Present : H.Braun, A.Gomez Alonso, W.Herr, J.Jowett, A.Koschik, R.de Maria, T.Risselada, F.Schmidt, P.Skowronski, F.Tecker, R.Tomas, F.Zimmermann

1) PTC: new matching method and other improvements (PS)
Piotr presented the new tools that have recently been added to the PTC version of MADX (slides in pdf).

The CTF3 team has now successfully migrated from MAD8 to PTC, but a few tools had to be added for this purpose, like the displacement of elements and the introduction of a real RBEND element.

A large effort was put on the introduction of knobs. Not only they may act on the values of some other input parameters, but they equally act directly on the lattice parameters kept in the Twiss table: these parameters are developed in Taylor series in the knob variables, and "turning a knob" changes the Twiss parameters on-line. The effect of the knobs on other input and output parameters can be displayed using a powerful plotting tool (based on ROOT). Matching of lattice parameters, which is slower with PTC than with MADX, can be made faster by using the Taylor expansions rather than making large numbers of calls to the Twiss module. Several iterations are usually required.

2) Tracking data of lost particles (Andres Gomez Alonso)
Andres Gomez Alonso (AB-CO) presented the new output of lost particle data available in the tracking module ("track, recloss=true") grouping together in a TFS table all relevant parameters of the particles lost during tracking (slides in ppt).

A solution allowing to make element properties dependent on the turn number is in preparation (AK).

3. On-line modeling (WH)
SDDS input/output (used by AB-OP) has been implemented in MADX as an alternative to the TFS format. However, SDDS will not be made available in public MADX versions.

4. AOB: bug corrected in MADX-to-Sixtrack converter
The introduction of a new type of elements (ends of separation magnets) created confusion in the MADX-to-Sixtrack converter. Hans Grote decided to make a thorough clean-up of this module.