Minutes of the CALICE-UK Steering Board Meeting, Manchester, 02/11/06
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Present: Dave Bailey (for part), Roger Barlow (for part), Paul Dauncey,
 Mark Thomson, David Ward (for part), Nigel Watson, Matthew Wing
Apologies: Mike Green

Minutes: Paul


Minutes of last meeting (phone, 05/05/06): No corrections. For matters
 arising, Mark and Nigel have not yet made contact with LCFI about UK
 links with the LDC and GLD groups; Dave has also not yet made contact
 with SiD.

 Paul talked to Steve Worm about having an LCFI representative give a
 talk at our general UK meetings, so as to give a short summary of LCFI
 work and hence identify possible areas of overlap, particularly in
 simulation work. Steve seemed enthusiastic about this but Paul had left
 this too late for the meeting tomorrow. Paul will try to organise such
 a talk for the next meeting. It would be reasonable to assume they
 would invite a CALICE-UK person to their meetings also.

 Paul did not set up a CERN account in the end as Mary Elizabeth Shewry
 was able to charge the expenses to her general account and then send
 the charges directly to our RAL account.


General news: Paul reported that the CERN beam tests for 2006 finished
 on Monday. Plans for future beam tests are discussed under the Steering
 Board item below.

 A "preproposal" for CALICE (and other) ILC calorimetry work has been
 submitted in response to the US NSF "PIRE" call. This is a US group
 including Jae Yu and Dhiman Chakraborty but they have asked for some
 non-US expressions of interest in collaborating, so Paul and Mark added
 their names to keep the UK involved. What we commit to will only be
 defined at the time of the full proposal at the end of Feb; there will
 be no funding for the non-US groups so this is more an expression of
 support. We can decide to withdraw before the full proposal if
 necessary.

 David reported there will be a general CALICE analysis meeting at DESY
 in Feb/Mar organised by David, Nigel and Roman Poeschel. This would be
 several days and allow the analysis status to be discussed in detail.


CALICE Steering Board report: Paul and David reported that there had
 been two meetings in the last six months. Several new groups have
 joined CALICE; the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in India will
 contribute 50 silicon wafers to the ECAL and Kobe and Shinshu
 Universities in Japan will build a scintillator ECAL. FNAL are still
 undecided about membership. Casablanca and Madrid have made contact.

 To improve the effectiveness of the analysis effort, two new posts of
 Physics and Analysis Coordinators have been created and were filled
 by Nigel and David, which is a reflection of the strong impact of the
 UK in CALICE.

 The target beam test schedule for next year was decided. The ECAL and
 AHCAL should be completed by May next year, when the CERN beam lines
 start their 2007 runs. (The TCMT was already completed this year.) The
 HCAL movable stage should also be complete, allowing angled incidence.
 We have bid for four more weeks of beam (and two weeks of parasitic
 muons for calibration) at CERN early in the 2007 period, ideally mid
 Jun to mid Sep. The detectors will then move to FNAL in Sep and start
 running there in Oct. When complete, around the end of 2007, the RPC
 DHCAL will replace the AHCAL and run until around Apr 2008.

 There will be three CALICE general collaboration meetings next year;
 the first around May in Japan, the second around Jul in Prague and the
 third around Oct in FNAL. The one in May will clearly concentrate on
 preparations for LCWS07 at the end of May.


CALICE Technical Board report: Paul and David also reported that there
 was a Technical Board review of readiness for the beam tests on
 15/16 Jun. The main task was defining the beam test programme for CERN.
 The other important conclusion which is relevant to the UK was that the
 software was not fully ready to allow analysis rapidly after the data
 were taken. This was one of the main motivations behind the
 appointments of the Physics and Analysis Coordinators (see above).


CALICE Speakers Bureau report: David reported that CALICE got 10 or 11
 talks at Valencia which was considered to be low. This was mainly due
 to a lack of available speakers. Most of the AHCAL speakers are giving
 practise talks at DESY today. The UK speakers will give practise talks
 in our meeting tomorrow. The others are not known, although they should
 all be released to the CALICE Steering Board tomorrow. Paul asked why
 they would not be released to the collaboration as a whole; it was due
 to the late timing, so receiving many comments would be difficult. This
 should clearly be improved before LCWS07.

