[Neutron] J-PARC Newsletter No. 86
shibata.kaoru
shibata.kaoru at jaea.go.jp
Wed Apr 20 10:41:32 CEST 2022
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J-PARC Project Newsletter
No.86, April 2022
Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex under joint operation by the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA)
http://j-parc.jp/index-e.html
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HEADLINES AND CONTENTS
1. [Overview]
THE INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING WAS HELD ON MARCH 3RD AND 4TH.
THE USER'S MEETING WAS HELD ON FEBRUARY 18TH.
2. [Accelerator Division]
OPERATION STATUS OF THE ACCELERATORS.
ACCELERATOR TECHNICAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE (A-TAC) MEETING.
3. [Particle and Nuclear Physics Division]
PROGRAM ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING.
BREAKTHROUGH IN KAONIC ATOM X-ray SPECTROSCOPY USING MICROCALORIMETERS.
ON GOING UPGRADE WORK TOWARDS HIGHER BEAM POWER.
STATUS OF THE MUON G-2/ ELECTRIC DIPOLE MOMENT (EDM) (E34).
STATUS OF THE COHERENT MUON TO ELECTRON TRANSITION (COMET).
4. [Materials and Life Science Division]
STABLE USER PROGRAM OPERATION HAD BEEN CONTINUED AT 730 KW.
QUANTUM BEAM SCIENCE FIESTA WAS HELD ONLINE.
BEAM COMMISSIONING STARTED AT H1 AREA.
5. [Nuclear Transmutation Division]
THE TECHNICAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE (T-TAC) MEETING WAS HELD.
6. [Safety Division]
THE SAFETY INSPECTION WAS SUCCESSFULLY CONDUCTED.
FISCAL 2021 J-PARC SAFETY AUDIT.
7. [Information System Section]
THE SCIENCE INFORMATION NETWORK (SINET) UPGRADE TO VERSION 6 MAKES J-PARC NETWORK SPEED UP.
8. [Editorial Note]
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1. [Overview] by Takashi KOBAYASHI
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THE INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING WAS HELD ON MARCH 3RD AND 4TH.
International advisory committee (IAC) met on March 3rd and 4th fully online (http://j-parc.jp/c/en/forum-and-committee/iac-e.html). IAC is a committee to advise the J-PARC center’s director and the directors general of JAEA and KEK on all aspects of J-PARC’s operation ranging from safety, science output, to the management and organization. We invited 16 distinguished researchers as IAC members, 10 of them as new members. New this time, we invited two members from the fields of social science. Dr. Robert McGREEVY from STFC was appointed as chair. Unfortunately, we had to give up holding a face-to-face meeting for the third time, and had a fully online meeting, for which we prepared video presentations. We received many important and valuable pieces of advice which will be our "guiding light" to maximize the performance of J-PARC.
USER'S MEETING WAS HELD ON FEBRUARY 18TH.
In order to communicate directly with J-PARC users, we organized a ‘Users Meeting’, (a sort of town meeting), mainly with the particle and nuclear physics users this time. Timetable and presentations files can be found at https://kds.kek.jp/event/41086/.
We explained the services offered by the user's office and heard presentations of user's needs. We also reported on the recent progress on the J-PARC access road. Inside J-PARC we formed a team to discuss and take actions to satisfy the user's needs as much as possible.
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2. [Accelerator Division] by Michikazu KINSHO
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OPERATION STATUS OF THE ACCELERATORS
After the New Year's holiday, the beam operation started on January 11th as a new operation run (Run#89). The user program resumed for the Materials and Life Science experimental facility (MLF) on January 15th. The beam power was about 730 kW which was the same as the previous user operation before summer shutdown. The user program was rather smooth for the MLF until the end of March.
The Main Ring (MR) has entered a long maintenance period for upgrade from July 1st 2021 until next autumn. The work has been progressing smoothly in preparation for the beam study operation in June this year.
The beam availability in the Japanese Fiscal Year 2021 (from April 2021 to March 2022) was more than 95 percent for the MLF since we had no serious troubles at the linear accelerator (linac), the 3 GeV Rapid Cycling Synchrotron (RCS) and the MLF. The availability of the MR user operation was also high, at more than 90% for both the neutrino and hadron user operation.
