This week we ran up to 1.2 mA beam at 38 MeV energy to the straight-ahead dump. The machine configuration presently allows us to turn on and "immediately" run current in the range 0.6-0.7 mA. It remains to do some "fine tuning" of the electron beam to do better. We will be working on it.

Our immediate commissioning goals continue to be (1)find and fix what doesn't work, (2)achieve stable 1.1 mA, 38 MeV beam of sufficiently good beam quality at the wiggler, and (3) achieve a reproducible machine setup that can be restored (turned on) quickly.

We need stability on a time scale commensurate with the cathode lifetime, and we have been gathering data to determine it. Midweek we did two sustained cw runs that indicated the cathode e- folding time was in the range 13-17 hours, but this was after using it since 27 Mar 98. We recesiated the cathode yesterday and will be gathering more data. What we have seen thus far is favorable. If the period between recesiation were to be 24 hours (3 shifts), that would be favorable both for commissioning and for users.

Regarding diagnostics, this week we commissioned the two M 56 cavities that will provide information about longitudinal phase space, we calibrated and now continuously use the current- monitor cavity in conjunction with the picoammeters at the beam dumps, and we debugged the hardware for the second multislit transverse-emittance monitor. We also set up the energy- recovery dump and put tune-up beam into it in preparation for doing a "zero-phasing" measurement of the bunch length coming out of the cryomodule. We will attempt to get a data point tonight.

In summary, people have continued to work very hard, and the successes over the last two weeks (going from µA to mA beam in that short time!) reflect their efforts. We are continuing along the lines outlined above.