Minutes of the CALICE-UK Steering Board phone meeting, 09/06/04
===============================================================
Present at Birmingham: Chris Hawkes, Nigel Watson
Present at Cambridge: Mark Thomson
Present at DESY: Matthew Wing
Present at Imperial: Paul Dauncey
Present at SLAC: Roger Barlow
Present at UCL: Jon Butterworth

Minutes: Paul


CALICE(-UK) status: Paul gave a short summary of the status of CALICE and
 CALICE-UK (see slides).

 There were few volunteers to give the CALICE status report at the LCUK
 meeting in Lancaster on 30 June, so Paul will discuss this with Dan Bowerman
 (who has not yet said no) and one of the two of them will give it.

 There was agreement on the proposal for transfer of funds from travel to
 equipment and RAL effort so Paul will organise this.


MoA draft: There had been several comments on the previous MoA draft 2.
 There are several changes to draft 5, in particular in Annex 1 for the CALICE
 collaboration organisation. Draft 5 is not yet agreed by the CALICE Steering
 Board; Paul edited in the latest changes following a discussion with Rolf
 Heuer (the SB chair). This draft was supposed to be discussed at DESY around
 the PRC on 27 May, but this did not happen. It is now scheduled to be
 discussed at the CERN meeting on 28 June.


Future plans: As discussed at the last meeting, there are several potential
 directions which we could aim for with regard to a long-term LC calorimetry
 bid. The timescale is more relaxed than originally thought. Paul talked to
 Jenny Thomas last month and she said submitting another SoI is not required.
 (This would have been required within a month if needed, in order to be 
 considered by SciComm and have us invited back before the end of the year.)
 We should give Janet Seed a warning that the bid will be going in later in
 the year so she can think about the budget side, but this can be a little
 later, when we have a firmer idea of cost. Numbers tend to get set in stone
 within PPARC so we would need to aim high at this early stage.

 The R&D items which are being considered are:
 o Plastic semiconductors: This was considered to be an interesting area and
   people had been encouraged to contact their Departments to find out if they
   had local expertise. Mark said the Cavendish had a large group in this
   area. He had had some contact already but would have more time after the
   exams were completed. His preliminary discussion had already raised the
   scale of what we want to do as an issue. Nigel reported that Birmingham
   did not seem to have much research in this area so things did not look
   promising there. He was also planning to ask at RAL ID. At UCL, Matthew
   had sent some emails but chasing them up was hard while he was still at
   DESY. Paul had not done anything beyond his original contact with the
   active group at Imperial; he will also follow this up after the exams
   are finished.
 o DHCAL: Matthew had had several email exchanges with Jose Repond on the
   subject of us getting involved in the DHCAL. Jose had been quite
   enthusiastic as he is looking for immediate funding for the readout of
   the CALICE DHCAL. This would be yet more throw-away short-term electronics
   and it is very unlikely we would get funding (or have the effort available)
   to do this. Hence, it is not clear whether the DHCAL idea is viable; Jose
   is not thinking so much about the longer term yet. Paul will chase this up
   further at the CERN meeting on 28/29 June.
 o FE/BE DAQ electronics: Paul has done little concrete on this since the last
   meeting. Having looked at some of what has been done for the LHC, it seems
   clock distribution is quite advanced there so it may be hard to really
   define a new program for the LC, particularly before the machine decision
   as the difficulty of the clock distribution depends strongly on the timing.
   Jon had discussed ideas with the UCL engineers and was thinking more in
   terms of the FE (on-detector) electronics and how that could be made very
   flexible in terms of FPGAs, etc. The main argument could be investigating
   handling large amounts of data due to the high channel count. This seems a
   profitable area to consider further and a brainstorming meeting to go
   through this with some engineers was agreed (see later).
 o MAPS; Paul outlined a possibility for using MAPS (see discussion document).
   One motivation here is that the UK is a strong leader in this field and
   PPARC are keen to have some real applications from the R&D which has
   already been done. To be useful, we would have to demonstrate that the
   very fine (digital) pixels of MAPS would give better pattern recognition
   that the pads and so that there could be less layers (and hence reduced
   cost). This will need quite a bit of simulation work. This was seen as more
   of a longshot but Paul will discuss this further with the MAPS group. The
   simulation experts should at least consider whether MAPS could lead to
   any improvements.


AOB: The people who said they would go to the CERN meeting on 28/29 June
 were; Paul, Dan Bowerman and Catherine Fry from Imperial and David, Chris
 Ainsley and George Mavromanolakis from Cambridge. Jon will be at CERN for the
 Atlas SCT week and so may be able to attend some of the sessions.


Next meeting: The FE/BE DAQ brainstorming meeting should be held at UCL while
 Matthew is there in late July. The next meeting for the CALICE-UK SB could
 take place there on the same day. Wed 28 July was chosen, with the
 electronics discussion in the morning and the SB meeting in the afternoon.