Run Coordinator report: Spring 2020 w11

Production running continues, in spite of rumblings in the news about the COVID-19 pandemic. A data corruption that was discovered in a number of the recent raw data files was traced to a faulty module in the FCAL. The module was replaced and a work-around found to allow the reconstruction code to continue past a corrupted event without crashing. Occasional drops by 10-20% in the collimator transmission continue to occur, and are being tracked in the logbook. So far there is no single parameter in the machine operating conditions or known beam properties that can explain it. Running continued smoothly over the weekend.

On Monday it was announced that the lab would transition within 24 hours to MEDCON5, which requires a reduced presence in the counting house and no more in-person meetings in MCC. Hall D discontinued the normal 2-person shift schedule, and transitioned to one-person shifts of 6 hours each with continuous video monitoring between the halls. In place of the second person in the counting house to help with data quality monitoring, a rotation of off-site workers was organized who were responsible to keep track of the monitoring plots and report on the quality of the data every 12 hours.

With the threat of early run termination due to escalating conditions of the pandemic, we tried to complete as many auxiliary measurements as possible. A successful accidentals intensity scan was completed on Tuesday evening, and a partially successful TAC run was taken on Wednesday morning. This week GlueX used 107 hours of acceptable beam, and a total of 22 billion events were collected.