ACCELERATOR TECHNICAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE (A-TAC) MEETING
The 21th A-TAC meeting was held on February 7th to 10th via remote Zoom presentations due to COVID-19 precautions. Of the nine committee members, eight members attended and 11 reports were presented such as: required items from last A-TAC, operational status, and performance upgrade. The committee deliberated on the improvements, objectives, etc. and gave recommendations.
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3. [Particle and Nuclear Physics Division]
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PROGRAM ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING (by Takeshi KOMATSUBARA)
The 33rd Program Advisory Committee (PAC) meeting was held as a video conference on January 19-21 2022. At the meeting, chaired by Dr. Rik Yoshida (Argonne National Laboratory), status of the experiments were reported and prospects for the beam time after the long shutdown of the Main Ring were discussed. The report from the focused review of the extended Hadron Experimental Facility, held in August 2021, was presented by the chair Dr. Tetsuo Hatsuda (RIKEN).
This time six proposals, including four new ones, requested Stage-1 status and three experiments requested Stage-2 approval. https://kds.kek.jp/indico/event/40624/
The PAC report will be available through the following web page. https://j-parc.jp/researcher/Hadron/en/PAC_for_NuclPart_e.html
The next PAC meeting will be held in July or August 2022.
BREAKTHROUGH IN KAONIC ATOM X-ray SPECTROSCOPY USING MICROCALORIMETERS (by Tadashi HASHIMOTO)
X-ray spectroscopy of kaonic atoms, where a negatively-charged anti-kaon replaces an electron in a normal atom, is a unique tool to investigate the strong interaction between an anti-kaon and a nucleon/nucleus at almost zero kinetic energy. A new experiment was performed at J-PARC and the obtained results provide important constraints on the anti-kaon interaction models, which would contribute to the discussion of kaonic nuclear bound states, and roles of anti-kaons in neutron stars.
The experiment, which is called J-PARC E62 experiment, has measured the 3d to 2p transition X-rays from kaonic helium-3 and helium-4 with a novel microcalorimeter spectrometer. The experiment was performed in June 2018 and collected ~200 X-ray events in ~20 days. The new spectrometer is based on an array of highly sensitive thermal sensors, which can realize both an eV-scale excellent resolution and a reasonably large effective area. The experiment established a method to operate the spectrometer in a severe radiation environment and achieved 6 eV FWHM resolution for 6 keV X-rays. The achieved precision is 10 times better than past measurements.
This result was published recently in Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 112503 (2022).
ON GOING UPGRADE WORK TOWARDS HIGHER BEAM POWER (by Yoshiaki FUJII)
The neutrino experimental facility and the T2K experiment groups are working very hard on improvement of their apparatus toward a beam restart expected around the end of 2022.
The most critical components in generating intense neutrino beam are the target and the pulsed magnet horns. The most-upstream horn, the first horn hereafter, has been already taken out from the beam line and placed in a so-called maintenance area equipped with manipulators for investigation of its condition after seven-years operation. An OTR beam profile monitor attached on the first horn has had a trouble in its moving mechanism. Investigation of the cause was extensively carried out via remote communication connections with experts in Canada. Preparation for replacement of the target heat exchanger is also in progress for handling higher beam heat deposit.
Construction of a new radio-active water dilution facility has been finished, and testing with non-radioactive water has been done. We will move to the next step, the construction of a facility to settle the industrial water sludge down.
As travels within Europe and those between Europe and North America are getting unrestricted, T2K has decided to have the next collaboration meeting from May 8th May 13 in-person, gathering both at Tokai and at CERN.
STATUS OF THE MUON G-2/ ELECTRIC DIPOLE MOMENT (EDM) (E34) (by Tsutomu MIBE)
The E34 collaboration prepares for precision measurements of the muon anomalous magnetic moment and electric dipole moment.
The first beam of surface muon has successfully been delivered to the H1 area. The collaboration worked with the MLF muon facility to carry out the commissioning of the beamline. The collaboration started a new experiment to demonstrate thermal muon production and its ionization at the S2 area. Acceleration cavities for the muon LINAC are under fabrication. Development of assembly of the silicon tracking detector was started at the KEK Tsukuba campus. A test of data transfer from MLF to KEKCC in Tsukuba was carried out and confirmed sufficient speed of data transfer.
