Technical News

• Low work function cavity tests took place last week on GPS. These used RILIS to produce Nd from a Ta roll target with a GdB6 ionizer tube.  Yields of 1e6-1e7 atoms/second of neutron deficient Nd isotopes were observed but with a 50% contamination. Large Gd beams were also observed.  Tests were concluded after two days.
• There is still a problem with the vacuum on GPS. An intervention is planned for Wednesday 8^th July for 1-2 hours in the separator zone to try and find the root cause of the problem.
• During the power cut the PLC programming was wiped. This has been temporarily fixed but a permanent repair will take at least one day and may cause longer delays if the repair is unsuccessful.  The RF amplifier for ISCOOL has also broken as a result of the recent power cut. A spare amplifier unit has been placed onto the ISCOOL vacuum unit but requires an Engineer to change the mass setting.
• Tape station tests: Tim discovered that the power supplies for LA2 QP20 were inverted (probably for a long time), which may explain the bad ion tuning in LA2.
• Booster: interlock on proton beam has been installed to prevent any accident if the steering magnet trip. This will switch the protons off and will prevent the beam being sent to the other target station.
• There is a list of new procedures for using the rabbit system for collections. Users must fill out procedure forms well in advance of any experiment.
• There will be a pre-consolidation for the vacuum system during the running period in preparation of a major over hall during the shutdown period.
• HMI magnets will arrive soon as part of the HIE-ISOLDE upgrade.

Experiments

• Solid state physics have been taking collections of 111Cd using a hot plasma ion source from GPS.
• HRS run for WITCH using a new UCx test target (constructed using nanotubes  to improve the release time) and studying ¹²⁴In .
• Recent Miniball run was able to take some data on ⁹⁴Kr and ⁹⁶Kr, before the power cut forced the experiment to be abandoned.  Preliminary analysis looks interesting.

A.O.B

• Talk on FRIB by Rick Casten. Slides are now available on the indico sever at CERN http://indico.cern.ch/categoryDisplay.py?categId=115
• Rick will be giving 3 lectures on nuclear physics in the coming weeks (6/7, 14/7,15/7) in the visitors room.

Minutes by Kieran