Minutes of DRAGON Meeting of Oct. 29, 2003

Present: AL, DG, DFOT, DH, JR, PW, CN, ML, MT, JDA (recorder in absence of MP)
 
Agenda
1. Minutes of Meeting of Oct. 21 (see attached)
2. Business arising 
3. Facility notes:      
      -status of leaky Q3
    -elastic detectors
3. Status of the Run in progress   
        (GEANT simulations and tuning discussion: optional)
4. Report from initial studies with new dE/E Si detectors   AO
5. AOB
    
    
1. Minutes of meeting of Oct. 22 approved with no changes noted.

2. No business arising aside for what was on agenda.

3. Status of Facility
	- Leak at Q3 fixed by Al Richardson (tightened connector)
	- remote NMR readout for MD2 still not operational  -  DFOT to get fixed
	- mass slits readout may be not functioning properly and do not insert quickly at 
   times  - DH to check
	- buncher malfunctioning (EPICS said it was off, when it was on) was brought to 
               to the attention of accelerator people (lost ~2 days over weekend)

4. Elastics Operations  -  JR
	JR has been checking the operation of the elastics. The noise problem is quite bad only when beam is on (stable or RB). He has tried to used a new electronics setup by taking parallel signals from detector and using different discriminators (LE and CFD) to get two different signals in time. Using this, he has triggered the energy spectra and seems to discriminate between the real signals and the noise signals. This may have solved the problem but he will check further. Attachment one shows his spectra, the electronics, and pictures from a scope of the original signals

5. Status of the Run
	DH has summarized what has been done at the lower energy (0.8 MeV/u) in the notebook. It seems a number of runs have been taken at this energy but the going is slow. It was suggested that we go back to 1.46 MeV/u and now do some studies of varying Q1 in a systematic fashion. ML will complete his simulation studies to compare against some of these data. A further game plan needs to be prepared by LB upon his return on thursday. 

	In anticipation of the solid target running in two weeks, DH will install the solid target setup onto DRAGON on Thursday of this week for testing with the stable beam and using a scintillator in one of the target spots. This will be a one day run at a beam energy of 1.46 MeV/u. The C12 run of LB will then be continued assuming a run plan is available. 

	In a related area DH showed data exploring the nature of the effects of beam when the separator is tuned for recoils in the first stage and beam in the second stage (see attachment 2). This relates to the studies attempted earlier with the DSSSD in the mass slit position. It is clear that there is a great deal of beam that is passed through the 2nd stage and this beam did hit the detector when positioned in the mass slit position. Singles studies were just not possible with this set up. 

6. The new DE/E silicon detectors – AO
	Ahmed Hussein and AO have tested the new prototype DE/E detectors received from Italy using an Am alpha source. These consist of a E Si detector of about 1 x 2 cm. On top are 10 (2 vertical strips of 5) thin (1 micron) small (~mm2) in area, ion implanted DE pads. Preamp boards were made here at TRIUMF and they need to operate inside of the vacuum system.Using a bias of about 150 volts both sets of strips do seem to work. The first set of 5 were initially tested but for some unknown reason stopped.It is suspected that they became warm during operation. The second set are working and the signals look good. AO will now attempt to get a spectrum as the next test. 
	
7. There will be a meeting of the ISAC Safety committee on Thursday at 13:00 to discuss the required safety approval to run the ISAC accelerator at 1.8 MeV/u. Approval from Ottawa is required since this was not specified in the original license of operation.