Commissioning and running of sPHENIX

[shimomuramaya <maya AT cc.nara-wu.ac.jp>]

Dear sPHENIX

Here is the SCM minutes on August 13.

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General (Stefan/Kin)

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Current Priority Items (PC)

• Make use of magnetic field, which we’ll have until Monday 5am :  take data with tracking detectors:  TPC, MVTX, INTT, TPOT, HCAL

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Work Control Coordinators (Chris/Joel)

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Plan of the Day (Stefan/PC/all–to be revisited at end of meeting)

• Work on the searching for TPC single pulse peak

• Take the cosmic data with HCAL trigger with tracking detectors.

• Request shift crew to take pedestal run shortly before and shortly after the magnet powerdown (~100k events each sample)

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Evening (Virginia)

• Took cosmics with tracking detectors + HCal (TPC HV off most of shift)

• MVTX clock errors 3 times throughout shift, resolved with button on gui

• One run we saw 200Hz trigger rate- traced to hot tower in trigger region of HCal. Resolved by restarting the run

Night (Silas)

• Intt chiller lad2 and  interlock went off at 6:30

• Mvtx clock error on L2_19

Day (Christine)

• INTT chiller again was recovered on our shift

• EMCAL: Fibers in SEB 07 and 06 have been swapped for DAQ development purposes to see why SEB06 is failing.

• TPC experts in trying to fix stuff.  Stopped runs on their request.

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Magnet (Kin)

• Magnet should be at full field until ~5 am on Monday.

MBD (Mickey)

• Nothing

Trigger (Dan)

GTM/GL1 (Martin/Dan/John K)

• Still hunting for the source of dead time. Joe doesn’t seem to be able to reproduce this on his test unit. Continuing tomorrow.

DAQ (Martin/John H)

• I seem to be able to run the digitizers without problems and accurate event counts practically indefinitely (running on seb01). Will upgrade to seb00 + seb01 tomorrow. Suspicion that there is a crack in the busy logic with multiple partitions (if I deliberately de-fang the busy, I can make all hell break loose, not a surprise).

• Big change coming to the jseb2server operation. (Because of its invasiveness, this needs to wait until tomorrow to be deployed). It has become clear that the current setup requires too much situational awareness by the DAQ operator, especially when changing parameters such as sample sizes. New scheme:

• “Reload” reloads the config (.scf) file unconditionally, ditches what we already had, generates new. No operational change here (but it’s still an expensive operation that we want to perform only when needed).

• “Load” changes its behavior (it was: set up the in-memory partition if new, else re-use what’s already there). Now: When new/on reload, calculate and remember the md5 checksum of the config file. On “load”, re-calculate it from config file, when identical to what we had, re-use what’s there. Else upgrade to “reload”. 

• This eliminates the need for operator awareness if anything has changed.
  
  

MVTX (Hao-Ren)

• Continue the work of cosmic run analysis

• Implemented simple clustering -> selection number of clusters to find more cosmic-like events (4 examples below): color indicates the number of pixel hits in the cluster

• A few numbers: a total of ~3.55M MVTX strobes are analyzed (Run 25475), within which ~3.6k have physics/L1 trigger. 42 strobes have number of clusters > 3 (some of these 42 strobes have clusters randomly distributed)

TPC (Tom Hemmick, Jin, Takao, Evgeny, Charles, David, Bob, Ross, John K., Thomas)

• Today 08/13:

• Raised HV quickly after system OFF last night

• Slow protection relaxed (effectively off), fast protection ON

• No new damage so far

Checked for signals at the following voltages on GEMs (5 min) each:

• 4500 V - nothing in OnlMon

• 4600 V - nothing in OnlMon

• 4700 V - nothing in OnlMon

• 4800 V - nothing in OnlMon

• 4850 V - saw the following (Run 25519):

• As yesterday, limited to single sectors/modules - probably delta electrons/heavy ions, not triggered on cosmics

• Next idea from Tom: Timing Scan

• Inexperienced timing operators but trying anyway (thanks to shift crew for patience)

• Changing # of Pre-triggers - takes a long time to reconfigure 8 x 26 x 24 SAMPAs

• 254

• 190

Looking to see if signals are outside window - probably not but worth checking

Previously, only messed with # of samples in waveform, today is different

Plans through 5 AM Monday (end of cryo):

• TPC will keep trying to get something 

• Most likely will not get FIELD ON cosmics before 5 AM

HCal (silas)

• Minor packet misalignment issues

EMCal (Tim)

• Nothing to report about the detector

• Request the pedestal run before and after the magnet turning off → (see the plan of the day) 

TPOT (Hugo)

• Nothing to the report on the detector side. Working on including TPOT to the nice MVTX+INTT displays shown yesterday. Almost there. 

• Side remark: TPOT has been ON for more than 5 days in a row now (full operating HV all the time). Not a single trip (in fact not a single trip for the last 2 weeks). This is in contrast to when we took data with beam, during which we had something like 1 or 2 trips every 1 or 2 days. (sometime worse, possibly related to beam conditions). To me it means the trips are related to the beam.. r.g. nuclear interactions in the detector resulting to particles deposing their entire energy and thus large amount of charge, and not to the detector. This is good news. 

INTT (Genki)

• Cosmic ray measurements ongoing.

• The chiller issue today resolved.

• We’d like to propose cosmic ray measurements in the streaming readout mode on Monday (no magnetic field) to see some cosmic tracks. Not too long time is needed (1-2 h).

sEPD()

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Gas/Cooling ()

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ZDC ()

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Background Counters ()

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Online Monitoring (Chris)

*******end of the minutes *********

Best,

Maya

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Associate Professor
Division of Natural Sciences 
Nara Women's University 

BNL Bldg.510C Room2-223

Email: maya AT cc.nara-wu.ac.jp
Office: 631-344-2778
Cell : 631-504-2144
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