Notes on the Jefferson Lab CLAS Collaboration Meeting

May 30 - June 1, 2002

Important Points:

1. Next Meeting:  Thursday , October 17 through Saturday, October 19 

                                        at Jefferson Lab, CEBAF Center

2. The meeting was again broadcast on the web, and the recordings are available from the archives at http://www.jlab.org/clas_collaboration/May2002/WebCastGuide.html.  Real thanks to Dan Carman who helped get this service in operation.  Because the information presented in the talks is available from this source, the following notes concentrate on the material presented and the discussion that took place at the Saturday business meeting.

3. Four new Term Members were admitted:
       Nawal Benmouna, GWU
       Olaksandr "Alex" Dzyubak, USCarolina
       Rafael Hakobyan, CUA
       Mikhail Osipenko, INFN

    

4. One Limited member was elected: 
       Andrei Afanasev, JLab

5. The Chair of the Collaboration reported on the balance of work load in reviewing papers.  At this time, for each paper three members of the appropriate Physics Working Group are chosen for the Analysis Review, then three members of the Collaboration, one of which must come from the same working group, are chosen for the CLAS Ad Hoc review.  The review committee work load has not been spread evenly throughout the Collaboration.  Two members, Steve Dytman and Stepan Stepanyan, have served on four committees, while seven members, Gary Adams, Bill Briscoe, Volker Burkert, Larry Dennis, Michel Guidal, Franz Klein and Gordon Mutchler have served on three committees.  The rest of us have done less.  In fact  57 members, not counting graduate students who are excused from this duty by custom, have not yet been asked to serve on a committee.  The CLAS members may be assured that the Coordinating Committee will strive to even out the work load.

6. There has been some confusion concerning the proper roll of CLAS Notes and CLAS Analysis documents.  The difference is that CLAS Analysis documents contain information that should be kept within the Collaboration, and is not yet for public distribution, whereas CLAS Notes  are public documents; anyone can view them on the Web, or JLab will send a copy upon request. Both kinds of documents are cataloged, presently by Elton Smith,  with appropriate identifying numbers when received.   The confusion has arisen because CLAS Analysis documents are used to support the results reported in a pending publication.  While this is a appropriate use of  CLAS Analysis documents, it is not the only use.  The goal of both of these classification is to help document the work of the Collaboration, and we certainly need more documentation.  Therefore, all members are encouraged to make use of these venues often, to report progress.

7. There is some ambiguity in our Charter as to the need for CLAS approval for a proposal being resubmitted to the PAC due to jeopardy.  Both the JLab management and the PAC consider these submissions as entirely new proposals.  Because of this, and because all proposal stand a good chance of being improved by the CLAS review process, the Coordinating Committee recommends the following addition (given by the underlined words) to our clarify our Charter on this point.  Section VIII PROPOSALS FOR RUNTIME, Part A, to read

   Proposals, including jeopardy proposals, for using Hall-B instrumentation can be submitted by members of the Collaboration only with the approval of the Physics Working Group or the full Collaboration.

   A vote on this proposed Charter amendment will take place at the next Collaboration meeting. 

8. During the discussion of item 7, it was noted that all PAC proposals stand to benefit from full CLAS participation and discussion. Because of scheduling difficulties, we have not had full CLAS presentations of PAC proposals for the past year.  We will try to correct for this omission in the future.  All members thinking of presenting proposals to the next PAC meeting in January (deadline for submission sometime in December) should be aware that we will expect a presentation to the full collaboration at the next meeting in October.

9. It has long been recognized that the present structure of the Physics Working Groups may not be the best possible.  The Real Photon Working Group deals with an admittedly complex beam line, but the physics covers a broad range, completely overlapping the other two working groups.  The problem is to choose groups that have topics that do not overlap (not possible) and that will keep the groups at approximately the same size.  At the present time we have not done well even on this last item.   The Real Photon Group has 65 members, SoN has 44 members, and Multihadron has 17 members.  One suggestion has been to make three groups entitled Structure of Hadrons, Structure of Mesons, and Structure of Nuclei.  While this is possibly a good physics separation, membership in these groups would be much more unbalanced than at present.  Good ideas to improve the current situation are always welcome.

10. A common complaint has been there during the parallel working group sessions, there are often talks of overlapping interests, at least to some, and thus some items of interest are missed.  We have tried different approaches to solve this problem in the past with poor outcomes.  We are thinking of trying another approach at the next Collaboration meeting.  We could reduce the parallel working group sessions to one session (one-half afternoon), leaving them to concentrate on technical consideration.  We could then plan several only partially overlapping physics session.  We might have three sessions divided into talks; foe example, Structure of the Nucleon, Meson Spectroscopy and Structure, Multihadron Physics, Strange Quark Interactions, and ???   Again we look forward to suggestion along these lines.

     

11. There will be some changes in the management of the CLAS collaboration starting in September because the leaders of two of the Physics Working Groups have decided to step down.  Maurik Holtrop was elected to replace Larry Weinstein as leader of the Multihadron Group.  The Structure of the Nucleon Group is presently holding a E-mail election for a replacement for Paul Stoler.  My personal thanks go to both retiring leaders, Paul and Larry, for all their help. The partly new management of our Collaboration will be: