Commissioning and running of sPHENIX

[Jamie Nagle <jamie.nagle AT colorado.edu>]

Hello sPHENIX Collaboration,

sPHENIX has now finished eight weeks of 2-person watch shifts, the morning 8:30 am sPHENIX planning meetings are now done, and we are now starting "Cryo-Week #1" with  four-person shifts and the ring is already getting very cold (helped by the new refrigerator in 1008)!

The shutdown is officially complete - special  thanks to John Haggerty and Jim Mills for coordinating this successful effort!

Detector installation is complete and the magnet end doors are closed.    The sPHENIX magnet has already cooled down to 5 K, and Kin expects to ramp the magnet to full field on Wednesday or Thursday this week.   The current RHIC schedule is to start injecting blue beam on Friday, then yellow beam on Sunday, and so potential first 2024 proton-proton collisions early next week.    Soon thereafter we expect some stores left in the machine overnight where we can time in the minimum bias (MBD) trigger and get started.

On the detector side, we have now been regularly running the GL1, LL1, HCal, EMCal, MBD, sEPD, ZDC (i.e., ADC systems) at > 15 kHz with multi-event buffering and random triggers.    There are a few mysteries with the busy logic that are being sorted out.        There was also a successful cosmic run with all subsystems (including TPC, TPOT, INTT and now MVTX), though at very  rate (30 Hz).    Cosmic ray event displays show tracks crossing the INTT and MVTX.   There are still critical issues related to humidity / dew point control for the TPC, as well as new firmware for the TPC  that will allow zero suppression and many other key features.   A lot of progress has been made in this area, and hopefully that starts getting exercised on the full electronics soon.

Thanks in advance to our first set of dedicated four-person shifters pictured below!     Also thanks to Rosi Reed, who is in her second week as Period Coordinator.

* Daily Shift Change Meetings (SCM) at 3:30 pm ET.    We have a daily google doc of notes and "plan of the day" linked from the run page.   The Zoom link for the SCM is also given at the top of the Run-2024 web page and repeated below.    

https://sphenix-intra.sdcc.bnl.gov/WWW/run/2024/

https://bnl.zoomgov.com/j/1614645041?pwd=bmE4STBRZk5tVVVUUC8zRnQxSlFyQT09

Lastly, people have done a great job signing up for shifts.    There are some swaps available on the "Trading Market" linked below, and there are shifts available in August-October!

https://www.sphenix.bnl.gov/ShiftSignupRun2/

Sincerely,

Jamie

sPHENIX Run Coordinator 2024

||------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|| James L. Nagle   
|| Professor of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder

|| EMAIL:   jamie.nagle AT colorado.edu
|| SKYPE:  jamie-nagle        
|| WEB:      http://spot.colorado.edu/~naglej 
||------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------