Proton Accelerator Operation Statistics 2015

For the first time in the history of the High Intensity Proton Accelerator the availability of the facility reached an outstanding value of 95% in 2015 with a record value of 99.3% in week 44. In comparison to the two previous years this corresponds to a reduction of the downtime by 50%. The user operation in 2015 was started as scheduled and already in the first week the machine was available 97% of the scheduled beam time. In addition to the smooth operation of the facility, high intensity beam experiments could regularly be performed with currents of up to 2.4 mA. The extraordinary performance of the facility could mainly be achieved by the commitment of the technical groups who managed to overcome the problems with the aluminium cavity in the Ring cyclotron. By coating parts of the cavity’s surface with a carbon layer, multipactoring and resulting x-ray emission could be reduced by two orders of magnitude leading to fewer short interruptions and a smooth operation of the whole facility.