Minutes of CALICE-UK Steering Board Meeting, Cambridge, 08/09/05 ================================================================ Present: Roger Barlow, Paul Dauncey, Mike Green, Mark Thomson, David Ward, Matthew Wing Phone: Mark Lancaster, Renato Turchetta, Mike Tyndel, Nigel Watson Minutes: Paul 1) Previous meeting at UCL 10/11/04: No comments or items remaining to be discussed. 2) CALICE Steering Board report: Paul reported on the CALICE SB as the UK representative. There have been several new groups joining CALICE during 2005: from Canada (McGill, Regina), France (Annecy, Grenoble, Lyon), Korea (Ewha) and the US (Boston). Of these, the Canadian and US groups will work on the DHCAL while the others will join the ECAL. In particular, Annecy (not Lyon, as incorrectly stated in the meeting) are interested in mechanics and the endcap design and may work closely with Manchester and Ecole Polytechnique in this area. There have been preliminary discussions about membership with other groups also, including the Italian LCCAL (ECAL) collaboration (lead by Paolo Checchia) and Chicago and FNAL. The former is the only ILC calorimeter group in Europe not currenting within CALICE. The latter two have been working with the CALICE DHCAL groups for some time but have no formal association. It would obviously be very useful to have FNAL as a collaborator. Note, the SLAC/Oregon/Brookhaven SiW ECAL collaboration still show no interest in working with CALICE. There will be the annual DESY Programme Review Committee (PRC) review of CALICE on 10 Nov, which involves an open presentation and a written report which normally has to be sent in four weeks in advance. However, this would be on 13 Oct, which is in the middle of the collaboration meeting and Technical Review, so we have asked for an extra week to prepare it. People have been identified to write the sections but the speaker for the open presentation has not been chosen. ACTION: Everyone send suggestions for the speaker to Paul. 3) CALICE Technical Board: Paul (as DAQ leader) and David (as software leader) reported on the TB. We need to submit an MoU to CERN to get beam time next year. This is necessary as we are asking for more than one week and so have to be formally approved. The MoU is to go to the SPSC for their meeting on 15 Nov. This involves submission of a written document but no open presentation. The document needs to go in two weeks in advance, i.e. by 31 Oct. Writing assingments have not yet been set. Paul and Felix Sefkow went to CERN to look at the available beam lines there during June. Their conclusion was that the H6 beam line in the North Area was probably the best. This is not occupied with Atlas or CMS equipment and has sufficient room for the whole CALICE calorimeter structure, including the tail catcher if required. The beam energy range was good, from ~3 GeV to ~100 GeV. The purity obtained depends on the PID installed in the beam line, but the implications of how to handle an impure beam and the level of impurity need to be checked. ACTION: Paul and David to follow up on these purity questions. An MoU will also be required for FNAL but as any beam test there is not foreseen before early 2007, then this will be submitted sometime next year. The Technical Board will be holding a technical review on the day following the DESY collaboration meeting, i.e. 14 Oct. The morning will be open presentations and the afternoon a closed session. However, it is expected that much of the material will be presented during the previous two days of the collaboration meeting itself. 4) CALICE Speakers Bureau report: David chairs this committee and hence reported on it. The other members are Jean-Claude Brient (ex-officio as Spokesperson) and Jose Repond (ex-officio as chair of the Steering Committee). There should be a fourth member who would do the technical (web) work and take over as chair eventually, but this person has not yet been identified. There has been little activity in this committee recently. The Bureau collected talks to send to the session organisers for LCWS05 in May. For EPS and LP, they tried to find speakers before submitting abstracts but did not get much interest; it might be better in future to find speakers after the abstracts are accepted. For the upcoming IEEE conference in Peurto Rico, Orsay and DESY have submitted abstracts. Other conferences in the near future include the ECFA meeting in Vienna in Nov. The CALORxx series is biannual and so the next will be CALOR06 (location unknown). We bid for travel funds for conferences as part of the proposal and so CALICE funds can be used to attend these; however, obviously if group funds can be used, it will help the CALICE budget. 