Conveners
Running a Beam Particle Accelerator during the COVID-19 pandemic (I)
- Chair: Rossano Giachino (CERN)
Description
After the initial response to the COVID-19 outbreak, our facilities had to settle into a new way of doing business. Over the past year, what new practices like teleworking, remote access for troubleshooting, remote control, …., did your facility adopt to safely deal with the pandemic? How did life change in the control room? How did you ensure health safety for your staff?
Operating under the pandemic might have had an impact on your operational performance. How were your maintenance activities and outages affected? Did you see a drop in overall beam performance? Did you change the way on-call response was handled? What was the impact to the users?
CERN was at the start of a 2-year long shut-down, scheduled to implement a major upgrade in the LHC injectors complex and to perform consolidation and maintenance on large parts of the LHC, when in March 2019 the Covid pandemic imposed itself. Installation work was adapted to comply to the new Covid related measures put in place and the schedule was shifted because of the lock-down. The...
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...
Synchrotron Radiation Sources (SRS) Indus-1 and Indus-2 at RRCAT, Indore (India) are being operated in round-the-clock mode as a national facility. Indus-1 is a 450 MeV, 125 mA electron storage ring emitting radiation from mid-IR to soft x-ray with a critical wavelength of ~ 61 Å. Indus-2 is a 2.5 GeV, 200 mA electron storage ring providing synchrotron radiation emitted from its bending...
ALBA is a third generation 3GeV synchrotron light source near Barcelona (Spain). In operation for users since 2012, there are 8 beamlines in operation, 2 in commissioning and 3 under construction. On March 2021 the Covid-19 pandemic forced Spain to a strict confinement, stopping abruptly the operation of the facility. One month after, we resumed operation with a “light” operation mode;...
The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility - Extremely Brilliant Source (ESRF-EBS) is a facility upgrade allowing its scientific users to take advantage of the first high-energy 4th generation light source. In December 2018, after 30 years of operation, the beam stopped for a 12-month shutdown to dismantle the old storage ring and to install the new X-ray source. In December 2019, first beam...