DRAGON meeting minutes Sept 9/03. 
Present: DH, DO, BD, NC, CR, LB, PM, JR, AB, MT, JDA, AL, AO, DG, SB and ML(recorder) 

Preliminaries: 
The group would like to welcome Nicole Chorney an undergraduate from UVic, and Mike Trinczek 
a postdoc to the group. 

Corrections to previous minutes: 
- Section 1 Bob Laxdal planning a two week shutdown starting Sept 24th. 
- Section 2 "ate Q10" should be "at Q10". 
- Section 4 Nicole arrived last week. 

Hardware: 
DH: DH introduces the group to the day which was referred to as "black 
Thursday". 20Ne beam was available to DRAGON for the purpose of first tests of the solid 
target and possible further testing of the MCP. Three foils had been mounted previously 
(2 20 ug/cm2 carbon foils and 1 120 ug/cm2 Mylar foil) for pump down and venting tests. It 
was discovered that the solid target drive was slipping, thus it was difficult to proceed 
with testing. It was decided to move on and deliver the beam to the MCP. The success of this 
venture was restrained by the fact that the bias on ED1 would not go above 40KV. Don Dale 
and company were called in and went through several step to determine that the problem was 
emanating from the high voltage stack, or within the vacuum chamber itself. The stack was 
taken out with the assistance of PM and DP (Doug Preddy). See the attachment 1, this pic was 
taken after some of the gunk had been cleaned off. No elements were "fried", open air tests 
will be done as well as possible. PM will clean this board and the stack will be reinserted. 
NK (Naimat Khan) had a spare negative stack and PM found a positive diode board which can be 
used to replace the negative diode board to "create" an anode HV supply. DH suggests it might 
be good to have a full complement of each HV stack species cleaned and ready to go if a 
reoccurrence should befall us. Trying to salvage the day, attention was put back toward the 
solid target drive. Attempting to calibrate the position of the foils only sent the ladder 
motor into a mad spinning frenzy. Rod Nussbaumer had a problem with the mm/step ratio so the 
drive had gone wild. As a final attempt to test the target the Mylar foil was placed in the 
beam interception position before pumpdown. This yielded some light as viewed by the CCD, 
however carbonization of the foil occurred rapidly. LB says Carbon vapours in the vacuum are 
sufficient to cause this problem, cold fingers are necessary. One other test on the list was 
a measure of the pickoff of net charge exchange of the beam to foil. However the resistance 
from the foil to ground was only 12Mohms, so any foil bias was problematic. 
DO: Pumping tube tests were done with three different setups: 1.No pumping tubes 2. Stubby 
tubes and 3. Regular tubes. These tests came about as a product of the wishes to increase the 
angular acceptance of DRAGON. Attachment 2 illustrates these results graphically, D4 labeled 
here is the furthest downstream ion gauge readout (just above furthest turbo pump). Of 
special interest to the group was the power output of the turbo pumps, and the maximum 
pressure allowable with the current pumping setup. More thought is needed for a plausible 
solution, for the problems at higher gas cell pressures. 

Beam Scheduling: 
JDA: The current beam schedule places DRAGON beam time just before that of TUDA in November. 
The goal of this beam time is to let TUDA scan for unknown energy levels in 22Mg via a 
(3He,p) reaction. If any new levels of astrophysical interest were found DRAGON would use its 
beam time to investigate the importance of these levels. If no new interesting levels were 
found we could return to levels in 22Mg where little DRAGON data exits, or could venture out 
to levels where no DRAGON data exists. The current beam time scheduling causes a big problem 
with this plan. 

Optics studies: 
JR: Joel introduces his "broad tune" which was derived from the standard tune" by varying each 
of the 16 elements repeatedly until the envelope at problematic spots met the requirements. 
Attachment 3 includes a memo sent to a select few of the group, in which a proposal to mount 
the DSSSD just after the first stage of DRAGON is made. The conclusion of Joel's work is that 
we can squeeze the beam through the first stage but as shown on page 2 of the attachment the 
vertical height of the beam becomes quite large, particularly the second order terms, in the 
second stage. An alternative solution to the large envelope problem is examined on the last 
page of the attachment where the height of Q9 is plotted as a function of y0 the initial beam 
height. As indicated a 13'' bore is required for a 5mm high beam spot. If the DSSSD were to be 
moved to after the first stage detector protection would become extremely important and beam 
tuners would have to be cautious. 
AO/CR/DH: GEANT should be used to confirm the results of JR. That is: can we squeeze the beam 
through the first stage and where is the beam being lost as compared to GIOS. 
JDA: We need a detailed proposal involving the mass slit box schematic if this is where the 
detector were to be moved. 

Other business arising: 
JDA: We need to backup the data on isdaq04 the hard drive is getting full. 
AB: There are several duplicate files, these will be removed. 
AO: We need to keep the data in the data partition drive, instead of 
copying .mid files for analysis to the home partition it is better to make soft links to the data 
drive. This should save space in the home drive.