 The UK is giving three CALICE talks (Anne-Marie Magnan, Konstantin
 Stefanov and Yoshi Mikami) with Mark giving a more general plenary in
 addition.

 There is a non ILC-specific instrumentation meeting in Vienna from
 19-24 Feb 2007 and David said CALICE may expect 4 or 5 talks.


EUDET report: Matthew reported that the EUDET annual meeting had
 recently been held in Munich and there had been three UK presentations
 on the DAQ, which was a reasonable number. The hardware development is
 is good shape but the main issues seem to be in the software. The UK is
 committed to providing the readout-level software for the calorimeter.
 The issue is whether this should be expanded to encompass the whole DAQ
 system, potentially including the tracking and vertex detectors also.
 This would be a major commitment and it is not clear if the UK has the
 resources to be able to do this. This task was clearly not part of the
 PPARC grant and so would need to come from the EUDET new RA effort.


Project Manager report: Paul reported for Mike Green. Mike had held the
 first WP managers meeting before the SB meeting today. Generally the
 projects are in reasonable shape, although WP3 has identified a call on
 the working allowance, which was approved by the other WP managers (see
 below).

 The next OsC meeting was postponed from Sep as the PPARC secretary
 repsponsible for our OsC left. It will now happen on 28 Nov and only
 Paul and Mike will attend. The documentation was sent in for the Sep
 date and so only a presentation and verbal replies to questions will
 be needed.


Budget/finance status: Paul stated that he and Mike had sent in the
 estimate for the total FY spend to RAL a few days before. The WPs are
 mainly in line with expectations, the exception being WP3 for which a
 previously unexpected spend of 25k is now foreseen. The travel budget
 is being underspent, with an estimate of 60k compared to the 75k in the
 budget. Even the 60k may be an overestimate as it assumed short term
 travel will continue at the same rate, although the beam tests are now
 complete until the next FY. RAL/EID are charging more for effort than
 the cost they gave us for the grant; despite several emails over a
 couple of months, this is still not understood and will be chased up.


UK attendence/prominence at Valencia: There are only five CALICE-UK
 people attending the Valencia meeting next week, of which four are
 giving talks (see above). Paul raised the question of why there were
 not more people (and hence talks) particularly from the RAs and PGs.
 The obvious RAs missing the meeting were George Mavromanolakis and
 Wenbiao Yan, both of whom have visa issues. Michele Faucci Giannelli
 could have gone to the meeting but his analysis was not thought to be
 well enough understood for a public talk.

 There is no obvious silver bullet to improve this in the future
 although advertising the meetings as early as possible and making the
 RAs and PGs volunteer for talks whenever feasible should help.


Upcoming meetings, UK attendance: Paul reported that the LCWS07 meeting
 will be at DESY from 30 May to 5 Jun. Given the usual rotation, as the
 previous was in Asia (Bangalore), then the following one in 2008 is
 most likely to be in the US, and probably FNAL. The 2007 CALICE
 collaboration meetings are listed above. There is also the Vienna
 conference as mentioned in the Speakers Bureau item above.

 LCWS07 is likely to be the first major release of quantitative beam
 test results and so we really should try to get as many UK people to
 attend and give talks as possible. Given that we know the meeting is
 coming up well in advance, then people should organise the RAs to keep
 the meeting period clear. It would probably be very helpful for
 speakers to also attend the CALICE Japanese collaboration meeting which
 is just before LCWS07.


Workpackage reports: Paul reported for David (who had to leave the
 meeting) on WP1. The UK hardware and firmware for the beam test
 performed well and we can hold our heads high. In particular, Matt
 Warren did an excellent job of being responsive to last minute requests
 for firmware changes and was crucial to the success. The analysis work
 has to now start in earnest and the appointment of the Physics and
 Analysis coordinators will be important for this. The UK work on the
 beam line geometries has been implemented but needs to be included in
 a Mokka release to be maximally useful.

