Reaching 100mA in the storage ring

Faster than the scheduled, yesterday 1st of April, we hit the milestone of the 100mA accumulated in the storage ring.

The 7th of March we receive the permission to start the commissioning of the storage ring (Monday, but was holidays in Barcelona). The 9th, we start and we did the first turn. It's not easy to reach this milestone that fast because many thing has been done blind and they was correct when too many parameters can fail.

Then we had stored beam the 13th and the 16th we start to accumulate beam in this ring.

During this last two weeks we was testing the subsystems that automatically kills the beam and it's better to do it with a low (but not too low) current. We did this test with about 40mA with success.

When the beam orbit goes close to the vacuum chamber, the beam positioning have to respond automatically to kill the beam that can break this chamber. If this brake happens the vacuum inside will be destroyed and this means months of problems.

With this tests pass, we can start increasing the more and more the current of this stored beam. From the evening of the 31th we start to increase this current. We've reach the 50mA, the 60mA, the 70mA, the 80mA, the 90mA... An at 18:25 of the 1st of April, we have reached the 100mA.

More important that this milestone itself, the great news is this was planed to be reach in June.

The work is not finish, but we are doing it faster than planed. Fine tuning is still pending, and this great speed on the milestones is not granting the next pending actions. But this give good feeling for that.

Update (20110408): This news has been published in the lightsources.org.