Firing up the LCLS: To the Undulator Hall
Saturday, December 13, 2008
4:10 After nearly eight hours of waiting and speculation, the sweeps and checkouts and repair signed-off, the beam has made it through the first sections of the LCLS and is "parked" at the tune up dump-undulator (TD-UND). Roger Erickson (head of accelerator systems) said it's a very promising start, that this means all the magnets and collimators and sections of beam pipe must have been relatively well aligned to begin with.
Once the go ahead was given, operators turned the beam on to pulse once a second. That's when the steering began. A graph showing the beam position monitors populated with a progression of spikes down the line as tweaks in steering magnets honed the beam's focus toward its target. After nearly a five-hour delay, getting the beam to the TD-UND took all of 10 minutes. Now the radiation physics group will make measurements of the facility by hand, which will take a few hours. It's possible that the beam will continue on and enter the undulator hall tonight. Erickson said that while the operators were wrangling the beam he counted 29 heads surrounding the console. It only took minutes for operators to get control of the beam, but it was an intense few minutes. Reminded me of scenes from the bridge of a starship in a science fiction movie, as if instead of electrons being guided through magnetic fields, it was us threading tensely through an asteroid field. posted by Brad Plummer @ 4:10pm
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