Beam-Based Collimator Alignment MD

The MD was performed on 21st April 2012, and was split into two parts. First, the alignment of a horizontal IR3 collimator was performed at different Dp/p cuts of the IR3 TCP to observe any improvements in the BLM spike quality. Secondly, new additions to the beam-based collimator alignment software aimed at speeding up the alignment were tested. The new features include coarse alignment of the collimator jaws around the BPM-interpolated orbit and new sequences in the parallel alignment algorithm to ensure that both jaws touch the beam before fine sequential alignment can proceed. The new software allowed 27 collimators to be aligned in 1 hour 45 minutes, which translates to a total of 5.5 hours for all collimators, an improvement of 2 hours over the previous best time achieved in the March 2012 setups.