Previous Logbook

01-11-2017

• Prepared the lab for arrival of HPTPC, Involved taking apart DMTPC and making space for requipment.
• Latter part of last week was a bit of a disaster having to make two trips to London to see the immigration lawyer
• Got the vessel into the building! YAY, everyone knows what happened... it was an adventure.
• CLEANING! lots and lots of cleaning, the vessel was extremely dirty on the inside (and outside)
• Put curtains back on clean tent (required cleaning also)
• re-plummbed the hydrolic lines on the vessel, had to tighten a few other fitting
• Made inventory list of parts we recieved from Cryovac
• Notes
  • All gas regulators have TIPOC inlet fittings, we will have to change this for relivent DIN/CGA fittings for use in the lab
  • Captured o-ring kf fittings are good for 10bar, note, we appear to have no spares!
  • Vacuum valve... if that is rated to 5 bar id be surprised. Looks like some random valve they found somewhere in the bushes. Part number is SA0150MVQF, technically rated between atmosphere and Vacuum
  • Chamber has 3 missing caps - they are plastic caps that have been taped on. All are KF40s, I think these were the ones used to pressure test with the HV feedthroughs.
  • We will probably want to put a steel brush pipe cleaner through the water drain and air release valves (top and bottom penetrations on the vessel) Both show corrossion and are generally hard to clean.

25-10-2017

• Lots of meetings with Sam / Cryovac, good news is that the vessel should 'should' be here today, keep fingers crossed.
  • We aquired quotes from kingsbury for cranage in preparation for our own shipping options
  • Speciality Spanish Transport, quote was lowered and we accepted
  • Southern Cranes and Access gave an insane quote, I think this was in response to bad communications between SST and cryovac and themselves which basically involved SST demanding a quote without giving them any information about the Job. So... knowing or believing they had no options, they quoted £1500 ish... which Cryovac (as much as they are not in a position to complain really) identified as crazy.
  • We provided Cryovac with our quote from Kingsbury
  • Cryovac contracted Kingsbury
• Got my simple diagnoistic tool working on m3daq
  • I made a sym link into /home/dmatter/bin (i think, i cant check, m3daq is offline for the delivery)
  • This means the program can be used from any command line location
  • Invoked by rawAna.exe - if given with no options it will print the usage directions and flags
  • For looking quickly at a root file and rumping the number of events/triggers point rawAna.exe at a raw root file with no arguments
  • -d dumps waveforms to screen ->really fast, much better than using a CINT macro
  • -c dumps CCD images
  • -d -c dumps both to screen
  • It can be used for offline analysis, currently it will do baseline cuts, peak time cuts, find peakheights for the charge channels and output 4 histograms. baseline sigma cut and time cut can be added using appropriate flags (see useage)
• Wrote small script for exporting fits file using the DMTPC image library for Kulveer to use
• Lab cleanup, tidy with the team, My task was mostly disconnecting and tidying away all cables and moving the DAQ computer and electronics rack.
• Shoring props are in place, clean tent has not fallen over... yet

18-10-2017

• Practiced some mesh stretching, (mostly a helper with Zack and the team)
  • Lots of intersting things learnt
• Started writing a tool for doing quick diagnostics on data files from DMTPC,
  • Very very fast at dumping waveforms to screen, which is initially the most useful use of it, to check what triggers look like
  • Optionally can dump CCD images along side the waveforms. So we can visually pair up waveforms and Events
  • Slowly updating it to perform baseline cuts given a list of files and generally have it do all of what we usually do in Macros
  • Motivation... CINT IS BAD AND SLOOOOW
  • Already this code appears much faster
• TPC rail mount designs -> Not got a full assembly drawing yet, though have had a few communications with machine ship, the rails are advancing and hopefully should be out soon.
• Reviewing Drawings with Zack.
• Chamber Shipping Drama... mostly Zack doing the waving of sticks at Sam, Adriana speaking to various spanish transport companies.
• I have spoken to the company wh lifted the DMTPC vessel, they are coming tomorrow to scope the area and will quote us for a UK lift.
• 

