Minutes of the ISOLDE Physics Group Meeting, March 8^th 2017

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

Technical news

• ISOLDE is returning to normal operation and next week the Technical Meeting will also resume the running-period format.
• The cleaning of the front-end Faraday cages took place last Monday, with volunteers from the local group (Kara, Hanne, Liam and Shane). Yesterday there was still some ongoing work on the Faraday-cage doors.
• The target currently installed on the HRS is suspected of having a leak. A new gasket was installed in order to fix the problem.
• There is a lot of shielding around the proton beam-dump area, but it will be kept in place until the first proton beam this year, in case interventions are still required.
• Some used targets will be brought back from the Intersecting Storage Rings to the class A area. The ventilation in the area will not be fully restarted until March 20^th. The work is finished, but some formalities are still waiting for completion.
• Additional target robot tests are taking place this week and the next.
• The leak on the main switchyard was fixed. A seal and the turbo pump were replaced.
• The GPS window was changed and the area was successfully pumped.
• The CA0.SC66 scanner was replaced, but the vacuum check has not yet been performed.
• This year the system used by CERN to grant the proton request for ISOLDE (i.e. its readiness to take protons) will be fully electronic. The procedure for this needs updating and a meeting about this is being held at the end of this week.
• The ISOLDE Solenoid Spectrometer (ISS) is in position after having been successfully transported into the ISOLDE hall last week. The superconducting magnet is cold. The beam lines are currently being reinstalled.
• The switchboard for assigning the various beam-gate triggers is being upgraded by Pascal.
• There will be a meeting with Erwin for optimizing the allocation of the storage space in the old control room.

Schedule

• The final version of the schedule will be available very soon. The ARIS conference poses many problems this year for scheduling.
• The mini-workshop of the next NUPECC meeting will take place on Friday in the CERN Council Chamber, starting 8:30. Everyone is welcome to participate, if interested. Friday afternoon there will be a visit of ISOLDE by the NUPECC participants, consisting of two groups of about 15 people, alternating with a visit of the ALICE experiment. The local teams are kindly asked to tidy up their setups for the visit.
• It is a very busy end of the week from the visits point of view. There are visits scheduled both on Thursday and Friday.
• The microwave oven in the ISOLDE kitchen broke. Frank contacted the technician of Siemens for repairs.

AOB

• The ISOLDE group is welcoming Anastasios Kanellakopoulos from IKS – KU Leuven who will be working with the COLLAPS experiment and Silvia Vinals Onses from IEM-CSIC, Madrid who will be working with Olof Tengblad in an experiment in IDS.
• Ten ISOLDE Summer-Student projects were approved for this year. The deadline for student selection is March 19^th. Next Wednesday there will be a meeting to discuss student selection and project priorities.
• The deadline for the ISOLDE Newsletter contributions is on Friday, March 10^th.

Seminar

• The meeting was followed by the seminar of Malgorzata Kasprzak from PSI and KU-Leuven on “Neutron Electric Dipole Moment – a key to the Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe”.

The next PG meeting will take place on Wednesday, March 15^th, at 14:00. It will be followed by a seminar by Georgi Georgiev from CSNSM Orsay on "Nuclear moments, from ground states to short-lived excited states, using radioactive ion beams".

Minutes taken by VM