Report to users of ATLAS - September 1998

The ATLAS facility has provided a total of 5749 hours of beam for research in FY1998. The accelerator operation had a very high 93% reliability factor during that period. With the startup of Gammasphere in January, our schedule has attempted to minimize scheduled downtime and maximize beam-time for research. Our best performance so far occurred during the month of May when a total of 639 hours was provided for research. From the accelerator point-of-view, recent major highlights have included first operation of a new production configuration for our 17F beams which increased the beam current on-target to 2 x 10617F ions/see. The 17F production target was moved approximately 4 meters upstream and a new superconducting solenoid was added to the system to refocus the highly divergent secondary beam. This new location also places the target upstream of a new superconducting resonator which was used to reduce the energy spread of the beam delivered to the spectrograph to less than 300 keV (FWHM). An improved, liquid nitrogen cooled, multiple gas cell has also significantly contributed to better performance