Minutes of the ISOLDE Physics Group Meeting, March 1^st 2017

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

Technical news

• The ventilation work in b. 179 is finished, but tests have not been performed yet. A couple of weeks of tests will follow before the class A area can be recommissioned.
• There has been a general clean-up operation around the HIE-ISOLDE beam lines, to facilitate the access of the ISS magnet. The transport of the ISS magnet from b. 180 will take place tomorrow, probably in the morning.
• A few cupboards from the ISOLDE hall extension will be moved to the old control room. Some space will also be created this way for a test bench of Stephan Ettenauer.
• A major intervention took place on both ISOLDE front ends. The extraction electrodes were replaced, as well as the Faraday-cage micro-switches. The total dose received by the participants was within the expected limits.
• Currently the target changing operation is being tested and the MEDICIS irradiation point is being maintained. It seems that the extraction-electrode problem reported last year, which caused it to move spontaneously to the full-in position, is still present. The cause is still not identified.
• The front-end intervention in preparation for the LIEBE tests later this year will take place next Thursday and Friday.
• The cleaning of the front-end Faraday cages will take place next week.
• The beam will be transported through the separators again as soon as the front-end work and clean-up are complete. The goal will be to transport the beam along all beam lines and check diagnostics. The irreproducibility of the GPS beam position will be addressed, but so far the longer time needed for GPS cycling was not investigated.
• The RF problem of the ISCOOL was solved, therefore Tim will check if the ISCOOL can be floated to 60 kV.
• The RILIS window on GPS will be replaced tomorrow, adding a rubber gasket to make a softer sealing, which should reduce the risk of the window cracking. The HRS window will stay as it is, because it seems not to present the same risk.
• Some scaffolding was installed around the HIE-ISOLDE cryomodules, in order to fix some non-conformities of the cooling system which were noticed this year. Once repaired, this will allow the cooling of the cryomodules to be more effective than last year.
• The cooling-ventilation work in b. 508 is going well and will begin tomorrow in the chemistry lab.

Schedule

• Some schedule iterations are still taking place, based on the feed-back received from users. It is likely to have a final version next week. The first part of the schedule will concern runs taking place until end of June (perhaps beginning of July).
• The INTC minutes are almost finalized and will be distributed by the end of the week.
• The deadline for the ISOLDE Newsletter was extended to March 10^th.

AOB

• The CERN Users’ Office will move to b. 510 for two months from mid-March.
• The ISOLDE DigiDAQ was still not found. Some photos of the device will be distributed, in case anyone sees it or knows where it is.

Seminar

• The meeting was followed by the seminar of Ronald Garcia Ruiz from CERN on “Simple questions of nuclear structure”.

The next PG meeting will take place on Wednesday, March 8^th, at 14:00. It will be followed by a seminar by Malgorzata Kasprzak from PSI and KU Leuven on "Neutron Electric Dipole Moment – a key to the Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe ".

Minutes taken by VM