STATUS OF THE COHERENT MUON TO ELECTRON TRANSITION (COMET) (by Satoshi MIHARA)
The COMET experiment aims to search for the lepton-flavor violating muon reaction, mu-e conversion, with a sensitivity better than 10-14 in Phase I.
Facility and detector construction work continues; construction of the primary proton beam line to deliver protons to the COMET experiment site completed in March 2022. Preparation of the cryogenic facility is in progress with a goal to operate the muon transport solenoid before summer 2022. The main detector of COMET for its physics measurement, the Cylindrical Drift Chamber (CDC), has been tested in the Tsukuba campus and is now good shape. The CDC will be transported to J-PARC before summer for further conditioning on site.
The COMET collaboration discussed the status and plan towards starting beam operation in JFY 2022-2023 during CM36 which was held in early March fully online with participation of most collaborators in 9 different time zones. Two new institutes participations were approved related to the affiliation changes of some of the members.
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4. [Materials and Life Science Division] by Toshiya OTOMO
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STABLE USER PROGRAM OPERATION HAD BEEN CONTINUED AT 730 KW
1) Neutron Source
Beam operation of MLF is going very well with 730 kW and a good availability of more than 90%.
The sound monitoring of the mercury target indicates excellent effect of bubble injection into mercury to mitigate pressure waves, which support further power ramp-up to over 800 kW from this April.
QUANTUM BEAM SCIENCE FIESTA WAS HELD ONLINE
2) Neutron Instruments and Science
After a long shut-down in the summer-autumn 2021 maintenance period, beam operation has been back in the middle of January 2022 and the user program was resumed.
The new proposal round 2022A is for the period from April to June. There were 303 submissions for general use proposals (short-term and one-year) and new user promotion proposals. 152 were approved by Neutron Science Proposal Review Committee (NSPRC) / Expert Panel of Proposal Evaluation Committee (PEC) followed by MLF Advisory Board held in February.
The international neutron advisory committee meeting (NAC-2022) has been held online on February 10th and 17th. The report from the MLF on updated status of the neutron source, neutron instruments, sample environment, and neutron devices were summarized. For the future aspect of MLF, industrial use, remote use, and optimization of the neutron target station were discussed along the committee recommendations of the last NAC. Video recorded presentations and reference materials were given to committee members prior to the online meeting this time as a trial.
Quantum Beam Science Fiesta FY2021 (QBSF2021) which is a yearly event for domestic users for MLF and IMSS (Institute of Materials Structure Science in KEK) was held online on March 7th to 9th, together with the 13th MLF symposium and the 39th PF symposium.
The recent four press releases at MLF were as follows;
(1)"Above-ordering-temperature large anomalous Hall effect in a triangular-lattice magnetic semiconductor" https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abl5381
(2)"Hydride-ion-conducting K2NiF4-type Ba-Li oxyhydride solid electrolyte" https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01175-0
(3)"Nondestructive quantitative imaging for spatially nonuniform degradation in a commercial lithium-ion battery using a pulsed neutron beam" https://doi.org/10.35848/1882-0786/ac4c45
(4)"Star-Polymer-DNA Gels Showing Highly Predictable and Tunable Mechanical Responses" https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202108818
BEAM COMMISSIONING STARTED AT H1 AREA
3) Muon Science Facility (MUSE)
After a long summer shutdown period of almost half a year since mid-July 2021, MUSE resumed operation on January 15, 2022 as scheduled. So far, the user experiments have been conducted smoothly, but there are still various restrictions due to the COVID-19 infection spread precautionary measures, and users, especially those from outside of Japan, are still not expected to come to Japan.
One piece of good news is that the H-Line has passed the facility inspection of Nuclear Regulation Authority in January and is now ready to deliver a muon beam to the H1 area. This has made it possible to conduct muon experiments at all four beamlines that were originally planned. Beam tuning at the H1 area is now underway, mainly by the experimental groups from the S-type proposals envisaged at the H1 area.
