Minutes of the REX integration meeting on Wednesday, 06.10.2004

Participants: Pierre Delahaye, Mats Lindroos (chair), Peter Butler, Luis Fraile, Georgi Gregoriew, Thomas Sieber, Ivan Deloose, Romain Savreux, Nicolai Trofimov, Franck Di Maio.

1. GENERAL ISSUES

- Mats introduced Nicolai Trofimov who started working in the AB Control Group on 01. October and will work on the REX control system in the next two years.

- The REX team will give a guided tour for Nicolai to show him the hardware and the current status of the control system of REX.

- Due to vacuum problems at the HRS target the WITCH run scheduled for the weekend has been cancelled. The question was, if it could be shifted to the end of the running period or if running on GPS is an alternative.

- Thomas has received Fredriks and Pierres list for spendings next year and will integrate them in the budget planning. The discussion about next years budget will at the next REX meeting.

- The linac part of the yellow report has been sent to Joakim Cederkall.

2. TRAP

- Pierre reported from the Mg run during the last week. A good charge breeding efficiency could be achieved during the run. The lower efficiency of the whole REX machine was 5%.

- The good REX efficiency, together with a higher yield of ³²Mg than expected from ISOLDE, lead to a count rate at the MINIBALL target which was two times higher than assumed in the proposal. After 4 hours of running they observed already 16 counts in the Coulex peak (final number of counts ~120). The Mg experiment was very successful.

- Pierre will try to get a PhD student for the development work on REXTRAP and for support during the running periods. He is in contact with the French CNRS for that reason. Mats proposed to look into possibilities at the Austrian- and CERN PhD programs.

3. EBIS

- The repair of the EBIS solenoid will be done now by ICE Oxford, which made the best offer for this work (3250 GBP). They will start immediately after the running period, therefore the EBIS is only operational until latest 5. November.

- A new breeding record of the REX charge breeder could be achieved by having 22% efficiency for K¹⁰⁺.

4. LINAC

- The LINAC was running nicely stable during the Mg run. The energy was 2.85 Mev/u with the power of the 200 MHz resonator limited to 75 kW to keep a safety margin of 15 kW to the maximum rf-power.

- After problems with the phase stabilization of the 200 MHz setup on Monday, the LINAC was not running with its maximum transmission (only ~60%). Anyway, due to good results we continued with the run. Switching back to stable beam for readjustment of the machine would have interrupted the measurement for too long.

- The spare Thales tube is now booked to the T131900 account. Munich will compensate for this next year.

5. CONTROL SYSTEM

- Ivan Deloose explained the problems with the BD FEC on last Monday: Because of the abuse of the computer for internet access, it got a virus which was unfortunately not found during the regular virus scans. When the virus became active and started connecting to other computers, the network connection of the FEC was interrupted by the IT group security. It took half a day to remove the virus infected files and to do a quickfix of the damaged operating system. However the computer is running now with this temporary solution. A complete reinstallation done by Ivan is scheduled for Tuesday 12. October.

- Nicolai Trofimov will work mainly on the migration of the REX control system to AB standards with support from Franck Di Maio. Franck estimates that two years is a reasonable time span to complete this task. Ivan Deloose will help Nicolai to get into the current REX control system.

- Nicolai raised the question, who is going to do the programming of the applications for the new REX control system.

Minutes by Thomas