11-10-2017

• Wrote a "How too and getting started page" for people to use to do basic dmtpc anaylsis etc it is located here
• Took data sample for purpose of CR-112 calibration, See Adriana's analysis
• Discovered Trigger issues with the DAQ
  • Appears to ignore trigger and pulse polarity settings (at least for the charge sensitive pre-amp)
  • Settings in the hptpc_neutron template (copied from one of the ones that shipped with the setup) has triggers on charge channels effectively disabled.
  • Thus it appears we are triggering only when we have a signal on the fast amplifers, ONLY negative going
  • Need to investigate this, possibility of hard coding or bug in the DAQ initialisation.
• Helped (Tiny bit) with the Ring Turning -> See Zacks page
• Helped (Tiny Tiny bit) with putting clean tent curtains up
• Created a 50ohm terminator for SHV connectors for grounding the anodes
• Grounded All anodes and ground meshes
• Ramped voltage - breakdown reoccurs at same voltages (630-650v)
• Cycled the gas, first pumping down to ~3x10^-6 mbar and then back to 40mbar
• Channels now ramp to 670 without sparking, sparking comes in closer to 680V now
• Cathode performance is identical, sparking occurs at 3200V
• Slowly ramped up all channels to 680V, sparking is moderate, though approximately 0.1Hz so we can get a few events between sparks
• Need to write some error handling into my code, currently segfaults if the first event has no triggers... Thus if the first event is after a spark, it sometimes contains zero triggers.
• Going to migrate to Linappserv and make a set of compiled programs to improve analysis speed
• Have 3 data samples in different configurations for analysis

04-10-2017

• Worked with Adriana on developing the analysis to accept multiple raw files
• Can identify each peak in the spectrum based upon behavour of the CSP channel.
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• All this is within a single run, a spark appears to trigger the change between each state. Looking through later files, the behavour returns to normal and then back to bad again
• Applying peak time cut effectively removes this bad behavour from the files.
• See Adriana's logbook for final plot showing combined files with baseline and time peak time cuts (Also preliminary gain)
• Shakedown of Amplifiers was good, using the test input, scope traces looked identical for all channels.
• 3 instances of bad grounding on the boards which has now been fixed. Extra insulation on the inside of the cases has been added.
• Vessel backfilled with CF4 to 40mbar(30 torr), pressure reached before backfill was 8.44x10^-7 mbar
• Drift field achieved and stable 3200V (compared to 2700V previously) Getting better can at do 100V/cm field at least.
• Anode voltage Bottom left starts to spark at approx 0.5-1Hz when at a voltage of 650V, 50V short of where I usually try and take data to see how everything is behaving.
• 

27-09-2017

• Baseline Analysis,
  • Initially performed my own baseline extraction in order to learn a few things about the raw TFile structure
  • Rewrote the same analysis in the space of a few hours using the dmtpc framework
• Process is to,
  • Extract the baseline from every trace and push it into a histogram for each channel
  • Fit gaussian/find RMT and define a cut of accepting only waveforms that have a baseline within 8sigma
  • Remove whole events that do not make the cut, Replot and refit.
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• Pulse height analysis
  • dmtpc framework is mostly defined in Pulse.hh (for anyone who is interested)
  • The getPeak() function extracts the peak and subtracts for baseline offset
  • Further acceptance can be performed based on getPeakTime()
  • Code (and a tutorial on what each part of my macro is doing what has been passed down to Adriana for further modification/development (getPeakTime() cuts which shouldn't take much development
  • Currently my analysis works only one a single file though it should be realitively simple to make it work on a string of files.
  • Quite slow... might concider a compiled version rather than a macro, shakes fist at CINT
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• Friday - Adriana and I did a full vacuum system and DMTPC operations tutorial,
  • Made modification to HV feedthrough, changing the connection type to a push on one
  • Applied Kapton insulation over any bare wire, the push on connector and length of the pin.
  • Proved the HV feedthrough operates up to the full capacity of the supply (8kV) in Nitrogen, no sparks or issues
  • Evacuuated vessel
• Started Testing performance of the Cremat boards, Initially tests look like boards are healthy, but we have devised a full set of tests to be performed in order to check board health and operation of different Amps in each
• Should be completed in next couple of days, if all checks are good we move onto the grounding and backfill the detector for sample runs