Commissioning and running of sPHENIX

[Rosi Reed <rosijreed AT lehigh.edu>]

Hi All,

As we approach the end of week #2, a lot of progress has been made.  First, thanks to our shifters Micah Meskowitz, Valerie Wolfe, Anthony Hodges, Apurva Narde, Anders Knospe and Adeeb Saed, and especially John Haggerty as the first Period Coordinator of Run 25.  MVP goes to Skaydi Grossberndt for stepping in as an emergency Shift Leader after we encountered our first illness of the run.  The installation review for the donuts and collars (Indico) was this week.  Based on the results from the review, the support structure and collar mockup will be installed starting Tuesday (March 4).

The intermittent cooling issue observed in the MVTX last week, which persisted after various repair attempts, has been resolved through the replacement of a faulty cooling tube.  The temperature of the MVTX is now stable when running fully configured, which is the high power consumption mode.  Some standalone cosmics data has been recorded, and the MVTX was successfully included into the Big Partition.  This evening Cameron worked with the Shift Crew to update the documentation in preparation for running next week.

The TPC had a highly successful week, with the arrival of the new GUI written by Tom Hemmick, work on TPC noise issues and cosmic data collection.  The TPC has now been turned over the Shift Crew's hands, which allowed us to record the TPC cosmic data needed for TPC gain balancing. 

In other tracking news, the INTT has been turned on, documentation was updated, and is now in the hands of the Shift Crew.  The INTT has been included in all of the cosmic data recorded since their successful start.  The TPOT gas has been turned on and the HV has been exercised.  Hugo will arrive next week to finish the TPOT work.

We had a Calo-DAQ fest on Thursday, with the goal of pushing the system to the point where the shift crew could run the DAQ with the calorimeters without expert help.  By the end of Thursday, this was indeed true.  This also allowed Skaydi to finish the HCal mapping checks while they were filling in as Shift Leader.

Next week the goal is to run the Big Partition with all of the tracking detectors, as well as continuing to make progress with the other subsystems.  We have 4 new shifters joining Micah Meskowitz and Valerie Wolfe (Joe Osborn, Evan Croft, Alexander Bazilevsky, and Emma McLaughlin).  John Haggerty will continue as Period coordinator.

Regards,

Rosi and Ron

sPHENIX Run Coordination 2025

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Rosi Reed
Associate Professor, Physics Department
Lehigh University
(610)758-3907
16 Memorial Drive East Office 406
Bethlehem, PA 18015

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