5) Report on Snowmass: Roger and Mark were the two CALICE-UK members who went to the Snowmass ILC meeting in Aug. Roger attended only the second week and mainly the accelerator sessions, while Mark went to the detector concept talks (although not the SiD ones). The machine physicists were very upbeat and a new baseline accelerator has been defined which is 41km long. Barry Barish has stated that a strong justification for two interaction regions needs to be made; the current design has two with crossing angles of 2 and 20 mrad, although how these differ in terms of use or optimisation needs to be defined. There was a good summary of the accelerator status from Nick Walker. There are eight baseline beam parameter sets although most people are working with the 337ns/176ns timing a la TESLA. The working luminosity assumption is 2x10^34 cm^2/s at low energy, with double this at high energy. The Japanese were very positive on prospects for an "Asian" (=Japanese) accelerator site, which would require significant funding from China. The US people were more downbeat although they all assume the ILC will be built in the US. The Europeans were more noncommittal. The recurring question is whether the ILC can be funded without having to wait for results from the LHC. On the calorimetry side, there was much discussion on PFLOW with a nice summary talk by Jean-Claude Brient. There was also a lot of discussion on test beam needs. The general thinking is now that finer granularity in the ECAL is better and Henri Videau presented results with 1x1mm^2 pads in the first few layers. The claim is that this is no more expensive than the standard option as the price is dominated by the silicon wafer area. Note, SiD has always had 4mm diagonal hexagon pads. There has been a lot of progress on generic PFLOW algorithms, particularly from Alexei Raspereza at DESY and Mark will show some details from his studies in the main meeting tomorrow. The important organisational point is that these studies are really starting now and the UK needs to get involved soon if they are to make an impact. There will be a worldwide studies PFLOW forum with monthly meetings, and the detector concept groups may organise something in addition. CALICE as a whole is mainly connected with LDC although there may be a SiD connection through the US DHCAL groups. Mark is mainly connected with LDC, although he is also involved with GLD (although it does not have a SiW ECAL). Nigel is using the SiD simulation for his MAPS studies, so although it would be good to have more effort in the detector concept groups, Mark and Nigel will be the CALICE-UK representatives for these detectors. LCFI were thought to be mainly involved in LDC but they may not be really heavily connected yet; we should discuss detector concepts and possible collaboration with them at the LCUK meeting in UCL on 5 Oct. ACTION: Mark and Nigel should make contact with Steve Worm and Tim Greenshaw about this. 6) EUDET proposal status: Matthew had prepared some transparencies on the status of the EUDET proposal. The spokesperson is Jochim Mnich at DESY. The bid contains several different pieces; the UK is only involved in JRA3. Assuming we get some funds (which seems almost certain), the grant will start on 1 Jan 2006 and will run for four years. This work is all connected with WP2, which suffered a cut in the PPRP deliberations. From an original total of 347k (170k effort, 177k other), the PPRP cut 125k, nominally for Task 2.5. However, this was not possible within only this task, so most came from effort. Nicola Pezzi was removed, as was a year of effort from each of the UCL and RHUL RAs. (These latter also then impacted the WP5 work). However, due to spreading the project over four FYs rather than the original three, the final outcome was not so severe. The effective WP2 cut was around 40k, albeit at the cost of a six month delay. Matthew will consider the new deliverables which the EUDET bid commits us to and figure out how much of the new funds will be needed. In particular, the proposal requires us to provide DAQ support for beam test runs until the end of 2009, which is well beyond the period of the PPARC grant. When the financial situation is clearer, any remaining EU funding (if any) could be used to offset the PPRP cuts. We should have the flexibility to move money between equipment and staff, although there may be an EU limit on consumables (as was the case for EuroTev). We could also move funds around on the PPARC side if this would be administratively easier, although this requires the approval of the Oversight Committee, so we would need a definitive and clear case for them. ACTION: Matthew to report back on the WP2 financial situation at a later date. 7) Edinburgh status: At the time of our proposal, Edinburgh expressed an interest in ILC studies but wanted to wait until their new lecturer was in post. They have recently appointed and Paul received the following from Steve Playfer: "We have appointed Victoria Martin as a temporary lecturer (5 years). She has been doing W/Z physics at CDF, and a bit on ILC studies in the US. She starts in Edinburgh at the beginning of next month. We are discussing setting up a joint ILC effort with Glasgow (as part of the new SUPA initiative). The likely participants are: Edinburgh: Victoria Martin, Peter Clarke, Steve Playfer Glasgow: Craig Buttar, Chris Parkes I'm not sure whether this takes us into LCFI (Glasgow), CALICE (Edinburgh) or both. We wanted to discuss this after Victoria arrives." Hence, there is still some possibility that they will want to join CALICE and it seems this may become clearer over the next month or so. It may be that SUPA brings some money, which will make any application to PPARC somewhat easier. 