Minutes of the CALICE-UK Steering Board meeting, Birmingham, 28/04/04 ===================================================================== Present: Paul Dauncey, Chris Hawkes, David Ward, Nigel Watson Phone from Cambridge: Mark Thompson Phone from DESY: Jon Butterworth, Matthew Wing Phone from SLAC: Roger Barlow Minutes: Paul Matthew Wing was welcomed as the newly appointed lecturer at UCL. He starts working for UCL in Oct, although he is currently based at DESY and will remain there until the end of the year. CALICE(-UK) status: See Paul's talk 1. This was a brief status report on CALICE-UK electronics activities at Paris, the ECAL plans for the rest of the year and the HCALs' schedules. We are unlikely to spend our travel budget of 68k in this FY but it would be politic to not overspend but use the remainder as part of the future bid to the PPRP. The next EFCA LC workshop will be at Durham and the dates are Tue 1 Sep to Sat 4 Sep inclusive. Draft MoA: The draft MoA which is in preparation has effectively two parts; the MoA proper, which is a list of reponsibilities taken on by each group, and the Annex 1, which is a collaboration proto-constitution. The purpose of the MoA part is not clear. The French groups believe this will help significantly with their funding; presumably the idea is that it shows the funding body that there is a lot of interest and investment in the project outside France. However, it is not clear who should sign the MoA for the UK or even what the signature commits the UK to doing. Paul had already brought this up with Ken Peach who seemed very reluctant to sign as he would not be able to promise any funds. The only people who could are PPARC and Ken thought it highly unlikely they would want to sign such a document. If there is no commitment (basically if it is purely a statement of support) then the question arises as to what it means in the first place. The constitution part was thought to be a good idea (although why it is part of the MoA was not clear) and such a document is needed. The proposed structure was also thought appropriate for a collaboration the size of CALICE. However, the structure was thought not to be working at present and the constitution as currently drafted was not specific enough in several areas to be useful. In particular, the SB role defined is clearly not possible when only meeting once a year. Rolf Heuer (as Chair) has been asked to hold meetings more frequently but he is very short on time. The TB has never met and does not act as a board at all. This should be significantly beefed up to take a lead in getting to a fully-functional system in a test beam around a year from now. The decision process for admitting new collaborating groups was not at all clear. The editorial policy was far too vague. There needs to be checks on results going out in public without adequate discussion or agreement within the collaboration. The authorship of papers as proposed was also very ad hoc. There was also concern expressed over the lack of communication within the collaboration. This probably cannot be fixed through this document but the issue is made worse by the lack of leadership of the SB. The SB would like to have the MoA wrapped up and signed by the DESY PRC meeting at the end of May. This seems optimistic but does mean that any further comments should be sent to Paul (or directly to Rolf Heuer, cc'ed to Paul) within a week. Post-CALICE planning: See Paul's talk 2. This was a list of some possibilities for longer term R&D projects. There was general agreement that it would not look good if we returned to the PPRP without any longer term R&D plans. Hence, we need to figure out what we can bid for with reasonable costings within this year. It has to also match onto the available rolling grant engineering effort. Very roughly, an estimate of the travel funds needed for CALICE work over the next two FYs would be ~70k for FY05/06 due to the beam tests and ~20k in FY06/07 for the analysis work. We might expect around 40k to roll over from this FY, meaning a increment of ~50k for travel would be needed. In addition, there would be ~40k to extend George's RA for the third year and probably at least one other RA post for a year, another ~40k. This makes ~130k to complete the CALICE program. To not look too out of scale, the longer term R&D could therefore be up to ~100k over the two years to appear significant but not dominant. Jon brought up the problem that the PPRP will, in principle, only give seedcorn to a project for up to three years, which would not be sufficient for CALICE. However, as we are completing a stand-alone project as well as looking at longer term R&D, it was not clear how this applies in our case. We need to consider that we may need to go to Science Committee instead of the PPRP, in which case we may need to get an SoI to them within a few months so as to have a bid considered within six months. An SoI would need to have some reasonable cost estimate which will require some work. Paul and Jon will contact Jenny Thomas to clarify exactly how to proceed here. There was some interest in several of the listed items. Providing and testing some fraction of the final silicon wafers would in principle be a sensibly sized UK contribution but it was not clear how we would proceed now such as to do this ten years from now. Jon pointed out that the Liverpool group has a new technique for two-dimensional readout from silicon strips using either charge division or timing. If the strip-parallel measurement is not too much worse than for a pad, the strip-perpendicular measurement would clearly be better and so might allow a reduction in the number of layers and hence cost. The plastic semiconductors would be interesting if at all feasible. This is by no means clear yet but there was agreement we should at least read up on this a bit. Given the delay in the LC, it would be credible to say we are taking the opportunity to re-evaluate whether silicon is still the best choice. A VFE chip could be developed through the RAL microelectronics group as part of the CMS work to take the APV25 tracker chip further. However, this would be very RAL-centric with only one or two University groups able to contribute. The FE/BE electronics is of interest but hard to specify in the medium term. However, a generic R&D bid to investigate possibilities of FE data handling, compression, pattern recognition, firmware updates, fibre/wireless technology, etc, might be credible. The bid would also preferably not be specific to either the warm or cold LC. The main interest in the HCAL seemed to be in the electronics again, which would have the same issues as for the ECAL FE/BE above. With some care, a FE/BE bid might be made common to both calorimeters. In several cases, a bid could be tied into the simulation expertise within the UK. This is one argument for why any such R&D needs to be done within the CALICE umbrella. Jon and Paul will investigate the FE/BE possibilities and try to flesh out a potential proposal in this area. Matthew will informally discuss the DHCAL options with Jose Repond and Steve Magill at DESY. Everyone will look into the possibilities in plastic semiconductors, including asking around for local expertise at their institutes, etc. People should try to report back at the next meeting. AOB: David reported that there is now a worldwide simulation effort to merge the various GEANT4 detector simlation programs in order to ease in detector comparisons. There is a phone meeting on Friday this week. Next meeting: We should compare notes in around one month if we are aiming for the assumed SoI to Science Committee in two months. The date for the next meeting suggested was Wed 9 Jun at Cambridge at 3pm (assuming Roger is at SLAC). There should be a meeting around a month after that to wrap things up and this could be combined with a general CALICE-UK meeting earlier in the day. The date and location for this will be arranged later.