DRAGON MEETING MINUTES - Tuesday, 12th April 2005

PRESENT: JDA, MT, CR (Rec), GR, BG, TK, CV, CO, DH, LB, PM, MH, JP, JC, DO,
AO, AH

1. HARDWARE.

- BCM2 needs fixing: lower left quadrant not reading current - appears as if
beam is not steered when increasing SM1 and SM2 currents.

- Q5 water leak will be looked at this week by D. Preddy and PM.

- There are no instructions on how to operate the Elastic Monitors, i.e,
bias etc. Need web pages to be updated.

- FCCH only reads 60% of the true current (i.e, that read by FCM) when beam
is steered through. Applying bias has an effect but true current is still
not read.

- There have been two episodes of turbos tripping off during the latest run.
DH will investigate.

- We need to check the gas target alignment as soon as possible for upcoming
runs.


2. 40Ca(a,g)44Ti - Run Highlights (CV).

- *CAN* separate Ca and Ar with the IC dE-E.

- There is more Ar in the Beam than Ca. Approx 3E5/s Ar and 4% of that is
Ca.

- Many contaminants in the beam, produced by OLIS RF source using Calcium
Hydride.

The surface source was not used - need to explore idea of using this further
with Keerthi. Keerthi thinks the best way to produce the Ca is by installing
the backplate heater on the RF source which requires 2 weeks of machine shop
time.

- dE-E signals were interpreted wrong way round in software - are now
correct as soon as the analyzer is restarted.

- Leaky beam was observed with lower energy than the expected recoil energy
and about 10% less energy than the full beam energy. A beam suppression
factor of around 1E8 was achieved.

- Closing Q-slits to 15mm reduces leaky beam, however recoils are required
to correctly investigate the effects of this.

- CV on agenda for ISAC forum on Wed 13th to report on this run.


3. 22Na(p,g)23Mg (JC).

- H3 beam to DRAGON thought possible by B. Laxdal. Development time is
required. RF source will probably be used. Require 0.1 < I < 1 pnA.


4. 20Ne(p,g)21Na (MT).

- MT continues to analyze data. Comment that runlog no longer contains true
run durations, instead has start and stop time, which may not take into
account run pauses. JP to check.


5. Prelude to 26Al(p,g)27Si (CR).

- 27Al calibration beam to DRAGON. We need to ask for some time prior to the
26Al runs. There is a week beginning 26th May which many parties are
interested in. We should get in there with a request. Keerthi would use the
RF source for this. We would benefit from the OLIS backplate heater here
also. The resonance in question (to calibrate our TOF system and test
observation of real coincident low-energy recoils) is 14 micro- eV. Require
> 1E9 beam.


6. DAQ discussion (JC Equipment Grant).

- JC to look into cheaper options for MCP package, e.g without resistive
anode and/or reduced size.

- JC and JP could look into cheaper digitizers such as the COPIO ones which
TACTIC intend to use.

- SiS3300 Digitizers: problem with high detection rates - get high data
rates into DAQ computer. However, trigger is taken from Tail (HI), so rates
are actually kept low.

- New DAQ Hardware would be installed in shutdown 2005/2006

- Can we do Mass Separation with Silicon by digitizing the DSSSD signals
also?


7. Transmission from DTL to DRAGON via the new S-Bend section (JC).

- (See attachment) Evidence of substantially reduced transmission through
the new S- bend section in HEBT between DTL and DRAGON gas target. Only one
post-install tune has achieved above 90% transmission between HEBT FC5 and
FC4, and this was at the highest energy. The low energy tunes were more in
the region of 65-75% transmission!

- JC will talk to B. Laxdal regarding this; see what possible solutions are
offered.