Minutes of the ISOLDE Physics Group Meeting, February 15^th 2017

There were no comments to the minutes of the previous meeting.

Technical news

• The ventilation work is ongoing in building 179.
• There are preparations for works in the class A area. The extraction electrodes will be exchanged on both front ends. There will be also some work on GPS in preparation for the LIEBE project.
• The laser windows will be exchanged on both separators. There were problems with the quartz windows delivered last year because they had a different size than the ones used in the past. A new metallic holding piece might be machined to ensure that the windows don’t crack anymore.
• An exchange of the oil of the primary pumps in the front-end area will be performed this week.
• The GPS cycling software takes longer to cycle than last year (7-8 s for the field to stabilize). Experts will be contacted to investigate the problem, as it will significantly increase the duration of mass scans.
• There was an inspection of the Intersecting Storage Ring area (ISR3) where ISOLDE items are stored.  Some of them (especially old chambers) will be removed.   
• New diagnostic boxes are being installed between the cryomodules. There was also an intervention on the HIE-ISOLDE extraction optics, allowing an increase of the ion pulse length to 2 ms.

Schedule

• Last week the 55^th INTC meeting took place. 31 proposals and documents (including nTOF) were submitted. In total 477 shifts were under discussion (including from status reports) and 214.5 were approved. There was no support for new Letters of Intent. Additional beam-time request forms were distributed for the newly approved shifts, with deadline end of this week.
• For future proposals the 6-page limit should be more strictly followed. Furthermore, it is also important to have on each proposal at least one spokesperson from an institution belonging to the ISOLDE collaboration.
• The schedule for 2017 is under consideration, some preliminary version will be discussed with concerned users end of this week or beginning of next week.

Safety

• The hands-on safety courses will be cancelled three weeks in advance if there are no subscribers, there will be more flexibility during the physics running period.
• There was a request to follow-up on whether the hands-on electrical safety course for the local group (which now lasts for three days) can be adapted to be shorter and more focused on ISOLDE necessities.
• The paperwork for the declassification of b. 275 has been completed.

AOB

• The phone conference system through the switchboard will be discontinued end of March and replaced entirely by the Vidyo system.
• The Adobe Acrobat Pro software might be removed from the CERN software package due to the high licencing cost. A cheaper alternative will be proposed.
• It was suggested to purchase a microphone for videoconferencing.
• A number of 12 or 13 summer-student projects were submitted for ISOLDE.

Visits

• There will be a visit on Friday by a French group, which will be guided by Stephan Malbrunot and Bertram Blank.
• Monday there will be a VIP visit by the Belgian Minister of Energy.
• Tuesday there will be a visit by a group of students from the Czech Republic.

Seminar

• The meeting was followed by a seminar by Silvia Lenzi from INFN Padova on "Development and evolution of deformation in medium-heavy nuclei".

The next PG meeting will be moved to Tuesday, February 21^st, at 15:00, due to the ISOLDE outing next week. The seminar by Joao Pedro Esteves De Araujo from Porto University on "Multifunctional materials and nanostructures: opportunities for materials and solid state physics studies at ISOLDE " will be rescheduled for March 22^nd.

Minutes taken by VM