Minutes of DRAGON meeting, March 30th 2004.

Present: JP, JS, MT, Catalin Matei (CM), DO, DH, GR, CR, AO, Peter Jackson 
(PJ), Lb, PM, CJ, ML (recorder)

Corrections to previous minutes: none.

Business arising:
MT- Ast07 is now in the system as being backed up.


Status of hardware:

DO - Fan under target platform not working, it is hot under there.
suspect TP1 mislabelled, will get Mike Leross to check.
Will put a big fan under there to cool pumps.
DH - According to the logbook ED2 tripped last night, not sure if
this is an actual problem with the EDs or if its a temperature problem.
DH would look at readback from cryo pump, if temperature
too high trigger was on to confirm second hypothesis.
DH - Both elastic monitors (EM1 and EM2) are in and working. EM1 looks ugly 
but EM2 looks good. There is some noise in EM2 but its well separated from the
"good stuff". We should do a trial with no gas.
LB - Seems to be better than we've ever had.
DH - Customized software for CCD still not up to par, but data might give us
another beam normalization.
JP - Future long term project could be to write this CCD data to the mid files.
AO - Should possible, would need to make it look like epics data.


Current run plan status 12C(a,g)16O:

LB - Got beam on saturday, started off 25 keV/u lower than on resonance.
Preliminary analysis of data indicated that the yield has remained fairly
constant, however a more rigorous analysis is needed. Sunday was spent by 
Operators going from a 3+ to a 4+ beam. Monday was spent mistuning DRAGON to get
max yield. Looks like the -1% tune works best, this is where the recoil peak
in the DSSSD is most symmetric. We still see a dip in the energy spectra
indicative of losses through DRAGON however acceptance seems high. Spectra in
DSSSD is very clean, its basically all good events. DRAGON operators should
monitor s9 which is the readout from FCM2, there should always be something 
there.
Cant tune a new beam through DRAGON due to lack of conditioning of EDs, one
has to just change the energy in the scaling program, after a measurement
from MD1 of course. Right now we are using the extrapolation method of the
gas pressure in the target to zero. The plan is to go to the limit of the 
accelerator (reason we needed a 4+ beam). We need to go back and do a run at
7+ to get a better idea of the charge state distribution, at the energy we 
were just at. The 2+ resonance has an isotropic gamma decay so it would be 
nice for calibration.
LB,AO,DH- We have a weird singles energy spectra in the DSSSD, seem to get 
some good counts at 7% of the mean energy.
These counts cannot have scattered through DRAGON since they have the same
time dependence with the RF as the other good events. Does the DSSSD have
bias? JP will check.
LB- We need to minimize s7 (total count rate in BGOs) for each new energy tune.
DH - At one point s7 went down by a factor of 50 with a proper tune!


CJ status of 21Na:

CJ - Reanalyzing the most recent 21Na data first analyzed by MT. See the 
attachment.
the fit does not include the lowest energy point (not shown in figure). If we
were to go back and look at this resonance again the charge state distribution
should be measured.
MT - We're actually outside the window in which Wenjie thesis applies.
DH - Would be 4 solid days of running to properly investigate this (these) 
resonance(s).
CJ - Second page of attachment is an outline of a possible run plan if we 
go back and get more data here.