SUMMARY of CLAS Collaboration Meeting, Sept. , 1997 at Jefferson Lab.

Steve Dytman

We had a successful collaboration meeting a week ago that I wanted to quickly summarize for those of you who couldn't attend. I realize the meeting was at a time when many of us have teaching responsibilities. This is an extremely important and interesting time in the development of the CLAS detector. We are nearing the end of installation, well into commissioning, and we need to start turning our efforts toward guaranteeing good physics results. This doesn't mean ignoring hardware issues, it means making sure the hardware is realiable and able to be monitored so that we can trust the objectivity of our results. This means a major effort in developing on-line monitoring tools (mostly software) to watch over the huge array of detectors we have built. At the same time, the level of effort for off-line software must increase to give us an understanding of the large amount of quality data we hope to obtain soon. Much work remains before a Data Summary Tape (DST) that anyone can believe can be made. This is a time that users can have a key role in doing the things we all do to make experiments a success. Be sure monitoring is robust and that you can use it on shift! Help design testing procedures. Contribute to software for conversion of detector raw data to physical parameters (calibrations) or to software to find tracks and identify particles or to guarantee a robust and stable on-line system.

I try to emphasize jobs that might be done off-site. On the other hand, the work remaining on-site cannot be ignored. Installation must continue after the September test run. An installed detector is not a working detector until it is adequately tested and debugged. Test runs with pulsers, lasers, and cosmic rays will occupy many people before the December run.

Contact one of the following people if you can contribute. I list people who are in charge of organizing the effort from different directions.

  • Volker Burkert and Bernhard Mecking (general)
  • Dieter Cords (on-line software)
  • Dennis Weygand (off-line software)
  • Steve Dytman (e1 run coordinator)
  • Rory Miskimen (g1 run coordinator)
  • Mark Ito (online monitoring)

There were 4 presentations on various aspects of software on Friday followed by a lengthy general discussion. Will Brooks gave an off-line manpower assessment and a glimpse into the future with present manpower. I think we are all forced to agree that significant new effort in off-line software is required if we want to have publishable data in less than 3 years. A major theme must be larger contributions from users off-site. Dennis Weygand is a new CLAS staff member with experience leading a similar organizational task at Brookhaven. He will lead the off-line effort.

Business items

A new New Member policy was discussed and passed after minor modification. Contact Gail Dodge, chairperson of the Membership Committee) for information. The new policy is very similar to the previous policy, but puts more emphasis on negotiation of new member responsibilities (contained in an MOU) with various members of the collaboration. The present feeling is that no charter modification is required. Jim O'Brien (archivist) and Gail are constructing a specific wording of the final policy.

Hall Crannell presented results of his committee to suggest changes in Charter wording regarding publication policy. There were friendly changes to their suggestions and the modifications to the charter will be voted on at the next collaboration meeting. Hall sent the suggested changes to all members.

There was a discussion of the run plan. Bernhard explained the steps by which the 1998 schedule was significantly altered. Main impact came from the switch from 3 hall to 2 hall running until approximately next summer and the narrow window in which the polarized target experiments (G_{en} and the Hall B GDH experiments) could be guaranteed to run this century. A mechanism was agreed to where the Run Plan Committee will have a telephone conference call so that user concerns can be folded into future important decisions.

The next collaboration meeting is tentatively scheduled for Jan. 8-10, 1998. The next PAC meeting is not set yet, that could have an impact on the time of the meeting. If you have a student who will do a thesis with CLAS and their name is not listed on the Hall-B web page, please send me as much information as you have (ideally, name, experiment, run group, and tentative thesis title). In most cases, there will be no controversy. My main concern right now is that a visitor to that page might wonder why such a large collaboration can have only 6 theses coming out of it!