I have written some times about how a synchrotron works (underlining that I am not a physicist and what I write is what I understood from the explanation of other people). Also I have wrote about how can we saw the beam or its effects: visible beam, first xrays or fluorescent screens But there is another way to see the beam: using an scope. Today I have ask to know a little bit more what we can see from an scope that we are reading the signal:
But, 2 questions: who this signal is get and what does this mean? This signal is get from a Fast Current Transformer (FCT) located in sector 02:
Very close to the dcct that is giving us the current of the beam in the machine status. This FCT is an inductor surrounding the vacuum chamber and what we see in the scope is the inducted current by the primary current given by the electron bunches. In the scope picture we can see the bunches in one turn (about 900ns). But a bunch is not one of this eleven groups in the signal. They are composed by bunches. May can help to see that by plots taken with taurus:
With this last picture we can see the bunches themselves. The bunches are separated by 2ns, and the linac is shutting in groups of 32 consecutive bunches and a gap of 24ns. Also I have ask why this groups of bunches have different shapes like:
This 3 examples has been taken over different times during today's start up of the machine. This shapes can be explained because fine configuration or how the equipments works and their efficiency. In the best case, in a world of the theory, this groups would be absolutely squared.
The original title of this post was 'European Strike 14N' because testerday we had a call for strike in many places in Europe. Some of the European countries doesn't have the right for a general strike (like Germany). In fact the bigger calls was in the south of the continent: Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, and Spain have had a journey strike, in Greece they had a 3 hour call for strike (remember that they have had 2 journeys of strike last 10th). In Italy the call has been made for 4 hour. But why the today's news have changed my mind? I thing there is a mismatch in the police actions when the injured people in the demonstrations are more than the arrested (worst when the is not intersection between the arrested joint and the injured joint). Well we have to think that one of the injured is a riot police man that has run over by a police ban:
After watch the video I have hallucinated with the hits on the girl close to where other physically protect the kit. After the girl protest to the riot controller, she have received the shield hit only to be telling something to the police. This girl doesn't look to be a menace to those police men. But after she have received 3 truncheon hits by two different elements of those shielded giants.
News like this ones that gives more injured people than arrested, makes me think that their method is not working because more innocents (because they hasn't been arrested) have been injured, further when they often say that they have identified hundreds of violent persons.
It is also incredible when the police count as injured their riot controllers with wrist pain. Where the origin of this pain is the hit with the truncheon, and they are not counting all the beat by this truncheons. In the case of the people in the protest, you must finish in the hospital with a big damage to be counted in this list.
The afternoon of November 13th, the Albasynchrotron has had an accident. As it has been officially mention by an email to all the staff, during the machine start up after a week shutdown, and accident have vent the vacuum in the storage ring. Having a 3GeV beam with a current of around 100mA some beam studies were on going. It looks that the vertical orbit have suddenly change (+-5mm). The machine protection was off because it was necessary for the works on going and the orbit interlock protection hasn't being triggered to kill the beam. This protection has been design to avoid the beam hits the cavity when the beam goes out of a safe region.
The first indicator of the issue can be saw in the machine status because usually the operation pressure is rounding the 1e-9 mbar (in the Ultra-High Vacuum range) and in the picture taken the evening of that day this pressure is at 6e-2 mbar, where this is medium vacuum. Even that this pressure value is not in one position, is an average. There where out-gassed sectors and sectors where the pressure has been contained:
In the bottom plot is possible to see where this accident have vent the cavity and where the pressure is very far than UHV. Notice that the scale is logarithmic in this plot, and we have already start work to fix that. When the accident has happen, some sectors have raised up to atmospheric pressure...
Now the machine status informs a little bit about this and is not giving a pressure value:
Update: Current user run cancelled. Due to the vacuum accident, the current 3 week run with beam for users has been cancelled. We hope to get it back up and running as soon as possible. Update 20121116: We are recovering the vacuum. Yesterday we where at 0.39mbar on average in the storage ring, and today we are at 0.074mbar (on average).
Update 20121117: Yesterday we've been informed that the breakdown was less than can be thought, if it's possible to say like that. As far as I understood, the electron beam haven't hit the vacuum chamber; the damage has come from synchrotron photons have hit flanges downstream some bending magnets, the feebleest element on the path. The vacuum technicians are working this weekend to speed up as much as possible the recovery of the machine operation. And today, on average we are at 0.0024mbar having only 4 places with pressures in the medium vacuum range (the others are already in UHV). Update 20121119: Back from the weekend It look like the people that work this free days did an incredible work:
Sector 12 have 2 reading of 2.7e-3mbar, but as is show in the plot, the others are below the 1e-8mbar. Sector 7 looks to be in an incredible good 1e-12mbar...