The committee meetings held in January and February under the COVID-19 pandemic protocols, included the Muon Science Proposal Review Committee (MSPRC) and Muon Advisory Committee (MAC), which were all conducted online, as in previous years.
In the MSPRC meeting, 50 proposals submitted for 2022A term were reviewed, with 26 approved, 22 reserved, and the remainder turned down.
The MAC met on-line multiple times, and those involving foreign MAC members were arranged separately in the night hours to minimize the effects of the time difference. While the report commended on the progress in fabrication of the spare muon production target and the first muon beam delivery to the H1 area, the shortage of manpower was cited again as a crucial issue for the sustainability of MUSE, and will be communicated again to the J-PARC management as one of the priority issues.
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5. [Nuclear Transmutation Division] by Toshinobu SASA
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THE TECHNICAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE (T-TAC) MEETING WAS HELD
The eighth TEF (Transmutation Experimental Facility) Technical Advisory Committee (T-TAC) meeting was held via online meeting at February 2nd, 9th and 16th in 2022. Three Japanese and four foreign committee members from Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland gathered to review the current progress of the TEF facility plan and related research and development work. As of this meeting, some of the committee members were changed to better match the expertise of the reviewers to the TEF activities.
In the first and second days, J-PARC staff members introduced their activities to realize the experimental facility, such as the technologies for Lead-Bismuth Eutectic alloy target and instrumentation, safety issues, neutronics, and accelerator technologies. After the closed discussion on the final day by the T- TAC members, various recommendations and comments to advance the R&D activities were introduced at the closing session. T-TAC suggested that the R&D works carried out by J-PARC is a highly valuable contribution to the international ADS community and acknowledged the continuous efforts deployed by J-PARC to set-up collaborations with other organizations at the national and international level in the framework of the Japanese ADS program. T-TAC also recommended to carefully set the priorities of the proposed activities to match the available resources. A summary report was delivered at the beginning of March 2022 to push forward the R&Ds for facility design.
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6. [Safety Division] by Yoshihiro NAKANE and Kotaro BESSHO
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THE SAFETY INSPECTION WAS SUCCESSFULLY CONDUCTED
The safety inspection of the Materials and Life Science Experimental Facility (MLF) was successfully conducted, and the certificate of compliance was issued on Jan. 27th by Radiation Management Institute, inc.
The inspection items were the shielding construction prepared for a new and a modified muon beamlines, the measurement of radiation dose rates around the shielding construction, and the operation tests on the safety interlocks in MLF.
FISCAL 2021 J-PARC SAFETY AUDIT
The fiscal 2021 J-PARC safety audit was conducted by two auditors on Dec. 20th. They reviewed the following points: 1) Compliance initiatives, 2) Organization for safety management, and 3) Safety management in works. The auditors gave us valuable recommendations, such as effective improvements of rad-work permit processes, scheduling maintenance works with a proper margin, review and improvement of all activity including maintenance works.
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7. [Information System Section] by Kazuo GORAI
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THE SCIENCE INFORMATION NETWORK (SINET) UPGRADE TO VERSION 6 MAKES J-PARC NETWORK SPEED UP
On April 1,2022, the National Institute of Informatics (NII) has upgraded SINET from version 5 to 6. SINET is a gateway from J-PARC network to the internet and also an important connection between J-PARC Tokai and KEK Tsukuba campus. Thanks to NII support in the upgrade, the network bandwidth between Tsukuba and Tokai could be increased from 10 Gbps to 10 Gbps x 2, The internet connection is still at 10 Gbps.
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8. [Editorial Note]
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Past issues are available from the below link.
http://j-parc.jp/c/en/topics/project-newsletter/index.html
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Editorial Board:
Toshifumi TSUKAMOTO (Chair): toshifumi.tsukamoto at kek.jp
Kaoru SHIBATA: shibata.kaoru@ jaea.go.jp
Takatoshi MORISHITA: morishita.takatoshi at jaea.go.jp
Jean-Michel POUTISSOU (English Editor): jmp at triumf.ca
Chiaki SHIRAISHI (Secretary): shiraishi.chiaki at jaea.go.jp
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