Accelerator Update

FY07 Machine Reliability Superb

November 2, 2007

Jim Murphy
Accelerator & Operations Division
jbm@bnl.gov

Archives:
June 2008
February 2008
November 2007
June 2007

The beginning of the fiscal year is always an opportune time to have a look back at the year just completed and to gaze forward at the year ahead. In retrospect, FY07 was a very good year for machine operations: the VUV ring achieved 98.2% reliability for 5704 hours of operation and the X-Ray ring achieved 96.2% reliability for about 4990 hours of operation. These superb statistics are a validation of the April 2007 organizational changes and a tribute to the cooperation and dedication of the talented staff in the Accelerator & Operations, Environmental, Safety, Health & Quality, and Experimental Systems divisions. We were fortunate to have Dr. Xi Yang (formerly of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) join the NSLS as the machine physicist for the booster ring. We also dipped into our local talent pool to promote Zhijian Yin to a new role as the Controls Computing Leader, effective November 1, 2007.

The Laser Electron Gamma Source (LEGS) completed its mission, and the decommissioning of the LEGS hardware in the X-Ray tunnel and on the experimental floor (out to the walkway) was a key accomplishment for FY07; decommissioning of the remaining LEGS hardware in the "target room and cryo lab" will continue in FY08. The real estate vacated by LEGS is being considered for a possible new beamline and insertion device in the X5 straight section. The options for a new X5 insertion device are being explored, as this straight section is "space challenged" because of its close proximity to the injection hardware for the X-Ray ring.

The X9 undulator/beamline construction and installation are the primary projects for FY08. Installation will be partitioned between the December '07 and May '08 shutdowns. The long-term schedule for January through April 2008 has now been issued and the next segment of the schedule is being planned to include installation of the X9 hardware.

In addition to the frontline storage ring sources there is also a vibrant accelerator physics program at the Source Development Laboratory (SDL), which generated publications in Physical Review Letters, Optics Express, and Applied Physics Letters in FY07. For FY08, the free electron laser (FEL) program will continue to receive funding from the Office of Naval Research, and some newly awarded Lab Directed Research and Development funding will kick start the development of a new state-of-the-art ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) source. The sub-picosecond sources at the SDL (FEL, TeraHertz, and UED) are complimentary to the storage ring sources where the pulse lengths are a few nanoseconds long.