount of time.