Dear Colleagues,
Enclosed is a copy of the minutes from the most recent CC meeting and
from the business-meeting session of the Collaboration Meeting. These
minutes were constructed by Pierre Bertin, who is acting CC Secretary.
Jeff Templon
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COLLABORATION MEETING SUMMARY
AUG 13,14 & 15 1998
Jeff Templon is the new elected Chairman of the CC , which is composed
of Kees de Jager, Jeff Templon, P.Y. Bertin, Franco Garibaldi and
Christian Cavata.
K. de Jager gave the Hall A status update.
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6 experiments have received at least some of their beamtime
allocations so far. E89-003(O16) and E89-033(O16) have each received
roughly half their allocation. E91-026(D2) and E92050(VCS) are both
finished with acquisition. The HAPPEX experiment and E93-027 ( GEp)
have finished their first running period.
The results of different experiments will be presented at conferences
this year and some will be object of publications soon (E91-026).
The polarized He3 target will be installed in August and the experiment
E94-01 will take advantage of the new polarized gun (70% polarization
expected).
o The Moller polarimeter is working satisfactory since April.
o The Chicane is completed.
o The optics of the Compton polarimeter will be installed in next
winter shutdown.
o The Arc energy measurement calibrations have been completed and
first measurements will be available this month.
o The septum magnet built by INFN will be implemented in 2000. That
will open the field of Hypernuclear physics and allow experiment on
GDH at low Q2.
o A check of the electromagnetic calorimeter (third arm prototype) was
done this spring and some real compton scattering events were seen,
giving a lot of confidence to the possibility to do this experiment
in the Hall with the required luminosity.
Regarding the high-energy upgrade plans, Kees stressed the following
points:
- that no decisions have been taken and no plans are fixed for
the equipment to be constructed/placed in the Hall
to fit with the energy upgrade.
- that all suggestions will be welcome.
- that we must spend some effort for our future.
COLLABORATION MEETING NOTES:
Status reports on experiments or apparati were given:
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Etienne BURTIN : Compton Polarimeter Update
Jian-Ping Chen : Polarized 3He Target Update
Eugene Chudakov : Moller Polarimeter Report
Franco Garibaldi : Septum Magnet/HNSS
Bill Hersman : Timing Scintillator Upgrade
Jim Kelly: E91-011/E96-001
Dimitri Margaziotis : E89-044 3He(e,e'p)
Zein-Eddine Meziani : E94-010 Status Report
Gille Quemener : E93-027 Status Report
Richard Holmes : HAPPEX Experiment Report
Pierre-Yves Bertin : VCS Report
Javier Gomez : E91-026 Report
Sergey Malov : E89-033 Report
Kevin Fissum : E89-003 Report
Copies of transparencies of the speakers can be found at the new
secretary of Hall A : Heather Ashley.
3 working groups met :
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Real Compton Scattering was discussed or reported :
Summary of the very successful test run was reported.
Detectors and electronic improvement.
Development of proposal to NSF/DOE funding
convenor: Alan Nathan and Wojtsekhowski Bogdan
Small Angle Physics with the Moller Polarimeter
convenor: Dan Dale
Software Working Group Session
A summary of this working group is given at the end
of this document
convenor : Jens-Ole Hansen
Business Meeting and Report from the CC Chair
( only 17 people attended the meeting!!!)
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- proposed as new member of the HALL A collaboration
Jesse HINES (student, Univ. Georgia) working on RCS
Stefen Strauch (postdoc, Rutgers) working on FPP
Xiaodong Jiang (postdoc, Rutgers) working on FPP
Mina Katramatou (faculty, Kent State) working on Monte Carlo
Rachele Di Salvo (postdoc, Blaise Pascal) working on ESPACE and VCS
all were unanimously accepted as members.
- Dates of 15, 16 January are proposed for the next collaboration
meeting; the second week of December is also proposed. Opinions
were expressed that the second week of January may be easier for
many members to attend, but the second week of December works
better for review of proposals to the PAC. A choice will be made
later and communicated at all members. Please communicate your
preference to your favorite CC member!
- The Hall is in good shape at the moment, as the experiments are
producing high-quality data (as evidenced by the warm reception of
Hall A presentations at recent conferences). Also, several
obvious incremental improvements in the equipment have been
identified, and plans are in place to carry these out. In the
short term (next two years), Hall A appears to be in fine shape.
However, there are some issues that face the Collaboration with
longer-term impact that need some work.
- The communication between the members of the collaboration and CC
are not fully satisfactory, and efforts will be made to improve
it. Members commented that the CC should also solve the problems
with the HALLA mailing list.
- Proposal filtering must be improved. It did not work so well during
the last go-round, neither in keeping the collaboration informed
nor in producing proposals that get approved. The proposed
charter revisions include text aimed at improving the process.
- Working groups appear to be mostly idle. The CC did not believe
this to be a good thing.
