First light of Alba in the news

I cannot find how to embed the video inside the post (put in a comment if you know how), but at least I have the link to the video in the most extended tv broadcast in Catalunya:

http://www.tv3.cat/3alacarta/#/videos/3434091

From the introduction they dedicate a lot of seconds, and inside the news review they have dedicated up to 2 minutes to the first synchrotron light in Alba (from 00:50 to 02:48).

Also they have explained another news about a work conflict (but not in the introduction) in a motorbikes factory, and they have dedicated to this: 1 minute (half of the time to the Alba's thing, from 03:27 to 04:30). If you look deep on to this news, how many red/black flags you can see?

First x-ray light in Alba

We've working hard during this last years for this day, and it works at the firsts try!

After open the frontend shutter and moving the masks on this part, we just see current on the electrometers in side of the beamline Mistral. At the beginning it was an small current, in the order of the microamperes (uA). An in the first position where a ccd camera is placed we have seen this:



This image has been taken in the first moment I saw the beam and the minimum delay to take an snapshot. But After I have take better ones like:



There's an email to all Alba's stuff, from the experiments head, with this attachment:



In this email, he thanks all the colleagues involved to have this result (and I like to forward this email to the people who help for that but left before this event).

Also is explained that this is a footprint of a bending magnet light shaping it with the movable masks, and detailing that the marks on are 1mm separated.

This is the beginning of the next step!

visible synchrotron light

Step by step, first turn on the 9th of March, beam stored the 13th and from the 16th of March we are accumulating more and more current on the storage ring beam. Yesterdaym, I have seen up to 20mA in the dcct. With this current, we can see visible light in the diagnostics beamline. Familiar name Xanadu, and technically bl34:


There is one diagnostics camera looking on this beam:


This days I have taken lots of snapshots of this "ctdiccd" application with beams from different places. For example Frontend34 with false colors:


Today, the plan is to do even more. We arrive early than expected to this step in the commissioning, and it's time for a shutter opening. The plan is open Mistral's frontend and start looking X-ray beam there. I hope I will have some nice photos of the beam.

increasing the current in the storage ring

Another goal has been reach in this commissioning. Only 8 days after this tests start we have up to 4 mA average current in the beam of the storage ring. The transmission from the booster ring to the storage looks good with values close to the 100%.

Also the beam is stored in this ring for hours now, and it's time to start accumulating charge in this storage.

It looks possible that at the end of this week one frontend shutter would be open and start seeing synchrotron light in the first beamline.

update: Looking on the ccd acquisition, I'm counting up to 5 different clients looking images of the diagnostics beamline. The peak was this morning about 10 computers looking on the same camera (I cannot count the number of persons looking this computers).

Stored beam in the storage ring

With a very redundant title I start this post with the announcement: this weekend Alba's storage ring has had a beam during one second. An small number of electrons (the current was 100uA, instead of the usuals 400mA that I saw in the screens of other synchrontrons).

Following the calculations of the last post and assuming the speed of the beam is 0.99998c in the storage ring of 268.8 meters:
0.99998c / 268.8 = 1115277 turns

There wasn't a announce email, but this weekend we had also beam for an hour in the storage ring. An hour has 3600s, then the beam has turned tu ring about 4 thousand million times. (I don't know yet the current of the beam in this case).

Storage ring first days of commissioning

We reach the goal of the 100 turns and we are starting the RF system to have the beam live time bigger. But what is the meaning of this 100 turn in terms of beam time?

I have made a few numbers, at read it with care: I'm not a physicist.

The previous steps to arrive to the storage (what we already test and commissioning in the past) starts in the linac. A lineas accelerator of about 20 meters who generates beams of 100MeV. Using the transfer line, this beam is injected in the ring of the booster (249.6 meters) using pulsed magnets. This is a very precise task because this pulses have to kick the linac's beams and don't affect the ones that are already in the booster (other way we will kick them out).

In the booster, the beam is ramp from 100MeV to 3GeV. The booster's radio frequency is accelerating 30 times the beam. At that time, the beam is good to be transferred to the storage ring. This operation can be done in 160ms, when the machine is operating at 3Hz, because this is in the positive part of the wave. One turn is about 888ns, then the beam has take 180000 turns in the booster.

There is also a transfer line from the booster to the storage, with many diagnostics elements.

Being on the storage ring (268.8 meters) the first turn photo has been publish in the Alba's web:


The transferlines are about 18 meters the ltb (linac to booster), and 26 meters the bts (booster to storage):
linac(20)+ltb(18)+(booster(249.6)*18e4 turns)+bts(26)+(storage(268.8)*1 turn)
This is about 45000Km from the linac's shot to the beam photo up here. This beam is hitting an screen of a few millimeters. During this trip the beam is stored in an orbit, being corrected, focused, and so on.

Now is time to store this beam in this orbit of 268.8 meters for many hours.

Storage ring first turn

This morning, just when I check the email I saw one from Dieter (accelerator's boss) announcing that yesterday evening we reach the goal of the first turn of the storage ring (and some more without radio frequency)

Why this goal is important? Afaik, this means that the path is free from the linac to the storage, and everywhere where the electron's beam has to live is well aligned, the magnets works and the orbit can be reached, and so on. In less words: the subsystems works together correctly. Until this week, we test everything as close as possible to the final way. But until the moment when you put everything together and you switch on it, you have a fussy area of afraidness.

Also I like to thanks Dieter, because is usual on him to do a thanks list when a goal is reach and a little email with some pictures and explanation (there are others not that polite and retailer). And in this complex machine, the goals can only be reach with a collective work.

Update: Today we hit the goal of 100 turns

Alba: Storage ring commissioning

It has been announced that yesterday arrives a fax to Alba's faciliries with the permission to start the storage ring commissioning. After a callback confirmation, and a couple of months waiting for this permission, including some shifts cancellations, the day has been arrived.

Following the plan, this afternoon we will start to operate the accelerators complex: starting from the very tested linac (from 2008, electron accelerator to 100Mev), followed by the booster ring (2009-2010, from 100MeV to 3GeV), and we will use again the BTS (Booster To Storage transferline) in order to inject and do the first turns in the storage ring accelerator (maintain at 3GeV and produce good synchrotron light).

Tango Control System in Ubuntu

Update: There's a newer version of this howto here.

A long a go, in the tango control system mail list, we have announced the availability of debian packages for Tango and the inclusion of them in the ubuntu's repositories. The installation of this distributed control system becomes really easy, and you will have the updates from the this community.

As easy like:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:abogani/tango
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys F141B61E

Edit the sources file if you are not in the Long Term Support (LTS) ubuntu version, with something like:
sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/abogani-tango-maverick.list
change, for example, maverick to lucid.

sudo apt-get update

Then you have two possibilities: with or without the tango database. The second case assumes that you have another server installed with it in the network.

1st case: install a tango with a database
sudo apt-get install tango-common tango-db tango-starter tango-test python-pytango libtango7-doc omninotify

Also "dbconfig-common libboost-python1.40.0 libcos4-1 liblog4tango4 libomniorb4-1 libomnithread3c2 libtango7" dependencies will be installed.

2nd case: you already have a tango database in another server:
If you already have another system in the network with tango installed, you don't need the database packages, then the installation to do is:
sudo apt-get install tango-common tango-starter tango-test python-pytango libtango7-doc omninotify

Also "libboost-python1.40.0 libcos4-1 liblog4tango4 libomniorb4-1 libomnithread3c2 libtango7" dependencies will be installed.


Well, after this steps, you must have the tango control system running on your machine and with it you have included the python binding.