8) New grant administration: Paul asked that any new web sites being set up for the new WPs should be linked from the UK home page, so send him any relevant URLs. Also, some groups have not yet sent updates for the UK list of people and email lists, so this should be done soon too. Now the grant outcome is known, RHUL need to formally join CALICE. (We can finesse the changes in the RAL groups as, to the rest of the collaboration, RAL was a member from the first round.) The rules for new groups are given in the collaboration MoA, but the basic requirement is to submit a Letter of Intent (LoI) to the CALICE Steering Board for approval. Mike has prepared the LoI which will be submitted next week. The UK PI's unanimously supported RHUL joining and the Steering Board will be informed of this by Paul. There is a need for two posts within the UK: o Budget holder, to keep an eye on spend o UK meeting organiser, to put together the general UK meetings, roughly every six months The former should be a PI (i.e. a member of the UK Steering Board) but it would be useful for the latter to be a more junior member who is aware of the work going on within the UK. There were few expressions of interest in the meeting. ACTION: Everyone consider this and get back to Paul with suggestions. The Budget Holder would also report to the Oversight Committee (OC) on the financial status. So far, PPARC have not set up any OC. The usual way they operate is that they get a report from the collaboration, with a few of the collaboration members in attendance, and then the OC meets in closed session. Typically, we would expect one person per workpackage (normally the WP leader) to attend, along with the UK Spokesperson and Budget Holder. We need to organise the project codes at RAL. There was general agreement that equipment (and consumables together) should be divided into one project code per workpackage, with several people able to sign on the budget. Travel was less clear; the two main possibilities were one project code with multiple people able to sign or one project code per institute, with one PI at each able to sign. The former was considered preferable if possible, as it makes keeping track of spend easier and the funds do not need to be divided between several institutes. However, there was some uncertainty if more than one approver was allowed for a travel project code, so the fallback would be the latter, with one project code per institute. ACTION: Paul to contact Tony Medland at RAL and get the project codes set up. It was agreed that we would be able to fund travel for non-PPARC students from our travel budget although (as always) this should not be too excessive. Paul asked about the implications of Full Economic Costs (FEC) in the future. Mike reported that PPARC were _not_ planning to convert pre-existing grants (like ours) to an FEC-basis but that the Universities has been given funds to allow them to continue until the end of their normal period. Hence, there should be no issue for us here. 9) RA recruitment status: Cambridge had a University-funded RA post with a deadline of Sep 6. This is for ILC general detector concepts work, rather than specifically CALICE. They have three reasonable candidates (all non-EU). The Imperial RA post has a deadline of Sep 16. So far there are only a couple of applications and none seem above threshold. Birmingham's RA post has a deadline of the end of Sep; they have three candidates with at least one reasonable one. Clearly, in all cases, good applicants who are not offered the job should be encouraged to apply to the other places. Note, UCL will also soon be advertising a post to start in Dec. ACTION: Everyone direct any good candidates to the available posts. 10) Travel and talks at upcoming meetings: The next LCUK meeting is at UCL on 5 Oct. As the previous meeting at Cambridge on 8 Jul was cancelled following the bombs in London, then Nigel, who would have talked at Cambridge, agreed to give his "Status of CALICE" talk at UCL instead. We may need a CALICE meeting at lunchtime during the LCUK meeting. ACTION: Paul to book a meeting room. The next CALICE general meeting is in DESY on 12-13 Oct. Besides encouraging UK people to give talks on what they are doing, we need a speaker to give a (probably brief) summary on the proposal outcome. (This follows Matthew's presentation at the last meeting in Dec last year which outlined what we would apply for.) The SB people who can attend the next DESY meeting are Paul, Nigel (possibly), Roger (possibly) and David (partially). Of these, Roger volunteered to give the proposal talk. Other UK people likely to go are Chris Ainsley, George Mavromanolakis and Fabrizio Salvatore. For the ECFA meeting in Vienna, 14-17 Nov, then attendees are Mark (partially), David (partially), Mike and George Mavromanolakis. Both Nigel and Paul can definitely not attend. With such small numbers, anyone else who can go should be encouraged to attend. Note, there may be an LDC meeting at the end of the Vienna meeting. The LCWS06 conference in Bangalore, Mar 2006, was too far off for people to know if they would be available, although Mark thought he would be able to go. 11) AOB: None.