Minutes of the ISOLDE Physics Group Meeting, February 1^st 2017

Technical news

• The cold check-out of the facility continues. Stable beam is being transported through the two separators to verify that all elements are functional.
• The installation work for the third cryomodule is ongoing. The cryomodule tunnel was closed on Wednesday, some drilling took place on Thursday and cabling work is in progress.
• There is a planned inspection of the ISCOOL. During the RP check some ²²⁵Ac contamination was found, potentially from the radium run.
• There will be power cuts the following week-end, which will also affect ISOLDE.
• Aziz Amamou is leading the cooling-ventilation work in b. 508. Erwin is the ISOLDE technical contact. The work will start next week and last until the end of March. It will begin on the second floor, giving the workers time to also finalize the required courses for accessing the supervised area. In the process, the ceilings of all rooms will be opened and piping will be installed. In March the work will move to the ground floor. For access to the various labs, communication with the users will be necessary. The schedule for the interventions can also be coordinated. Karl will join the common meeting with Erwin to represent the ISOLDE experiments.  A round of questions was received by Aziz from the users.  There will be no cooling capacity problem for the building.   
• There is a campaign of cabling in the hall extension. It is planned to have one signal from each experiment connected to the ISOLDE control system. One should follow-up if this is not enough. The plan to install some additional beam diagnostics on the high-energy line might clash with planned Miniball activities.

Schedule

• On Tuesday next week will take place the ISCC meeting, followed on Wednesday by the open session of the INTC meeting. There will be no physics group meeting next Wednesday.
• The meeting of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) will take place on Friday 3^rd February and comments to the INTC documents will arrive by lunch time on the same day.
• The schedule of the open INTC session was distributed. If presenters require a change of schedule they should contact Karl.
• Some of the beam requests for 2017 were already received.  It would very useful for Karl to have at least an idea of the requests from each experiment before Tuesday, in order to discuss it in the ISCC.
• There was a meeting with Jose Alberto Rodriguez concerning HIE-ISOLDE scheduling, also concerning possible alternation with low-energy experiments. It is possible to have one low-energy experiment between every two HIE-ISOLDE experiments. A two-day break seems to be what the operators require to set up a new HIE-ISOLDE beam, to see how this affects longer runs. 

Safety

• For people affiliated to EP-DI it seems that the access requests go for signature to Manfred Krammer. To be checked if they can be directed to Karl Johnston. In case there are problems with the forwarding of access request, contact Karl.
• The ISOLDE-specific training courses are taking place every week, unless there is no one participating.

AOB

• Angela Bracco joined the ISOLDE physics group as a Scientific Associate for 6 months and Olof Tengblad joined as Corresponding Associate for 4 months.
• The call for summer-student is open, Liam is centralizing the information. The aim is to submit 14 projects.
• The LC0 line was removed, as requested by the CRIS experiment. The CRIS team would like to extend a big thanks to the vacuum team, which performed this operation very efficiently.

Visits

• Kara will send the visits schedule to Aziz Amamou and Erwin for coordinating with the cooling and ventilation work.

Seminar

• The meeting was followed by a seminar by Liam Gaffney from CERN (Miniball experiment) on "A complementary approach to shape coexistence in nuclei".

The next PG meeting will be held Wednesday February 15^st at 14:00. It will be followed by a seminar by Silvia Lenzi from INFN Padova  on "Development and evolution of deformation in medium-heavy nuclei ".

Minutes taken by VM (from recording)