The following section will describe the needed maintenance, tests and repairs planned for the current fiscal FY13 and FY14. The main activities are:

The extraction of the FGT occurred during the week of Monday, July 15, 2013.  All six disks together with the extension rail structure are transported to Temple University and set up there in the B11 GEM lab in the basement of the current Department of Physics at Temple University. The cost for transportation will be covered by Temple University.

The Temple University group is in the process to set up a complete HV, gas and DAQ system. This process will occur over the next months.  

It is planned to measure the leakage current performance for each of the 24 quarter sections up to 500V and provide an online documentation for each leakage current measurement. All resources such as power supplies, current measurement devices etc. are available at Temple University. This process can start as soon as the HV and gas system has been completed. 

It is planned to diagnose the gas line blockage for quarter sections 4C/4D once the FGT along with the gas system has been set up at Temple University. 

The leakage current performance will be tested early on during the scheduled period of leakage current measurements to confirm that quarter section 6C cannot be operated at full HV, i.e. at 3400V. In addition, it will be possible to determine which sector is causing excessive leakage currents. If the issue comes from only one sector, a simple fix can be made by disabling this sector. There are three spare quarter sections available whose performance has to be confirmed during the summer 2013. In addition, the Temple University will re-build at least one quarter section as part of the funded DOE EIC R&D program with a modified spacer grid using a Kapton spacer grid. It is therefore expected that at least 1-2 spare quarter section modules will be available if needed. The new Kapton spacer grid quarter section will be tested during the FNAL test-beam in May 2014 as part of the funded EIC R&D program.

The characterization of the front-end system in terms of its pedestal performance can only be started once the DAQ system is completed. 

In the commissioning of the FGT some unexpected problems were discovered with the front-end-electronic (FEE) cards, which were designed by MIT-Bates. These problems manifest themselves as chips that have no slow controls communication (I2C) or chips that lose their configuration or communication ability halfway during the run. In addition, we have seen FEE cards that have a large number of dead channels and FEE cards that have an unusual pedestal distribution. We suspect there is more than one insidious problem with the FEE cards. Among these possibilities are: 

• no connection or broken physical connection to the channel, 
• no connection or broken physical connection to the detector (at the connector),
  
• I2C level issues, SEU causing the APV to lose its configuration, 
  
• power supply instabilities, and 
  
• Power-on-Reset problems.

MIT-Bates engineers, who designed the FEE cards, will assist in diagnosing these problems. Ben Buck, an electronics engineer along with necessary test equipment, will travel to Temple University to provide diagnostic assistance to identify and determine possible solutions to the problems.  

It is expected that any larger material costs, such as for signal and power cables will be directly procured through BNL. Provision is made for small material items purchased directly by MIT.

After completing the debugging, test and repair of the FGT front-end system, it is planned to characterize each quarter section using a ⁵⁵Fe source and cosmic-ray setup. 

After completing the 55Fe source and cosmic-ray test, it is planned to carry out a requested test beam at FNAL for three weeks starting May 07, 2014. The test beam period from May 07, 2014 until May 27, 2014 has been reserved by the FNAL test-beam coordinator, Dr. Aria Soha. The funding of all test-beam activities is covered by Temple University funding. The following test beam program is planned:

• Latency scan, i.e. establishing proper timing
• APV parameter study
• HV scan / Efficiency scan
• High statistics data set for several fiducial areas of 4 quarter sections ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ together with the IST silicon telescope

The test beam program is similar in spirit to the successful and published test-beam of small prototype triple-GEM detectors in May 2007 at FNAL.