Minutes of the ISOLDE Physics Group Meeting, January 18^th 2017

Technical news

• The HV cages in the target area will be cleaned this week.
• There will be work on the ventilation in the Class A lab until end of February.
• Used targets are being moved to the intersecting storage rings on Saturday 21^st January, which will allow for work in the Class A lab. 
• There are plans to inspect the ISCOOL in order to determine if any intervention is required before the start-up. A question was raised by Maria Borge to the reintroduction of the regulated helium valve which can be remote controlled.
• Cooling water will be back January 23^rd. The low external temperatures experienced during this period might require postponing the start-up by one-two days.
• The devices are being gradually restarted and a number of control-system updates are being applied.
• Next Tuesday the third cryomodule will be brought in the ISOLDE hall. The SAS must be empty by this time to make room for the transport. The operation will hinder access through the SAS throughout the day.
• Cooling and ventilation work in b. 508 will begin soon, date to be confirmed (probably February 1^st). The process could not begin earlier due to the pending bidding process, which was completed end of 2016. The work will begin with the control room and will partially interfere with the activity, because it is a water cooling system which requires additional piping. A question was raised by Mark Bissell concerning whether enough cooling capacity will be provided by the proposed solution (which was a concern in the past, when the solution was discussed).

Schedule

• Many documents were submitted for the next INTC meeting: 21 proposals or addenda, 5 letters of intent and 5 letters of clarification. The open meeting on February 8^th will be dense, starting early at 08:30.
• The beam requests for this year will be sent soon. The deadline for receiving the answers is February 10^th, but any early ideas would be useful in order to prepare the schedule and for discussion with the technical teams. As usual the beam requests will be accompanied by Excel sheets in order to update the publication lists resulting from the different experiments.
• In this years’ schedule there won’t be a dedicated HIE-ISOLDE window, but a period of alternation between HIE-ISOLDE and low-energy runs.

Safety

• ISOLDE hands-on safety courses will resume next week. Members of the local group are still required to follow the full three-day electrical course (Habilitation Electrique - Electrician Low Voltage - Initial). 

AOB

• The call for summer-student projects has been made with deadline February 12^th. ISOLDE aims for a list of 12 projects. Project title and description should be sent to Liam Gaffney by February 1^st. The description can reflect the on-line project submission form found at http://hrapps.cern.ch/auth/f?p=112:1 .
• The call for contributions to the ISOLDE newsletter will be made beginning of next week.

Visits

• The visit from the Icelandic TV crew went well.
• A visit from the UK civil service future leaders scheme will take place on Friday at 15:15.
• The location of the ISOLDE helmets (part in the SAS and part in the cupboard next to the restrooms) could be changed. Any suggestions are welcome.

The next PG meeting will be held Wednesday January 25^th at 14:00. It will be followed by a seminar by Pauline Yzombard from the AEgIS experiment located at the Antiproton Decelerator of CERN on Status of the AEgIS experiment.

Minutes taken by VM