The Proton linac is currently running, hopefully to deliver beam to the LHC shortly.
2007
Linac 2 ran for 5044 hours with 98.7% up time. The main issue during the year was sparking from the source high voltage platform, which was traced to dust coming for the air conditioning system.2006
The Linac ran for approximately 5500 hours. A report on the operation and faults will be written shortly.
2005
Linac 2 operation was solely for the PSB to supply the proton beam to ISOLDE. All the other accelerators in the proton chain were stopped during this year. (Linac 3 also operated for the LEIR commissioning.)
2003
Linac2 ran for 4880 hours with 62 hours downtime. This represents a beam non availability of 1.27%. As last year beam currents were maintained between 170 and 175 mA. The main source of unreliability was the provision of water and electrical services (25 hours)
2002
The linac ran for about 4900 hours with 52 hours downtime. This represents an downtime of 1.08%. Beam current was maintained between 173 and 175 mA for high intensity users.
The main problems experienced since the start-up were:-
2001
The ion source with a number of serious breakdowns, most especially cathode (filament) . The history can be found in the following note if you are interested.
On November 24 1999, the Linac intensity as seen by the PSB at the handover point (LTB.TRA60) attained 183 mA within the emittances required by LHC and probably within the range of adjustment for energy spread. This was a test beam of reasonable length and not operational (economy of RF power tube lifetime).