12th Workshop on Accelerator Operations

The ISIS Neutron and Muon Facility in South Oxfordshire UK has recently had to deal with the ongoing Covid 19 global pandemic. The announcement by the Prime Minister of a national lockdown on 20th March 2020 resulted in significant alterations to our User programme and temporary suspension of operations. The ‘new normal’ evolved as ISIS slowly came back online in preparation for the User cycle beginning on 8th September, the biggest changes being to staffing the facility, initially remotely and progressively reintroducing attendance for key safety and equipment specialists. Remarkably, only one User cycle was lost, and the machine exceeded expectations on return to operations. To achieve this staff developed new Covid secure ways of working in accelerator operations, controlling the machine, managing equipment maintenance and failures and dealing with the User community remotely. In this snapshot talk of a monumental 18 months, with contributions from across the facility, I walk through our Covid 19 journey and show how our equipment and operational groups, running and maintaining the accelerator, contributed to this achievement; what we initially did at the start of lockdown, what we changed through the pandemic, what was learned and what has been kept moving forward from this unprecedented experience.