Recent developments for an improved operation at the ESRF

Although the ESRF has been operating smoothly for over nine years, continuous efforts are being made to improve the beam parameters whilst maintaining a high level of beam availability. The flexibility of the machine is in permanent evolution: delivery at 5 GeV (instead of 6 GeV) was achieved for a few days, a high focusing optics lattice was in operation on one beam line (in order to reduce the photon beam size at the location of the sample), and emittance coupling was decreased from 1% to 0.25%. All the cells have been equipped with damping links, which goal is to attenuate the vibration amplitudes of the girders. A new filling pattern, aimed at being a compromise for most of the users, is being developed, whilst the RF system has been completely upgraded to ensure a better redundancy and hence a better mean time between failures of this equipment. In addition to these improvements, the policy of preventive maintenance has been maintained, leading to a beam availability of 96.4% and a mean time between failures of 38 hours in year 2000.