Update 20121119, afternoon: the machine status gui recovers the pressure value
The Vacuum Controls gui (vacca) is also showing much better look:
Taking the Spanish media and the international information that arrives to this country, Germany is where they pave our streets with gold. The PIIGS have their economies compared with Germany with the risk premium. The gods of the markets decides above everything in a politics system that would be named marketcracy. And if the markets decides that a virgin worker must be sacrificed, the politicians, like a high priest does what ever is necessary to obey the god will. But mass media are also priest on this system. They make up the reality to adapt the collective think to the global order. Lying to the plebs about how the things happens in other places. But some times they made a mistake throwing something that allows to understand. In Germany, you have an special tax if you belong to a religion. Each church receives depending on the people that follows this religion. Then belong or not to a religion is translated to money for the ecclesiastic hierarchy. Today, in the news, I have seen that in Germany the Catholic Christian church is denying religious services to the people that decide to save money by refusing to be Catholic. That means you save 8% tax, by refusing to mention your faith to the government. I think before, you must be practitioner to pay that, because if you don't follow the church activities was use less to pay. Then I think the people that is taking this decision are real believers with real money problems. The plebs in the PIIGS have received the message that in the north, where the things are made in the good way, they work and they like fine. But the reality is different. In this wrong capitalism, where wins are private and loses are publicly shared, all the plebs are suffering to maintain the rich. It's still the save think than always, it's a class conflict. We didn't finish it, it's only one season more.
Sometime a go, I have received the request to control a new model of cameras The BaslerAce acA1300-30g{m,c}. Yes both types: monochrome and colour. The most common cameras to look at the beam are the Basler ScoutscA1000-30gm and the scA1300-32gm (yes until now we have only supported monochrome cameras in the service of beam diagnostics by imaging. To take the pictures of this Basler Scout we have used and contribute using the Soleil's device ImgGrabber, and to analyse those taken pictures we have used the ImgBeamAnalyzer (also originally from Solei). How we look at the images? Long time a go we have start working with Qt and as a result we have used Qub widget from esrf. This widget has been integrated in tau that has been renamed to taurus. As an example, I have saved hundreds of snapshots of the gui with beam. The latest publish here was to celebrate the first x-ray beam at alba, but I can share much more of those pictures:
But the software we used doesn't support the Ace cameras. There is a newer software that makes deprecated this software and many of the synchrotrons that are using tango are migrating to LImA (Library for Image Acquisition). This is a very powerful software specially focussed in detectors. This ccds that I'm talking here are not usually "detectors" in a synchrotron sense. They are not the end of the beamline from where the data of the experiment is collected. The most often activity of this cameras is beam diagnostics previous to the experiment to make sure that everything is on the expected place and the shape of the beam have the desired characteristics. Then they are used very often as a live video image in the graphical user interface (gui) from which I have placed images before. Another situation is during beam commissioning when this cameras are used much more like a detector during a scan using Sardana. On this situation is not that important the image availability during the measurement, the most important this is the beam study of each picture and the statistical characteristics from the beam. Then we have two very different user cases. In the upgrade to LImA both must be implemented, and yes they already are. In the LImA Basler device the Ace cameras are already supported and there are some attributes that allows the possibility to have a gui like we have. But what was the problem? This attribute are from the "new" tango data type DevEncoded. Our system didn't support yet this data type and this has been an august development (almost the best month to work, almost every one on holidays and no one is bothering your development). What make this data type special? This data type can contain almost anything: basically is a list of an string together with a list of bytes, where the string says what and how the things are codified in the list of bytes. In the case of the LImA's "video_last_image" attribute, the DevEncoded is given as a "VIDEO_IMAGE" format. An issue of this flexibility is the naming, we are starting putting names without a rule and in the future this will be very difficult to unify and harmonise. LImA is hosted in a git repository and in the file "applications/tango/LimaCCDs.py" there is a method 'read_video_last_image()' where this "VIDEO_IMAGE" is codified. Recently this DevEncoded format has been integrated in taurus. And as we want to see the images using guiqwt who is integrated in taurus using an extension of this software, we have integrated this DevEncoded as a interpretable data from taurus. The result: we've been able to take and show images from a monochrome Basler ace camera:
Using a fake beam (a image of the beam printed in a paper and placed in front of a ccd) we can check how it behaves with different beam types:
Very glad and satisfied when you see this images. It doesn't look special, but knowing the effort behind that the view is different.
No one like that some one else robs what is ours. The think is like this from immemorial time that the human beings we have occurred to rules and institutions to avoid it and to punish to that do it.
