Commissioning and running of sPHENIX

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

Hello sPHENIXians,

This week marks the start of cryo-week #19 (out of 19 + 6 = 25).     The current pp running goes until September 16, 2024 and then just 3 weeks of AuAu, i.e., until October 7, 2024.    Under this plan there are 26 days left of pp running.     sPHENIX is currently taking physics data with the full suite of detectors including the TPC!     To celebrate this accomplishment enabled by so much hard work, by so many people, and over so many years, we had a taco & isobutane party outside of 1008.

sPHENIX has been running over the last six days at +1.5 mrad with approximately 50% of the collisions within |z|<10 cm.    C-AD has delivered good luminosity stores, and are currently keeping the stores for 8 hours.    Further machine development for the beta squeeze might be scheduled for next week, along with a zero field run.   TPC zero suppression has been tuned and a first offline analysis examination looks good - more to come.     An effort last week to make sure the data integrity is good for all tracking detectors was quite successful - people working together side-by-side.     sPHENIX is currently sampling the full luminosity delivered with jet/photon triggers (with full tracking) at the rate of approximately 1.5 pb^-1 / week.     This past week, again with enormous effort (special call out to Jin and Martin), the data writing capabilities have been improved such that sPHENIX is recording 10% of all collision data with full streaming by the MVTX, INTT, and TPC in triggered mode with 50 microsecond extended readout.
The rate for this part of the program, emphasizing open heavy flavor, is approximately 0.15 pb^-1 / week.   That should mean we already have 300k D0 mesons on disk (thanks to Cameron for the estimate).     Just today saw another success and it appears that the streaming rate might be more than doubled!

There is still significant work ahead to continue increasing our streaming capabilities, stabilize our detector operation, and fully validate the quality of the data with fast offline analyses.    Keep pushing forward.   The graph below shows a summary of the run so far and the time remaining.

Below are the links to the weekly RHIC Coordination meeting presentations from sPHENIX and C-AD.  

https://indico.bnl.gov/event/20768/contributions/95707/attachments/56751/97216/sPHENIXRunCoordinator_RHICCoordinationMeeting2024_08202024.pdf

https://indico.bnl.gov/event/20768/contributions/95706/attachments/56747/97211/RHIC_Coordination_Meeting_XXIX-3.pdf

Lastly, welcome to our new enterprising sPHENIX shift crew (picture below) and thanks to our continuing Period Coordinator Chris Pinkenburg (picture below).

Sincerely,

Jamie

sPHENIX Run Coordinator 2024

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|| 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 
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