- The allowed test beam hours are twenty-four hours a day. During any time period, there will often be interruptions to service due to the other aspects of the Fermilab program. If those interruptions impact the ability to complete the experiment, users can request extended running hours from the test beam coordinator only, which may or may not be granted by the Ops coordinator and head of Program Planning.
- It is best to request extra running time as soon as you realize you will need it. The sooner the coordinators know of your request the easier it is to schedule it.
- If an experiment does not take advantage of the hours that are assigned, it is unlikely they will be granted extended running.
- Due to the high demand for FTBF beam time, it is unlikely a request for more days of beam time will be granted, even in cases of total accelerator failures, however we will do our best to accommodate you based on the schedule.
In the case of severe Accelerator Downtime:
Users are required to expect 20% downtime in their original beam time request. However, sometimes severe catastrophes can occur, causing significant downtime, to the point where the experiment cannot be completed in the requested time. In such cases, the Test Beam schedule does NOT shift to accommodate beam downtimes. Many users have outside constraints on their schedule slots, and need locked-in dates months in advanced. For this reason, we schedule “make-up time” into the schedule every other month. This allows an experiment to re-schedule to a night-shift position within two months.
If the make-up slot remains unscheduled during an experiment’s beam run it may be used for facility beam tests, installation time for upcoming experiments, or by the running experiment to make up for small accelerator downtimes during the day, or for additional tests.