March message from the Spokesperson I hope you have all enjoyed the relative calm since Quark Matter. Even then a lot of activity has taken place. In this message I will give an update. The next collaboration meeting is planned for April 25-27 at Brookhaven as has been communicated with the institutional representatives The main issue of the meeting will be a) Planning for the Startup of run. Hardware to commission, repairs still to be done b) Planning of the physics running and analysis. This will cover both c) Presentation of physics analysis of the 2000 data in progress, and discussion of papers. d) Upgrade plans and improvements for 2002/2003 running. A more detailed agenda will be prepared in the coming two weeks. It seems that the startup of the 2001 run is on track, with cool-down starting shortly, and the machine operations beginning around May 1. It is likely the first week will be dedicated to power supply testing, and the period immediate after to injection, and acceleration studies. There is no firm date for the start of the physics program, but likely this would be in the very end of May. The first part of the run will be long period with Au ions at 100 GeV/c each. This period that may end sometime late August is followed of commissioning of the proton beam and a short proton run, perhaps 6-7 weeks total. This brings us into the next fiscal year starting October 1, and as you may know the budget outlook for FY 2002 is bleak. The estimate from the CA-Department on the length of the run based on the presidential budget is presented on the their web page. Essentially the run will be 10-14 weeks of physics running unless the proposed budgets are changed upward by congress. As during last years run there will be weekly management meetings between experiments and CA-D to follow progress, and settle priorities for the run starting April 1. Several detector installation and repair projects has been on-going. This following is not a complete report only a brief status. The readout plane of TPM1 has been rebuild, has been reinstalled, and is currently being tested with cosmic rays tracks by Ramiro and Jens Ivar. The response from the TPC looks very good at quite low anode voltages of 1180 and 1200V. For the other TPCs the main changes were to modify the resistor chain, add additional frames to hold the entrance and exit foil in place. This job has been performed for T1, which is now back on the platform awaiting testing. For T2 problems appeared when the job of adding the frames started. Some cracks in the Lucite box already there has been growing, as has the concern for this. The frame/foil work will be completed, repairs to the cracks made, but at the same time building a replacement Lucite box is considered. The final installation and initial checkout of T4 and T5 is presently on going. The multi-plexers, and cables has been installed, and the DAQ readout and data-formats defined. I hope by the end of the week to get a ore detailed report on the status from Cibor and Pawel. Their the work of Yury, Dana and Burt it has been well established that the small beam-beam counter tubes saturates already for the 1 hit peak. The concern has really been whether or not the tubes could deliver good timing. More analysis has been done on the data from last year, and it seems for the subset of tubes looked at so far that slewing corrections can be made for the small tubes, and a resulting time resolution of about 70 psec per tube. This is a bit higher than the test beam result of about 45-50 psec, but certainly sufficient when using several tubes to get a good timing signal from the BB. What will be difficult is to get multiplicity information out due to the saturation. Two options exists; either have dedicated runs with lower voltages for the small tubes thereby getting into a linear response region, or replace a subset of the small tubes with non-saturating ¾" tubes (such tubes has been identified, but will have to be procured at a cost of about $1,000+overhead per tube). For the later option a decision has to made soon to be ready for replacement during this years run. The paper and analysis committee is working the p-bar/p ratio paper. The extraction of the final ratios from MRS has to be done using the same centrality selection as done for the high-rapidity data, and a few corrections has to be re-checked. Otherwise, the letter is almost complete and ready for circulation within the collaboration. ------------------------------------------------------ Flemming Videbaek Physics Department Brookhaven National Laboratory tlf: 631-344-4106 fax 631-344-1334 e-mail: videbaek@bnl.gov
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Mar 25 2001 - 12:44:33 EST