I understand, therefore, the anger of the owners of the supermarkets where a group of Andalusian laborers has removed food. Although the objective is noble, I have already said that to anybody it likes that someone else robbs what is own and I understand him, then, that they have reported to the authorities.
I already say that it seems normal to me. But what, nevertheless, it does not seem so normal to me it is that these authorities and the politicians who have been scandalized so much by the theft of the laborers are so little sensible to other much more great robberies that happen to newspaper in our country. That is to say, that they have got upset as much by a theft of small account and they do not persecute the great robberies and swindles.
Let us see:
Let us suppose that the labourers filled each one of the shopping cart with food by value of 300 euros each one (what he would mean, by the way, that the stolen total amount is very small for Carrefour and Mercadona, because between both company they obtained 845 million euros of benefits in 2011, and if we suppose that they gathered 25 cars of food is that with that benefit they would be possible to be filled to 2.8 million cars with food by value of 300 euros each one).
Now let us compare this theft with other three robberies of which they have taken place or they take place day to day in Spain:
a) Robbery of the electrical companies.
The engineer Antonio Moreno has demonstrated that “every day that happens without the Government approves the official rule that he defines in what consists “the suitable renovation and update of the park of accountants”, the electrical companies receive the following amounts illegally (including the VAT):
- More than 600,000 euros by a service (“the suitable renovation and update of the park of accountants”) that do not given because the Government not yet has defined of what this service consists.
- Between 196,000 and 342,000 euros by the positive error that has 80% of the accountants because they have not been verified periodically because the Government not yet has published the corresponding norm”.
That is to say, that the company electrical (single to receive a service of renovation and update of accountants that does not render) robs every day to the Spaniards equivalent to 2,000 shopping cart with food by value of 300 euros each one, which represents about 730,000 shopping cart after the year.
As it can be seen in the Web of Brown Antonio (http://www.estafaluz.com) if the other concepts of the continuous swindle of these companies are added, it would be that the very many ones are robbing us equivalent to more shopping cart.
b) Robbery of the preferred participations.
As it is known, a good number of banks deceived thousands of Spanish savers placing “preferred participation to them” as if those products were deposits, without informing to them of which in fact those things are something like actions without right to vote and whose single cash could be recovered in very leonine clauses (a news tv report of Tele5 on this subject here).
As a result of that fraud of the banks around a million people there are lost the immense majority of its savings, calculating that those losses, a true robbery, can have a value of between 10,000 and 30,000 million euros.
If we accepted the lowest estimation (10,000 million), it is that the banks have robbed to a million Spanish citizens, and only by the concept of preferred participations, the equivalent to 33 million shopping carts loaded with food by value of 300 euros each one.
c) Fiscal fraud.
According to the technicians of the Ministry of Finance the 72% of the fiscal fraud (that is of about 89,000 million euro altogether), is made by the biggest fortunes and the greatest enterprises corporations, which means that these didn't pay to Finance's Ministry about 64,000 million euros to the year.
If we accepted that to evade the payment of taxes to which we are compelled it is a robbery to the society, it is that the great fortunes and corporations rob to all the Spaniards the equivalent one to 213 million shopping carts loaded with food by value of 300 euros each one.
To these robberies we could add others to great scale, like that the deceived families who contracted with banks credits with fraudulent clauses ground (information here and here), those that practice the pharmaceutical companies (information here), or and endless suffered daily of bad practices of the banks that cost thousands of million to all the Spanish citizens (adicae). Neither mention the global robbery of astronomical amounts of money that the financial crisis has supposed, the banking rescues, etc.
In conclusion: it could seem reasonable to me that it is wanted to persecute and to condemn the labourers who have stolen a few shopping carts of food by value of about 7,500 euros and not on its own benefit. But what I ask myself it is another thing: how is possible that such judges, public prosecutors, police, authorities… that they are persecuting and that will finish jailing to the labourers responsible by the theft for a few shopping carts of food do not persecute with similar fervor to those who amounts are robbing us that are several million greater times?
I do not know that the readers think but, at sight of this so contradictory behavior and the poor effective persecution who have those multimillionaire robberies, with what I think they criminalize the labourers not because the robbery itself but by another thing worries to them: because to whistle-blower to show the worse and more revolting shame of our opulent world is seen: the hunger. A suffering, do not forget, that the result of the lack of resources is not an accident nor but, as said the previous Relator of the Nations United for the Problems of the Feeding, Jean Ziegler, “a organized crime against the Humanity”. And he is for that reason, I create, who the criminals who commit it or who help to commit do not want it that he is spoken of it.
So do not be hypocritical: If the authorities that demands the respect to the order and the property were coherent and ended the true thieves who are robbing to the immense majority of the society there would not be more labourers taking eaten of the supermarkets.