- Lots of effort must be given for the high energy upgrade plans if
we are to receive the equipment we want to carry out the physics
experiments we'd like to do.
In conclusion the CC has numerous problems to solve, and rely on the
help and participation of the full Hall A collaboration.
Hall-A charter.
----------------
The Hall-A Ad-hoc Charter Committee has drafted a set of amendments to
the Hall-A charter. These amendments were presented to the
collaboration meeting Sat. Aug. 15. A first discussion took place on
these amendments but the proposed amendments were NOT voted on at this
time. They must be submitted to the collaboration for an email vote
in approximately one month, depending upon feedback received from the
collaboration.
The proposed amendments are on the web at
http://www.jlab.org/~hyde/Ammend_HallA.html
The proposed new draft (resulting from the
ammendments) is in
http://www.jlab.org/~hyde/charter_cehw.html
The present charter is available at
http://www.jlab.org/~hyde/charter_HallA.html
Please read the proposed amendments and send your
comments to hyde@jlab.org (proposed alternative
wording is more helpful than general criticism).
COMMENTS ON THE PROPOSED REVISIONS MADE DURING THE BUSINESS MEETING:
In general, the members present seemed pleased with the proposed
amendments. One general comment is that there were several places
where the role of the CC in arbitration of problems and/or disputes
was stressed. Members felt that it was better to make one statement
about this role in the section about the CC, and strike the ones in
the specific sections.
Some members suggested that they might prefer a division of the
document into a general Charter (which specifies goals and scope) and
a set of By-Laws (which specify the operation of the Collaboration).
This opinion did not appear to be unanimous.
Amendment VII-d: replace "PhD director" with "PhD advisor".
Suggestion: make an appendix to the Charter which includes the current
list of working groups.
in the GOAL section: suggested to explicitly mention something about
the future, e.g. determination and promotion of the future physics
program and planning for new equipment connected with CEBAF energy
upgrades.
Amendment VII-a:
Strike the sentence "However, participation in each collaboration
experiment is not automatic", viewed as negative and somewhat
redundant. Also amend the sentence directly following to "The
spokespersons of each experiment must, after consultation with the CC,
publish the criteria ..." and in the sentence following, amend to
read "appealed to the CC and/or the full collaboration."
Finally, there was some discussion (and split opinion in those
present) about where to place the responsibility in deciding who would
be allowed to participate in Collaboration experiments. Some members
thought that there should be no restrictions on members participating,
and we would rely on members being reasonable in how much contribution
they offered to an experiment in return for joining. Others thought
that the current charter proposal was better, where the spokespersons
(after CC review) publish criteria for joining an experiment, and we
rely on these criteria to be reasonable. No consensus was attained on
this issue.
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Summary of Software Working Group Meeting 14 August 1998, JLab
Ole Hansen gave a summary of the current status of the ESPACE analysis
software. The latest version was released in early June and the next
version is expected in mid-September. Currently known problems include
the calculations of the beam energy loss and raster/BPM variables as well
as the extended target optimization. Several new contributions have been
made or have been promised, including code for the S3 scintillator. A new
manual is in preparation. The installation procedure will be
simplified in the next release. In general, ESPACE appears to be
rather stable and reasonably well debugged.
Jeff Templon followed with a general-interest presentation on scientific
programming, using ESPACE as an example. He presented several examples
for typical programming mistakes which may require time-consuming debugging.
Static code analyzers are likely to catch most of these errors and are highly
recommended to improve reliability of code and personal productivity.
Run-time array range-checking is another excellent tool to catch common
problems. Studies show that neither FORTRAN nor C are preferable in terms
of likelihood of programming faults, although preference should be given to
higher-level languages. The code error rate in ESPACE is noticeably below
the average of commercial source code, although ESPACE does show a
significant number of problems which need to be analyzed in detail.
Michael Kuss concluded with an overview of the features of the analysis
package used at Mainz, called COLA. The advantages of this package are
faster speed and better modularity and maintainability. The code is
based on C++ and is split into several well-defined libraries. However,
the package does not nearly include as many features as ESPACE (shower
counters, FPP, optimizations missing, much less accurate VDC tracking
algorithm) which, when included, might diminish the advantages. Michael
will consider preparing a proposal outlining the required time and manpower
for a test of this package in Hall A. His preliminary conclusions were that
COLA, as it is, is not quite competitive with ESPACE.
In the following discussion, a general consensus emerged that the current
ESPACE is too big and too hard to understand. The code should be cleaned
up and split into well-defined modules. Optimizations might be done by
a separate program that would share library functions with ESPACE.
The calling interface to library subroutines should be clearly defined and
well documented. Per suggestion of Kees de Jager, the possibility of
collaborating with the Hall C software group will be explored in the next
few months. In addition, it was agreed that the ESPACE code development team
begin develop a plan for possible restructuring of ESPACE. The code
development team will communicate by E-mail in September.
Ole Hansen