Commissioning and running of sPHENIX

[Stefan Bathe <stefan.bathe AT baruch.cuny.edu>]

Minutes shift change 2023-05-19

general
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approval to operate

- granted yesterday

- started this morning:

  - cryo for magnet (until labor day weekend)

  - nitrogen flow for MVTX/INTT/EMCal

  - operating gas flow for TPC (argon only for now) and TPOT

  - North background counters hooked up

last night’s 3 stores

- first store: MVD observed lots of junk from north

  - Angelika did collimator work, improvement by factor 20 according to her, yellow not as clean as blue 

 - 2nd and 3rd store:  shift crew needs to follow beam call list and call experts if there is physics beam (not any beam)

- GTM firmware didn’t have coarse delay implemented:  MBD can only be timed in by adding fiber

  - needs to be timed in every store if beam tune changes

Plan

- continue MBD trigger commissioning tonight

- hopefully start calorimeter commissioning over the weekend

evening (Sasha)

- beam most of shift

- first store soon after 6, 12 bunches, lasted one hour

- soon after that 2nd store with 56 bunches, lasted until end

- experts working

- problem with BERT (for dump)

  - if start bert from startup GUI you get MCR version, wrong

  - instead run from terminal-> tiny pop-up asking for password

  - Kin included instructions on run web page

  

night (Brett)

- some experts around first part of night

- 3:00am cleared out

Day (Ben)

- beam dumped 8:00am

- restricted access (see above)

- number of other experts went in

- problem with phone in gas mixing house

  - contacted ITD:  fixed

- no access now

MBD (Mickey)

- went in during access

  - modified blue logic: now coincidence 10 ns:  exclude junk

  - downside:  we won’t see these background events

- almost got online. monitor running

- should be able to set vertex cut in Ll1

HCAL (Oliver)

- roughly linear increase of bias current

- first estimate of bias current by end of 2025

- one trip at 4:30am

EMCal (Sean)

- working on yesterday’s LV channel

- conclusion:  issue in sector itself, still investigating, but low hope

- 1 kHz LED long, one dropped out after a while

TPOT (Hugo)

- running operating work

- will start HV commissioning tomorrow morning between stores

- should reconvene on Monday

- by end of weekend:  decide what should be monitored by shift

- Hugo wants to potentially be called when beam off starting tomorrow morning

TPC (Jennifer)

- see presentation on indico page

- online calibration based on pedestal

- done on regular basis (longest run is 40 h) done before beam came

- not running when there is no beam

- will work on having shift crew run this whenever there is no beam

- goes to conditions db, analyzed offline, not online monitoring

INTT (Rachid)

- have nitrogen

- request to add event counter to framework, done

- need decoder

- wants to be called for non-beam time

MVTX (Jo)

- ladders off, but turned on readout units during beam to check radiation effects

- two methods:  transient effects:  duplication:  always running

- permanet bit flips:  scrubbing:  currently off

- checking between 3 branches of logic to check:  saw a few transient effects last night

  - small enough that it doesn’t matter, but interesting that it happens at all

  - conferring with ITS colleagues

- did calibration runs

- had done that on telescope set-up, then fine

- but when tried this morning with actual setup:  some firmware related issues:  2 servers (same firmware): had issues

  - investigating firmware

- shows how important it is to exercise actual setup

- detector is back off as off right before meeting

- readout units on, will look at beam

- considering turning on detector over weekend depending on how much we will learn about beam conditions

- decoder work:  Martin?

  - Martin:  priority is ability to take data and look at it, decoder is convenience for now

- will continue calibration runs at beam off time

- stave temperatures:  1 C increase when INTT on

- air blower:  Rob says Dan Cacace with Mike Lenz

sEPD (Rosi)

- nothing

DAQ (Martin)

- new firmware version for GTM

  - delay still not right, Joe working

- email to run list:  SDCC requested to put data under different top directory

  - moved files that were there to right place, made symlink

  - adjust transfer scripts!!!

- working on EMCal readout

  - Tim helped to look at code that worked in High Bay

  - one line was duplicated, removed

  - still working

Trigger (Dan) see slides

- south counts considerably faster

- MBD not timed in (180 degrees out of phase)

- shouldn’t get anything:  got 5 Hz, good

- Jamie:  even with stable beam:  single rates were always high

  - always needed to require 2 tubes on each side and vertex cuts

  - Bill:  MBD location?  PHENIX vs sPHENIX 144 cm,  3-4  vs 250 cm 3.5-4.5

- Mickey:  MBD more exposed from back side (no muon piston)

  - might need shielding right around beam pipe

ZDC (Peter)

- after yesterday’s meeting

  - took data during first store yesterday with 12x12 store

    - higher rate in South, background

 - John took events later last night

 - translating to root trees, then analyze

 - trying to understand singles rates

- using John’s DAQ for time being (scope)

- next week ADC crate

 

Background counters (John):  

- added 3 background counters North side

- 

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Stefan Bathe

Professor of Physics
Baruch College, CUNY
and RIKEN Visiting Scientist

Baruch:                                     BNL:
17 Lexington Ave                      Bldg. 510
office 940                                  office 2-229
phone 646-660-6272                phone 631-344-8490
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