[Solid_gem] minutes for January GEM monthly meeting

[Jianbei Liu]

Hi All,

Minutes from yesterday's GEM meeting have been attached to the meeting agenda and copied below
https://hep.ustc.edu.cn/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=10

We had a rather short meeting yesterday which saw two reports presented by Wenhao from USTC and by Xiaomei from CIAE, respectively. 

Fabrication and test of a new 30*30cm^2 triple GEM chamber at USTC
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- built another 30*30cm^2 triple GEM chamber with an improved design
- tested the chamber with X-ray for gain uniformity. Much better uniformity observed compared to the previous chamber (improved roughly by a factor of 2). There were a few sectors performing not in a very stable manner, still under investigation. 
 
Progress of GEM foil production R&D at CIAE
-----------------------------------------------------------------
- the workshop for GEM foil production was introduced with pictures shown of key equipments.
- GEM foil production process has reached the copper etching step. Raw GEM foil from various sources were tried and some of them were copper-etched successfully with good quality. See pictures on slide 10.
- Currently working on kapton etching which requires building a dedicated kapton etching room. Readout board etching also being considered. 
- Near future plans
  * finish the construction of the kapton etching room by the end of this month. 
  * produce the first batch of GEM foils by the end of March

Call for input from Chinese institutes for the renewal of the APV25 license
-------------------------------------------------------------
Jianping repeated the call that had been made a few months ago regarding the license renewal. 
Our Chinese collaborators, attention please,  please inform Jianping of an estimate of your demand for APV52 chips for the second phase by March 2014.

Jianbei