 Matthew reported on WP2. There are five tasks, all UK based and all are
 effectively on schedule. The main disruption was caused by the UCL RA,
 Chris Targett-Adams, leaving unexpectedly but he was responsible enough
 to fully document his code before leaving so the overall impact will
 probably be quite small. His replacement, Valeria Bartsch, is already
 in post. Unfortunately, there is no UK DAQ talk at Valencia.

 For WP3, Paul reported that to obtain a good S/N in the MAPS, it will
 be necessary to develop a new process step to cut off the signal charge
 from the readout circuit p-mos transistors. This was not foreseen and
 will cost around 50k. He hopes RAL will pay half of this as the process
 would be generally useful for other MAPS designs. Negotiations are
 still ongoing. Even an extra cost of 25k will require using the working
 allowance and this will probably become a major topic at the upcoming
 OsC meeting. Together with other delays in the design, this extra step
 will mean we will miss the submission deadline for the first MAPS
 sensor. This will incur a three month delay until the next
 multi-project run in Apr. This can only really be accomodated by
 shortening the final beam test. To compensate for this, the first
 sensors may now also be tested in beam at DESY (or FNAL) towards the
 end of 2007. There are two MAPS talks at Valencia; this is the first
 public announcement of the project.

 Dave reported on WP4. The Manchester people had a useful meeting with
 the mechanical engineers at LLR this week and are up to date on the
 latest ideas. The glue studies will continue up to a decision point
 next year. For the thermal side, Steve Snow has done some modelling
 showing a temperature difference of around 10C across the slab without
 active cooling, which is thought acceptable. A full engineering design
 of the cooling system is needed but Manchester do not have the effort
 or interest in taking on this major task. The WP4 schedule is being
 adjusted to align better with EUDET, so there are some small changes to
 the Gantt charts. In addition, Steve Watts and other members of his
 Brunel group will move to Manchester in Jan. This could change the
 emphasis of the work there; is it possible he may become coordinator of
 the CALICE silicon wafer production, although nothing is firm yet.

 Nigel reported that WP5 is mainly on schedule. Mark is clearly in a
 leading role through PandoraPFA and this is reflected by his plenary
 talk at Valencia. The UK analyses in WW scattering and ZHH production
 are good channels for benchmarking detectors. The work in Mokka on MAPS
 must get into a Mokka release to be most useful. It should not hold up
 the long-awaited 6-02 release but should go into the next one following
 that.


UK interfaces to global detectors and status of the CDRs: Paul asked
 about the status of the global detector groups and how the UK could
 make itself more prominent. Specifically, there is a worry that the
 work done in the UK, on the DAQ but more so on MAPS, could be ignored
 by the detector groups. Mark reported that there are regular phone
 meetings and that LDC and GLD are receptive to new ideas. SiD would be
 much harder to get into given the inflexibility of many of the people
 involved. As stated above, we have no contact with SiD, which is a
 significant lack. Dream, the fourth detector concept, is still at a
 very rudimentary stage and is not considered too seriously yet.

 Mark also reported that the timescale for the CDRs and costings is
 not yet settled, although there was a recent deadline for new
 contributions.


IPPP representative: Nigel Glover contacted Paul to ask for a CALICE-UK
 contact name for the IPPP in Durham; see the email on the meeting web
 page. This would probably be a low level task to connect people in
 CALICE to the Durham theorists if there were any issues of mutual
 interest. It would make sense for this to be someone involved in WP5
 and Nigel volunteered to take this on.


CALICE-UK meeting organiser: This was to have been Chris Targett-Adams
 but he has left UCL. Paul said the motivation for this was mainly that
 he hadn't had time to organise the meetings regularly, hence they have
 been somewhat sporadic. Dave volunteered himself for this although if
 there are other people (maybe RAs) who would be responsible and could
 take this on, they should still be considered.


AoB: None.


Next meeting(s): The next UK SB meeting will be a phone meeting and is
 tentatively scheduled for Wed 14 Feb at 14.00.

 The history for hosting general meetings is UCL 4, Birmingham 3,
 Manchester 2 and Cambridge 1, so it was thought to be Imperial's turn
 next. Hence, the next general CALICE-UK meeting will be at Imperial,
 with the SB meeting on Mon 26 Mar at 16.00 and the general meeting on
 Tue 27 Mar, starting at 11.00