SUMMARY of CLAS Collaboration Meeting January 14-16, 1999 S. Dytman The collab meeting was officially Thur 130m to 1pm Saturday. However, there were also important meetings Thur morn. With advancing analyses, there are many more things to discuss. I expect this trend to continue-- there will be important summaries and selected talks in plenary session, but much of our discussion will occur in smaller groups. The next collab mtg will be June 3-5, 1999. We tentatively set following meeting to October before the DNP meeting. My memory is that it was Oct 14-16, but someone will surely help me with the correct dates. We expect a schedule similar to this time, but there will be PWG sessions both Thur evening and Friday morning. We saw a few major results in plenary sessions. A few themes stand out. Cooking is starting to pile up. That is NOT because of CPU limitations (yet), but rather lack of calibration constants. Establishing calibration procedures and pushing data cooking must be one of our focuses for the next few months. Right now, we have g1, g6, and eg1 data in hand with very little of it cooked. Many talks are scheduled for the Atlanta meeting that depend critically on this. As a collaboration, this must receive enough attention and will clearly be a Service issue of importance. On the other hand, it's a great way for new grad students to get good practical knowledge. We have been taking data for almost a year now. Many of us feel that we should start pushing for our first publications. It is at least clear that by pushing we can make it happen sooner. Physics working groups will discuss the issues over the next few months and make recommendations to the Coordinating Comm. The CC will make choices of the analyses that will receive the priority in allocation of resources based on input from the PWG's. Tentatively, those choices will be made at the June collab mtg. with the goal of submitting papers around the end of 1999. Arne Freyberger suggested that 6 months is too short a time to get a publication ready; he could be right. The eg1 run was in many ways a success. The overall data taking efficiency was about (still being discussed) 50%. The target worked well enough, but had a few problems that will be worked on over the next year. There was very little deuterium running and no real photon running. Sebastian Kuhn (ECO) estimates about 2B electron events on tape. Volker Burkert showed some nice analysis of asymmetries normalized to the ep elastic asymmetry. The delta(1236) asymm is negative (as expected) and prominent final states are being seen after significant tracking code modifications. e1 analyses are close to cross sections, are looking in detail at radiative corrections, acceptance issues, and decay corrections. The GSIM 'talk' on Sat was devoted to 3 presentations of acceptance details in e1 analyses. There was a lot of discussion and the talks went over schedule for 1/2 hour. I felt these were valuable presentations. The acceptances are complicated, but understood at the 10-20% level and ONLY geometry has been used. g1 and g6 analyses are starting acceptance calcs and have clear identification of many states. Mark Ito has been recently appointed Offline analysis coordinator. He presented a list of questions and issues. There was a lengthy discussion about what is wrong and right with what we do. It is clear that we are getting things done, but not as quickly or as efficiently as might be expected. Dieter Cords showed the marvelous improvement in DAQ rate. We can now commonly run with event rate of 2000 Hz with 90% livetime. The online and CODA groups have systematically attacked and conquered a difficult problem; we will all benefit from their efforts. Congratulations! COLLABORATION ISSUES Membership-We approved 3 new Full members (John Hardie(Christopher Newport), John Price (Louisiana Tech), and Michele Guidal (Orsay)). Two candidates from ITEP (K. Mikhailov and A. Stavinsky) were approved by the Membership Comm for presentation to the full collab next meeting. A CLAS Coordinating Comm chairman election must be held in June. Larry Dennis and Brian Raue are seeking nominations from CLAS members. Mac Mestayer stood in for Ken Hicks (stuck in bad weather) to present the status of the Service Work Comm. They have evaluated the proposals of each group and felt each is roughly equal. It appears that the large amount of service work required to run CLAS is not covered and groups will be asked to add some tasks. This is obviously an important part of guaranteeing high quality physics results in the future. Rory Miskimen discussed work of the CLAS Speakers Comm. They are evaluating personal invitations. It is stll too early to expect invitations to the collaboration, but they are contacting organizers of next year's conferences. From the CLAS web page, there is a link to the CSC page that is maintained by Brian Raue. It is a nice listing of and links to a LOT of upcoming conferences and workshops. Check it out! I presented a report on the Coord Comm meetings. We now meet about once a month because there are more issues. There have been small changes in the CLAS schedule (recommended by a slightly larger group, the Run Plan Comm) that will be posted on my web page shortly. Because of problems getting the target going in 1998, we propose a 2nd eg1 run in 2000. There will also likely be a radphi run in 2000. Although there were lengthy discussions on various issues, none mentioned what I feel is the real issue of how we be sure all CLAS groups get data at a reasonable pace. We should evaluate the 2000 schedule to be sure other CLAS experiments are not unnecessarily delayed. We offer guidelines to the PWGs for physics results evaluations. All results should be discussed in written documents that will be viewable by all CLAS members (but no outsiders) on internal web pages. They will then be presented and discussed at PWG meetings before they can be approved. We need to establish a new kind of document, the CLAS Analysis Note. CLAS Notes are too public, no physics results should go in them. 'final' results: fairly complete description of analysis. Could be part of a thesis. refereed conf talk: about 4 pages APS talk: 1-2 pages We discussed a few issues as a group. 1) Barry Ritchie and Latifa Elouardhiri discussed their evaluations of conference talks. APS talks are being taken quite seriously since they are the first views many phsyicists get of CLAS work. Proposals for PANIC contributions should go to the PWG coordinators soon. The abstracts must be approved by the CSC and submitted before the March 15 conference deadline. 2) We all agreed that the technical papers should be submitted within a few months. To be current, they should be published BEFORE the 1st physics papers. Most groups are close to finishing. 3) We discussed overlapping and new analyses. There are already PAC approved overlaps in physics analyses. We will have to deal with them as they come. In each case, the principals should try to reach agreement. If that is not possible, the PWG and/or Coord Comm will try to mediate. It is important for anyone doing an analysis to discuss your progress at PWG meetings and tell the CLAS Coord which data set you are examining. This will help avoid problems. The idea of a new classification of proposal was also discussed. Some of us feel (including the PAC!) that we could benefit from fewer proposals. It is clear that we cannot abandon proposals for a few reasons- advantage of an outside evaluation, need to establish new beam conditions, and importance in establishing credit esp. for young people. However, we do not need formal PAC approval of every ep analysis and we should hold some proposals back from the PAC unless the above reasons apply. A straw vote was made for the idea of establishing a new category of CLAS-approved proposals that would never go to PAC. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor. I am not sure of the mechanism yet, but there will be a proposal next time.