CALICE-UK Steering Board Meeting, Cambridge, 19/09/07 ===================================================== Present: Dave Bailey, Paul Dauncey, Mike Green, Marcel Stanitzki, Mark Thomson, David Ward, Matthew Wing Phone: Nigel Watson Minutes: Paul 1: Minutes of last meeting: Despite us previously deciding to invite an LCFI speaker to give a talk at our general meetings, Paul had forgotten to do so for the meeting tomorrow; apologies. However, given the move towards the detector concepts, it might be more sensible to invite speakers on ILD and SiD to give talks instead in the future. Steve Watts will not join CALICE although he may have a longer-term interest in ILC work. 2: General CALICE/ILC news: The combined LDC-GLD effort has been renamed to ILD. Veronique Boisvert has joined RHUL as a lecturer and will be working on CALICE. She will eventually take over from Mike as the PI when he retires. Antonella De Santo from RHUL is also attending the ILD meeting on Friday but she is coming from general physics interest and will not be working within CALICE in the short term. The listserv email servers which we use in CALICE (both for UK and non UK groups) will be shutting down sometime in the next 3-6 months. There is a direct replacement hosted by JISC to which we can transfer and they will maintain the old postings and provide some level of mail forwarding so the old email addresses will continue to work for some time. However, eventually we will need to tell everyone in CALICE to change the email address they use. Nigel raised the issue that the JISC servers are supposed to be for UK use and they have said that at least 40% of the email addresses should be within the UK. This would clearly not be true for CALICE, particularly as we have email lists for each country separately. Marcel and Nigel will see if they can negotiate a solution to this. 3: CALICE Steering Board report: There have been two CALICE SB meetings since the UK SB last met; at Kobe (May) and at Prague (Sep). New groups continue to join CALICE. Mumbai will contribute to silicon wafer production; they have silicon experience from CMS. Heidelberg will study SiPMs for the AHCAL. MPI Munich will design mechanics for the AHCAL and thick GEMs for the DHCAL. Two Moroccan institutes (which have a link to the Grenoble group already in CALICE) will join at a low level of effort and will contribute to shifts and analysis. Because of the new groups, it was thought useful to draw up a list of service tasks, which new groups would be required to take on. This would also be useful for existing groups if they wanted to contribute more generally to CALICE. A preliminary list has been made, mainly based on beam test support and documentation tasks. It is likely more detector-specific tasks might be added. If anyone has ideas for items to go on this list, contact David and Paul. The SPSC has asked us to report on the use of the test beam at CERN this summer. We obviously have a very good story to tell them and Fabrizion Salvatore was chosen to give this talk, in recognition of his great work as run coordinator. This will be at CERN on Oct 4 so if anyone happens to be at CERN, they should go along. We have to give our (irregular) report to the DESY PRC on Nov 8. This will be given by Jean Claude Brient. The main impact for us will be the preparation of the document to be sent to the committee, which is needed by mid Oct. This can be based on the LCWS R&D panel submission although it will require a lot of updates. The next CALICE general meeting will be at Argonne. The date is not yet set but it will be towards the end of Feb or early Mar. There will be around one day of parallel sessions. The meeting following this should be in Europe and the UK is a possible candidate. It would be around Jun/Jul and hence could be outside term. Due to the parallel sessions, at least three rooms would be needed. Dave volunteered Manchester as a candidate; the only other group which has expressed interest is Lyon. The third draft of the LCWS R&D Panel report has been circulated. This is still not public but we were sent it to make comments and corrections. It mainly reads very well for CALICE and it is positive enough that we should send it to the OsC for the next meeting and also possibly to the panel considering our next grant bid. The preparations for the move to FNAL next year require an MoU to be submitted by the end of the year, and hence a draft by the end of Nov. Paul and Felix Sefkow steered this through for CERN and the equivalent role for FNAL will be done by Roman Poeschl and Vishnu Zutshi, who will be the overall coordinators for the FNAL run. (Note this is separate from the day-to-day run coordinators.) A team of engineers will have to visit FNAL before the MoU is finalised to check what is available and what we will need provided, in terms of space, power, infrastructure, cranes, etc. Paul may need to also go to check the DAQ aspects of the existing beam line instrumentation (tracking and particle id). However, the visit is likely to be during ALCPG and Paul cannot attend this. For the UK organisation, we should contact the Mary-Elizabeth equivalent at FNAL to prepare the ground; Paul will look into this. It is very clear that we are under pressure to produce papers from the beam test runs and Jean Claude urged the SB to push on this as much as possible. 