From: "Hagen, Mark E." To: ; ; ; ; "John Tranquada" ; "Kenzelmann Michel" ; "Bill Leonhardt" Cc: "Winn, Barry L." ; "Graves-Brook, Melissa K." Subject: HYSPEC Update - 1st ever neutrons planned for next Monday Date: Friday, August 05, 2011 2:46 PM Hi folks, Let me give you an update on where we are with HYSPEC. On July 19th we had the final SING site project review, David Mildner from NCNR and Jerry O'Hearn from LBL, came and gave SING (aka HYSPEC at this point) its last review. Both David and Jerry gave us the thumbs up in their report by DoE. On July 28th HYSPEC was signed off by the Instrument Systems Safety Committee at SNS to open its shutter for neutron beam. On August 4th (yesterday) DoE's ESAAB granted HYSPEC CD-4 and formally ended the SING project. So, next Monday 8th August, when the SNS accelerator comes up from summer shutdown, we will open the shutter for the first time in order for the RCT's to do a radiation survey around the beam line. This is part of a standard start-up for SNS, the accelerator stops at low power, ~100kW, for a few hours and the RCT's have to go around checking all the beam lines to make sure that the shielding is sound. So the exact time to open the shutter is unclear, but it will probably be around noon. On Tuesday, when the SNS is at full power, we have to get another survey done to again validate the shielding. We will then do a couple of other tests and then, after that, we'll shut HYSPEC down for a couple of weeks. There are a few more installations that I still want to get done, one of which involves pouring concrete. After we have poured the concrete we'll get the instrument enclosure/dance floor thoroughly cleaned. (We don't want concrete dust getting under the airpads etc.) We then have motion testing of the detector vessel to tune up. It moves well on some parts of the floor and less well on others, but we haven't put any effort into tuning it up yet and I'm sure we can get it working well everywhere. And then in mid to late August we plan/hope to start commissioning with neutrons, checking HOPG rocking curves, aligning collimators, chopper phase delays etc. etc. etc. There's plenty of work to get done in the next few months :) We'll send out some photograph's of the shutter opening and the instrument on Monday. I'm not sure when you all will be here at SNS next, I know that Steve, Jim and Rob will be here for the selection panels, but if you are here soon then Barry and/or I will gladly show it off to you in real life. I think you'll be pleasantly impressed. Cheers, Mark ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Mark Hagen Spallation Neutron Source, Bldg. 8600 Oak Ridge National Lab. P.O. Box 2008 Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831 U.S.A. Tel: (865) 241 9782 E-mail: hagenme@ornl.gov -----------------------------------------------------------------------------