1. Technical News

• It was reminded that the shutdown break will see two new major installation:

1. HRS front-end
2. ISOLDE vacuum control system

• Power trip on the 2^nd of December during night, MINIBALL area without power until morning. Box of fuses to be repaired since they are very difficult to switch back on. It should also be considered to divide box in two to feed power to different parts of MINIBALL.
• The warming up of MINIBALL array has started.  Clusters may not be leaving CERN during this shutdown period.
• Shielding work on REX has started.
• The end of the year saw two important funding: acceptance of HIE-ISOLDE and consolidation of target area.
• CERN will take over the ASPIC equipment from HMI and a funding request has been submitted to the BMBF (German funding agency) to restart a physics program.

2. Experiments

• WITCH ran the last experiment (IS433), employing protons, of the year. Aim was to take beam from both HRS and GPS targets, but managed to use only GPS as the HRS front-end was blocked. However, preliminary outcome is positive.
• Tilted foil experiment was carried out at MINIBALL to study the degree of beam polarization. Three different targets (Ni, Sn and PE) and two different beam energies (2.85 MeV/u and 1.2 MeV/u) were used. Angular distribution analysis has just begun, thus no results or even rough guesses yet.
• ISOLDE will start taking protons on the 26^th of April, offline tests of new vacuum control system to be carried out prior to start-up.

3. AOB

• Yorick reported on his two talks given in IEFC meeting (session mainly devoted to ISOLDE).
• ENSAR proposal has been submitted last week. If successful, this will provide Transnational Access money from September 2010 onwards.
• Magda reported on ISOLDE poster which was presented in the PS-50 symposium. It received lot of positive feedback, especially from people who didn’t know much about ISOLDE in advance.
• ISOLDE was awarded two new fellows; Deyan Yordanov is welcomed as a new CERN fellow.

The other fellowship was turned down as apparently another vacancy became more attracting. Therefore, ISOLDE could get another fellow in the next call.

• Gry Tveten is leaving soon, which opens place for a new student.
• Seminar talk given by Susanne Kreim on “Direct observation of a single proton in a Penning Trap”, which lead into lively discussion.