4: CALICE Technical Board report: The TB meetings have continued on and off through the summer although the attendance is quite low. The main upcoming issue is the software review, which is to see if the software we have is appropriate for the analysis we will need to do with the beam test data. This has been delayed by a couple of months and will now take place around the end of Nov at DESY; it will be coupled to an AHCAL meeting there so the date will be fixed by that meeting. As part of the preparations, a questionnaire will be sent out to all the people active (or potentially active) in analysis to see what their needs are. 5:CALICE Speakers Bureau report: David reported that he has speakers for most ALCPG talks except for an ECAL talk; this is an area where the UK could supply someone. However, we have very few people able to attend. Although talks on the individual subdetector R&D (such as MAPS) are not administered through the Speakers Bureau, they should still inform David about talks as there is some level of interference between all CALICE talks, as shown at EPS this summer. In the last meeting, David had mentioned a Speakers Bureau wiki page but this did not survive due to a lack of someone to maintain it. This is now on the list of service tasks mentioned above. There is a simple web page for the Speakers Bureau which is linked directly from the CALICE home page. This has recent talks and David would like to add in older ones also. The experience from LCWS was thought positive. The reviewing of drafts had been squeezed for time close to the meeting but it had been seen as a very useful process. All groups went along with the procedure. The practise talks themselves were less successful as there was not time for a run-through for everyone. As it turned out, most went well anyway but this was probably because of the quality of the speakers. We cannot always be sure this will be the case in the future so it would be good to schedule them well in advance. 6: Connections to global detectors studies: For information, Paul reminded the meeting that the Cambridge/RAL proposal by Mark and Marcel to study generic PFA will being considered by the PPRP next week. The open presentation will be at Aston University in Birmingham on Wed 26 Sep at 9.15. Nigel will try to attend as well. As Mark and Marcel are quite firmly committed to ILD and SiD, respectively, this proposal covers both detector concepts. Paul stated that he would prefer the CALICE-UK work (at least for the DAQ and MAPS where there are more than one institute involved) to be represented in both detector concepts. This would protect us against future uncertainties; it is quite possible that the UK will be forced to be only on a single experiment or even that only one will ever be built. The main issue is of course the amount of effort available to cover two experiments. Simply turning up at the concept meetings and presenting the UK work would be a small amount of extra effort but to really get involved and take a major role in the LoI and EDR would be a much larger task. Other points discussed included that it is highly unlikely European funding from FP programmes would go to SiD given that it is seen as a US project. However, as FP7 is again funding infrastructure, then it is not clear direct funding for any detector would be possible. The discussions within EUDET are mainly towards generic DAQ, rather than ILD-specific, as this is seen as more likely to be funded; it could even include SLHC also. Some groups are already firmly committed to particular concepts while others are holding off for a while. It is not yet clear whether it is possible to be on both LoIs so the decision point is unknown. 7: Programmatic review: Following the late request for input which was required by Fri 21 Sep, Paul reported that CALICE-UK and LCFI had sent a combined request to STFC asking for more time. We have been told that mid-Oct is acceptable. Mike and Renato have already sent Paul some input and he would like further comments over the next week or so. He will then try to produce draft answers and recirculate the document in around two to three weeks. 8: Argonne-funded students: Jose Repond had discussed with at least UCL and Imperial about funding students; Argonne is a national laboratory and so cannot award degrees. Matthew reported this had worked well with three Zeus students as they had been selected by UCL and had been resident at DESY for most of their PhD period. Except for doing service work on the Argonne hardware, they had been like any other UCL student. For CALICE, Jose had indicated that the students would have to be at FNAL effectively full-time. This raises issues of University residency requirements (which may be more or less strictily enforced at different institutes) and how they are supervised for producing a thesis in the end. It would require the supervisor to travel to FNAL quite often and it was not clear how much the UK University would benefit unless they wanted to start working in the area of DHCALs. UCL and Cambridge thought they might want to pursue this and Paul will contact Jose. 9: Workpackage/EUDET reports: There was a report for each workpackage; o WP1: The test beam was a big success this summer. There is now a large amount of analysis to do and we are under pressure to push this through. Unfortunately, the beam test itself diverted people from the analysis effort over the summer. o WP2: There had been a DAQ meeting just before the SB meeting and things appear on track. There is still a projected underspend for the whole project. For EUDET, the work is progressing but the schedules for the calorimeters are generally slipping, which makes producing the DAQ in time easier. o WP3: Two errors have been found on the sensor but there