Referee's report on CALICE proposal, part 2 =========================================== 28/11/2002 I) Introduction =============== After the discussion at the July PPRP, the CALICE proponents have taken a few months to respond to the one major concern from the Panel concerning their proposal, namely the lack of clear commitment and guidance from academic staff at the required level for the simulation effort. The CALICE proponents have now resubmitted an updated proposal, which will be discussed at the PPRP meeting on December 2nd. II) Comments from referee ========================= 1) Simulation effort -------------------- The progress on the involvement in the simulation is quite impressive since Proposal 317 was submitted about six months ago. There is now a clear momentum and purpose in this effort and there are even some first encouraging results. The UK CALICE simulation effort is now recognised within the overall CALICE collaboration and I feel personally that they have chosen the right approach, namely that of comparing the currently available simulation engines (GEANT3, GEANT4 and FLUKA) in terms of their response to hadrons. The collaboration has now realised the importance of these tools for the delicate work of assessing and optimising the electromagnetic and hadronic components of the calorimeter and I am confident that they will bring these tools up to the required functionality in time for the confrontation with the test-beam data in 2004. 2) Human resources and funding ------------------------------ The personnel situation as presented in Table 1 of the updated proposal has improved considerably, both from the point of view of the involvement of existing staff and from the point of view of the requests for new posts. More specifically, I would state that: - the situation is excellent at Cambridge - the situation is satisfactory at Birmingham, Imperial and UCL - the situation is reasonable at Manchester A nagging concern for me is the multiple involvement in several large experiments of some of the academic staff (by this I do not mean involvement simultaneously in one big data-taking experiment and one future large-scale experiment, but rather involvement in two competing future large-scale experiments or even worse in a running experiment together with two future large-scale experiments). This is perhaps unavoidable at some level, but it should be of concern to the PPRP and SC that academic staff involved in the LHC experiments also gets involved in other future experiments. In terms of funding, the requests have increased by 44k for the new RA, 41 k for S. Boogert, 6 k for RAL ID, 26 k for travel, and 142 k for Univ. PPARC effort. I set aside the PPARC effort increase at the universities, since this is good for the project and was strongly recommended by the PPRP in July. The total relevant increase in the funding request is therefore 117 k, of which 98 k can be attributed to an actual lengthening of the project as compared to the original proposal. 3) Specific comments and answers from the collaboration ------------------------------------------------------- Question: how well can you really defend the extension to S. Boogert. I am not convinced by this other LC project. There is too much mixing in this and it is much too early in the game for the LC to claim positive mixing between different parts of the project. Or am I wrong? Answer (from P. Dauncey): The work by Stewart Boogert and David Miller uses the same programs as the core simulation work, so there is direct coupling in helping each other in the technical details of the simulation; this has started already. You are correct that the physics output is not strongly connected at present. However, I see the two studies merging later, after the beam test is finished and the simulation is tuned. At that point, we have to get back to optimising the ECAL (and HCAL) design for the full LC detector. One important part of this (in my mind) is the constraint that the ECAL has to satisfy the requirements for the lumi spectrum measurement and these are not trivial. By having Stewart working on this, we can be sure to factor these requirements in. From this view, the final year is the most critical as this is when the two parts of the simulation really come together and this is why we wanted to be sure Stewart will still be around at that time. Question: why is the RAL ID effort increasing if you will use the CMS FED as a basis? Answer (from P. Dauncey): It might sound strange but the two are effectively decoupled! All we will reuse from the FED (to a large extent) is the physical layout of the back 2/3 of the board. Almost all the firmware in the BE and FE FPGAs will need to be redone and this is where the majority of the effort goes. The layout saving is minor (1 month); the real motivator for this is schedule which would otherwise be delayed by layout technician availability. The other thing here is that the original and new proposal had the effort estimated by different people. For this resubmission, we now have identified the actual RAL engineer who would work with us if approved and he has done the new estimate. His turns out to be a little different from the original one, i.e. 38 rather than 34 months in total, of which 18 months will come from the Universities. This is at the level of 10% and so, while not really inconsistent, I would prefer us to bid for the larger value. His final number for RAL ID is 20 months, by the way; he agrees with the numbers for the drawing office and engineering in the version you have but says he thinks we should do some of the board testing in RAL (as opposed to Universities) where he can oversee it and this will take an extra 2 months. I will include this in the final version. I also got the final equipment estimate on Friday; the FED option is slightly more expensive in equipment costs and comes to 111k. This is broken down as below: NRE 5k Readout boards; 6100 x 11 boards 67k Trigger NIM-LVDS board; 1000 1k Test board; 1000 1k Cables; 150 x 100 cables 15k PC and disk; 4k PC, 8k disk 12k VME interfaces; 4k interface 4k 9U VME crate and PS; 6000 6k ================================================== Total 111k This means overall, compared to the original proposal, the equipment cost has gone up by 8k and the RAL cost by 17k. These are small compared to the effort changes so I hope this won't be seen as an issue. III) Summary and recommendations ================================ It is worthwhile to repeat that the proponents of Proposal 317 to the PPRP wish to join one of the most exciting R&D proposals for the Next Linear Collider. The calorimetry technique proposed for this next generation of collider experiments is quite novel, since it basically proposed to perform tracking of particles within the calorimeter itself. The proponents see their involvement with CALICE proceeding possibly in two stages: 1) First stage: 2002-2005 a) participation in the development and construction of the physics prototype to be used for data taking in testbeam in 2004. As latecomers in the collaboration, the UK proponents have accepted to produce more or less standard readout and trigger electronics for this prototype. b) direct involvement in simulation studies of this physics prototype with the goal of providing the collaboration with the necessary tools to define the measurements to be done in beam and to assess their results. 2) Second stage: 2006-onwards Based on the results of the first stage and on the evolution of the basic R&D on the electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeter technologies, the UK groups would actively participate in the real optimisation of the overall CALICE calorimeter, including aspects such as cost, cooling, physics performance, etc., which they cannot address at present given their current commitments. After the clarifications provided in the updated proposal, I would recommend that Proposal 317 be approved on the basis of their revised request. I would also recommend that they be reviewed around summer-fall 2004 to assess their progress and address possible changes in plans for personnel and funding for the completion of the project.