Minutes of the ISOLDE Physics Group Meeting, February 21^st 2017

There were no comments to the minutes of the previous meeting. The meeting was rescheduled from its original date (February 22^nd) due to the ISOLDE outing.

Technical news

• There is ongoing work on the ISOLDE front ends. The roughing pumps have been maintained. The turbos will be maintained next week.
• The ISCOOL roughing pumps will be maintained next year. There are communication problems with the ISCOOL RF generator. After the problems are solved the ISCOOL will be tested on high voltage (up to 60 kV). 
• There is still a leak at the main switchyard, a relic from last year. It will be looked into next week. Some lead bricks are still installed in the area from last year’s HIE-ISOLDE tin run.
• The intervention on the ISOLDE front ends for the LIEBE project is delayed to March 6^th, due to personnel availability problems on the robot manipulation.
• The MEDICIS montrac system is being checked and re-commissioned. All is fine for the moment. The MEDICIS robot has been rebuilt following the use of some of its parts for ISOLDE last year.
• A new camera system is planned for installation in the target area in two weeks from now. This will give better visual feed-back during target manipulation.
• The extraction electrode will be exchanged on both front ends and some of the micro-switches will be replaced.  This requires a careful planning of the dose distribution between the participants in the intervention, in order not to surpass ALARA levels.
• The ISS magnet has been successfully charged up to 2.75 T. It will be de-energized and brought in the ISOLDE hall next week. This requires disassembling the third HIE-ISOLDE beam line, but also temporarily cutting the ventilation at the end of the ISOLDE hall. A cleaning activity will be schedule for next week, in order to remove whatever stored materials might still be in the way.
• ISOLDE operators have been struggling with controls. Things are working at the moment, but there are problems with the feed-back from the GPS vacuum system, which made it impossible to control without manual intervention.
• The transport of the big magnet for Magda’s project will be performed by crane, therefore it will not clash with the ISS manipulations.
• The cooling-ventilation work is ongoing in b. 508. So far things are running smoothly.

Schedule

• The beam requests for this year were all received. Some of the users are already being contacted with enquiries about the schedule. More details will be received by the end of the week.

AOB

• The ISOLDE outing will take place tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon. The meeting for departure will take place at 13:00.

Seminar

• The meeting was not followed by a seminar due to the change of schedule. 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 " is rescheduled for March 29^th.

The next PG meeting will take place on Wednesday, March 1^st, at 14:00. It will be followed by a seminar by Ronald Garcia Ruiz from CERN on "Simple questions of nuclear structure".

Minutes taken by VM