is a workaround for at least one of them already. Neither is a disaster and there is still a lot which can be done even if the second problem cannot be overcome. The decision to go for a beam test with this sensor, combined with the unexpectedly high ~300 I/O pin count of the sensor, has meant the DAQ PCBs have been substantially higher in cost than originally estimated. Overall, WP3 is now heading for an overspend of around 20k, rather than the 15k (for the development of the INMAPS process) already reported to the OsC. o WP4: The glue work is now effectively complete, with only infrequent measurements to be done on the long-term test over the next year or so. The UK contribution to the EUDET mechanics had been clarified during the Prague meeting last week. The UK will now develop the infrastructure for robotic gluing of the silicon wafers. It will also do the detailed mechanical design of the end-of-slab region which contains the DIF. This of course ties in well with the UK DAQ work. The work is directed towards EUDET but is applicable also to ILD as the two are effectively the same. Hence, this should lead to a contribution to the ILD EDR. o WP5: Nigel had had to leave the meeting but David reported that the physics studies had also been slowed down due to people working on the beam tests over the summer. Mark reported that there is a move to start combined LCFI/CALICE/ILD/SiD physics study meetings in the UK so we can pool knowledge, etc. The idea would be to have two organisers representing all four groups. It is likely the LCFI person would also cover SiD so we need to identify a CALICE/ILD person. Nigel was thought the obvious candidate and Paul will check with him if he is prepared to do this. There will be some discussion on these meetings at the LCUK meeting next week. 10: Project Manager report, OsC and budget status: Mike reported that the third OsC meeting in Jul had gone well and we seem to have a good working relationship with the OsC now. The next meeting will be on Fri 25 Jan. The OsC want us to start looking to the end of the grant from now on and so want us to give a plan to completion more than the usual status report. This means they want not only the usual Gantt charts but also ones to give the realistic schedule, with extra items if needed to reflect the actual work being done now. This second set of Gantt charts will be the ones then updated for future meetings. We have explored the issue of using any remaining working allowance for funding RAs beyond the end of the grant and the OsC seems receptive if we can make a good case. Mike thinks we will need to present this plan to them in the next meeting so we will need to make significant decisions on how we would do this at the next WP managers meeting on Mon 5 Nov. The working allowance is 166k of which WP3 needs 20k but there is a projected underspend overall of around 25k so it might all be uncommitted so far. Hence, there is a reasonable amount of money in terms of e.g. six month extensions to RAs through the summer of 2009, if this is what we want to do. We could alternatively use the funds to increase the scope of the project. The paperwork need to be sent to the OsC by Tue 18 Dec so Paul asked for first drafts by Fri 30 Nov. We will send the LCWS R&D Panel report together with the other paperwork, assuming it is public by this time. Since the last meeting, the apparent large overspend in RAL TD effort has been found to be an administrative misunderstanding and there is no longer any problem. Mike thinks we will need to start reporting actual spend on the RAs rather than the nominal values given in the past, so people should make sure they can get these numbers by Nov. 11: Upcoming meetings, UK attendence: There is an EUDET meeting in Paris from 8-10 Oct to which five or six UK people will attend. This will have little impact on our budget as only the per diem is claimed from CALICE. For the ALCPG meeting at FNAL from 22-26 Oct, only Marcel and probably George can attend. (The Imperial PG student, Jamie Ballin, may go if STFC approve it, but this would not be from our budget.) The IEEE meeting in Hawaii is the week following ALCPG. Marcel and Jamie Crooks will be giving MAPS talks and Matt Warren will be giving a DAQ talk. Yoshi Mikami has expressed an interest in the AFCA meeting in Sendai on 3-6 Mar 2008. He would give a MAPS talk. 12: AoB: There were three items o Mike raised the issue of the next grant application. There are many issues to consider; whether this will be CALICE (i.e. R&D) or ILD/SiD (i.e. concepts) based. This may require coordination with LCFI and a preliminary discussion should be started at Liverpool next week. Note, LCFI currently have funding until Jan 2009 and so are on a very similar timescale to us. Also, the right time to submit the bid was not clear. The political situation will be clearer the later the bid is submitted, but we cannot leave it too late as approval can take many months. It was thought sometime around Jun/Jul next year might be appropriate. We are also at risk of being put on bridging funds until the LOIs (or even EDRs) are produced; this is a particular danger as it is not possible to hire or extend RAs under that circumstance. o Dave reported that Manchester have a student starting on CALICE in Oct. o Marcel reported that he has been made SiD simulation software coordinator and so will be a session convenor at ALCPG. 13: Next meeting(s): The next general CALICE-UK meeting, with a SB meeting the afternoon before, will be at RHUL. It will be sometime in Mar after the end of term.