Minutes of the Jan 6, 2006 Tevatron Dept Meeting

* News (Ron) - Ron, Valeri and Mike participated in a review of the 2.5 MHz 
Pbar Acceleration in MI.  Before making a final decision on implementation, 
there will be additional benchmarking studies to compare its performance to
the current acceleration/coalescing scheme over a range of pbar intensities 
and longitudinal emittances expected from the Recycler in the future.  A 
survey asking about using rechargeable batteries in pagers was circulated...
AD ES&H is seeking the input.  Regarding the failure of the B17 spool piece
during a quench in November, cryo discovered that the B17 Kautzky valve failed
to open and release helium gas during the incident.  That Kautzky was confirmed
bad and was replaced this week.  This was only the 2nd instance of this type of
failure mode.  All Kautzky valves will be inspected for such failures.

* Weekly Summary (Andreas) - It was an eventful week.  The first 3 stores
were the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th best stores in terms of integrated luminosity!
But, one of the F17 injection kickers failed and needed to be replaced.  The
F17-2  collimator was borescoped and confirmed to have a damaged surface; the 
collimator was also replaced.  (It is thought that during the event that 
damaged the collimator, molten steel from the collimator splattered onto the 
kicker surface and eventually led to its failure.)  During the F17 work, one 
of the gate valves leaked and caused a lot of air to be adsorbed onto the cold
beam tube upstream of F17.  Vacuum was bad enough to warrant warming up F1 to
100K to boil off the crud to improve the vacuum.  After F1 was cooled down 
again, a ground fault was discovered and isolated to a string of elements 
somewhere between F17-1 and F18-3.  The fault was not identified, but it was 
eliminated ("burned up") after hipotting with 1 A @ 1 kV.  The first store 
after the shutdown had a record average initial luminosity of 
171 E30 cm^-2 s^-1.  Other work during the shutdown included troubleshooting 
of the IPM (electronic noise reduced by 20 dB with better grounding), OTR 
(no progress on fixing the motion control out of the beam), and 1.7 GHz 
Schottky system (installing bypass switch around front-end amplifier to 
investigation possible saturation and widening the bunch gates).

* Plan for Next Week

   - Raise separator voltages in seq 17 and 18 of squeeze (Ron, proton-only)
   - Acquire helix closure data (Yuri, proton-only) 
   - Differential chromaticity at low beta (Alex, proton-only)
   - Check updated orbit stabilization code (Vahid, proton-only)
   - Chromaticity Tracker check (Tan, proton-only)
   - Align and reintegrate F17-2 collimator into operations (Dean, EOS)
   - Crystal collimator (Dean, EOS)
   - Beam-beam compensation with TEL (Xiaolong, Vladimir, EOS)
   - Tune measurements with F0 stripline (Jean-Paul, EOS)
   - Coupling adjustments during HEP (Jerry, EOS)