Minutes of DRAGON meeting, 6 February 2007. Present: Chris Ruiz (CR), Christof Vockenhuber (CV), Dave Hutcheon (DH), Dave Ottewell (DFOT), Goetz Ruprecht (GR), John D'Auria (JDA), Lothar Buchmann (LB), Peter Machule (PM), Mike Trinczek (MT) - recorder. 1. Previous minutes: Accepted without corrections. 2. Business arising: Annual Report submission deadline approaching. DH - DRAGON general report done CV - almost done with 40Ca report CR - working on 26Al report 3. Acceptance Studies (CR): DSSSD has been mounted just in front of the Final Slit box to measure the alpha particles. There is an x-y stage to allow almost complete coverage. With the DRAGON "Standard" tune (which now has Q1 at -5%), the beam of alphas was off-center. Corrected with the final steerers, then adjusted ED2 to have beam centered and the final steerers at 0. This resulted in ED2 being about 1kV lower (now ED2 = .78ED1). The beam looks very well focused! It is much smaller than the GIOS envelope plot for 15O(a,g)19Ne that we always look at. (DH Caveat: with 300 traces, the plot may be misleading...) The optics settings seem to be bang-on to expected values, unlike what JEP and EOC had experienced (e.g. ED1 m/q was exactly what it should be, whereas that of JEP and EOC was 1.3% lower.) No direct comparison yet to the work of JEP and EOC because the small pumping tubes, etc were in for this data set. The tubes/collimators have now been removed to take more data this evening. Once done, will need to compare to GEANT. Next location for DSSSD will be just after MD2. PM points out that the Q10 Hall probe was disturbed. It now has a field ratio to MD1 of 0.266, compared to 0.27 before. We will need to see if this is significant... DH reports that the mass slits were "jammed" on the weekend. This happened after Dave Moris had cleaned out the dust on the motors and had reconnected the EPICS/motor-drive cables incorrectly. Problem has been fixed. 4. 20Ne Analysis (MT): After finding ROODY too cumbersome and flaky, decided to move to a more-involved ROOT analysis. Getting help from CR and CV. (CR also reports extensive ROODY crashing on the weekend; we all agree that it is an incredibly frustrating on-line viewer.) 5. 40Ca Analysis (CV for CO): The first charge-state distribution analysis done 9 months ago looked not accurate enough, so CV has reanalyzed the data and is much happier with the results. Using ROOT, the spikes in current measurements (FC4, FC1, FCCH) have been removed and only a certain range integrated, allowing a better average current to be determined. The Sayer formula can reproduce the measured charge-state distributions after the CSB foil at 0Torr rather well and changes in pressure may be taken into account by shifting the mean charge state. The last big remaining item in the analysis is a GEANT simulation for the BGO efficiency. CV will need some help from the experts... We should keep pushing hard to complete the analysis and get the paper out soon. While CO hopes to graduate this summer, we should endeavour to publish much sooner. 6. Mitutoyo Drive for Charge Slits (DFOT): The drives and controller have arrived and look very promising. No batteries required! Rolf Keitel will integrate the RS-232 output into the control system sometime in the next 2 months. In the meantime, DFOT and PM will work on the mounting. 7. Other business: a. DH and CV report that the mesh and glass slides for mounting the thin foils have been ordered. b. CR is in the process of ordering the photocells for Project747. Will purchase 70 from Advanced Photonics in California at a cost of 9.50USD for each 1cm2 cell. Brian Evans is making a prototype detector with the cells on loan from York. c. DH will submit the EMIS abstract that he had circulated last week. JDA will draft an abstract detailing the upgrades and improvements to DRAGON over the last few years; will circulate soon. d. CR tells of more stories in the XIA saga. He and Chris Pearson have compared each and every part in the two acquisition computers and have found very little difference, yet it works with CP's computer and not ours. CR has a new hard drive from PAA and will mirror CP's system. Maybe this helps? Meanwhile, the manufacturer XIA has offered to get it working on our computer if we send it to them. Not to be outdone, KO will lend us a 12-bit, digitizing, 8-channel card should the XIA stuff never work. He refuses to get involved with the XIA system directly since it "works" in Windows. (Given all the trouble, this attitude may yet prove to be the most sensible...) e. JDA reports on the Town Hall Meeting just held in Chicago. He had already summarized the meeting in an email: [JDA email] " 1. The new mini RIA proposal (ABEL, ICF) from ARL and MSU both essentially are based upon a fragmentation approach and are delaying any ISOL until later. The production accelerator is now a 200 MeV linac which can give up 500 MeV protons, and heavy ions. They plan to do fragmentation, gas stopping in a linear or a cyclotron gas catcher, and then reaccelerate. Neither facility will be able to go to energy below 500 keV/A on the reacceleration so DRAGON will remain unique. Everyone wants to build a DRAGON like facility, by the way. 2. Notre Dame hopes to turn on St. George by 2008 and it is DRAGON like but has a Wien filter instead of fixed electrostatic dipoles. 3. TUNL and Henry Weller will try the C12(a,g)O16 inversely using high intensith, monoenergetic gamma rays starting in 2008. 4. There is a great talk by Tim Beers on measuring elemental distributions from over 20000 stars..Go to my course web page (http://sfu.ca/NuSc344.html click on NuSc 344, and then click on the stars hot button. 5. Jeff Blackmon gave a nice review of present studies with good mention of DRAGON stuff in a plenary talk. "