2. Notice of STAR meetings and reviews
A Technical Advisory Committee review meeting at LBL will be held from October 10 through October 12.3. Christies Corner
The summer collaboration meeting has come and gone here at BNL. I believe that the details on how many STAR collaborators attended, and decisions which were reached by the STAR council will be covered in other sections of this newsletter. Personally, I thought that this was probably the most interesting collaboration meeting that we've had so far.
A week after the STAR meeting PHENIX held a week long collaboration meeting here at BNL. The number of participants was similar to that for the STAR meeting. A major difference from the STAR meeting was that, with the exception of their equivalent bodies to the STAR council and the Technical committee, the entire PHENIX meeting consisted of plenary sessions. The majority of talks were given by invited theorists, which made it an interesting meeting for outsiders such as myself. I tried to glean what I could about the status of their hardware and software, but the topics were not very prominent in the talks.
The study of optimum cable tray layouts is continuing. The layouts are necessary to evaluate the fill ratio of the cable trays for different configurations of power supply locations and will be presented to the collaboration during the August meeting. Work on a full scale model (approximately 60 degree segment) of the magnet face is continuing.
The first five pad planes are in work at Buckbee-Mears and should be shipped to LBL during the second week of August.
All outer sector backers are in work at LBL and making good progress.
Most of the engineering for the Sector Mounting Tool (SMT) is complete. Key components have been selected and will be purchased for evaluation. Generation of the detailed drawings will begin next month.
Alexei Lebedev has completed preliminary experiments that verify the feasibility of a new laser calibration system design.
As part of the rebaselining effort, a new schedule for the TPC has been completed and a new cost estimate is in work.
The design of the steel is in an advanced state with many drawings ready for checking. The steel Final Design Review has been set for August 29-30 at BNL.
Considerable effort went into a detailed simulation of the data processing performed on the DAQ receiver cards. The purpose of this effort was to understand the tradeoffs between hardware design, cost and accuracy of data transformations. The fiber link evaluation board has completed its shakedown phase and is now fully functional. The design phase of the cluster-finding ASIC has passed a major milestone. The design is now complete except for the implementation of the cluster pointer memory array which awaits delivery of a software library from Mentor Graphics.
Through attempts to compute cross sections from the data stream a number of misunderstandings concerning the luminosity monitoring have been uncovered. These will be clarified at the upcoming workshop. In hardware, a very simple user interface has been completed which will download algorithms into the FPGAs for level 0. This simple point-and-click operation requires less than 10 seconds to load the bitstream into the FPGA via the VME bus. Test beam plans include a simple DAQ based on some of the level 1 ideas being developed for the trigger. The test is to take place in October behind the MPS at the AGS.
Iwona Sakrejda has spent a week at LBL coordinating with Doug Olson and Chuck McParland on the software interface to on-line computing.
July witnessed relatively little new software development because personnel focused on simulations for the upgrade proposals and the August Collaboration Meeting. Efforts continued in alternative tracking algorithms for dense environment. The first detailed schedule for the TPC-specific and event-reconstruction software was produced. Work on event visualization continued. Investigation of stereovision as a visualization technology began.
The Oracle commercial database software, which will be the principal tool for future database applications, was finally delivered to the RHIC computers at the end of July. A main focus of infrastructure activity continues to be the system design for STAR electronics and software. Another activity is the investigation of CORBA as the architecture for distributed computing for STAR.
Reported by Edward Platner
On the seventh day, the upgrade committee met to develop a set of recommendations. Their recommendations are presented in the "From the Spokesman" section of this newsletter. The committee then met with the council to present the recommendations which were unanimously approved.
One hundred twenty participants registered for this collaboration meeting. Thirty six plenary presentations and 125 working group presentations were given. Three more institutions joined the STAR collaboration: The Max Plank Institute for High Energy Physics in Munich, The Particle Physics Laboratory at Dubna and the Laboratory for High Energy also at Dubna. At this counting 60 people have joined STAR from these three institutions. See "Comings and goings at STAR" for details.
This was the second summer in a row that the banquet was held at a restaurant on the Moriches Bay. Due to the large size of our group (over 110 people) the banquet took place under tents right on the beach. The weather was cooperative with a nearly full moon presiding over the evening. Those volleyball enthusiasts who were here last year were glad to find that their well-lighted court on the sand was still available. This year the owners have installed a net fence so players didn't have to spend so much of their time diving into the water to retrieve the ball.
The food was satisfying and plentiful, highlighted by the local shellfish. Singers with guitars provided the music. During their break we were treated to Russian ballads played and sung by Alexei Lebedev from MEPhI. Long Island's choice season gave us fine food, fine weather and fine entertainment.
Alexei Lebedev
4. STAR Project Summary (from the July monthly report)
A first cut at revising the Integrated Project Schedule (IPS) has been completed. Initial iterations of revised bottoms up cost estimates for several subsystems have been received. The remainder will be submitted to the STAR Project Office in August. "Dry runs" of the presentations for the RHIC TAC review committee in October are scheduled for mid September. No progress has been made on the re-design (de-scoping) of the WAH assembly building. This task is of critical importance to STAR. Evaluation of coil proposals is progressing well with four proposals that look technically adequate. Good progress has been made on the magnet steel design. The steel FDR is scheduled for August 29-30 at BNL.
TPC Summary and Highlights
The field cage of the OFC 5-cm gas gap prototype has achieved breakdown voltages in nitrogen in excess of 120 kV. The OFC winding mandrel supports and drive system were installed. Modifications to the winding equipment and materials tests are proceeding with the help of a student from UC Davis.
Magnet Summary and Highlights
Work continued on the evaluation of proposals for the main and space-trim coils. After an initial evaluation, questions were submitted to potential vendors for clarification. Award of the coil contract is expected in early September.
Electronics Summary and Highlights
SAS2 part characterization is essentially finished. A few measurements remain to be made, but a third submission ("SAS3") has been laid out. The SCA/ADC tester has been installed at BNL. Chip testing of the 2600 devices is approximately 80 percent complete. The new case versions of the TPC power supply arrived at LBL and are undergoing reliability tests. As witnessed in Moscow, the case temperature rise is much lower in the new design.
Computing Summary and Highlights
LBL acquired an SGI workstation equipped with special graphics hardware to develop special event visualization software. The address of the machine is spica.lbl.gov.
5. Contributions
Collaboration meeting number 9
BNL hosted a seven day collaboration meeting from August 14 to 20. Three days were plenary sessions, including a day with overview and project leader presentations. Another day was given over to simulation presentations and a third day of STAR upgrade presentations. The additional days were working group sessions, one of which was shared with the upgrade committee.
6. Comings and goings at STAR
Three new institutions were welcomed into the STAR collaboration. They are the Max Plank Institute at Munich, the PPL at Dubna and the LHE also at Dubna.
7. Employment opportunities
IMMEDIATE OPENING
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics Group at Creighton University has an immediate opening for a staff physicist. The position will focus on control systems work related to the STAR experiment at RHIC. Limited opportunities will be available for teaching or participation in the NA44 experiment for candidates with an appropriate background. The applicants must have a commitment to working with undergraduate and Masters students in the environment of a comprehensive Jesuit Liberal Arts university. They must have completed a Ph.D. in nuclear or high energy physics and have a serious interest in working in the field of relativistic heavy ion physics. The ideal candidate will have a background in UNIX, have data acquisition or control system experience. The successful candidate must possess communication skills appropriate for working in a large collaboration as well as in a university setting. Applicants should contact Dr. Michael Cherney (CHERNEY@VXCERN.CERN.CH) or Dr. Janet Seger (jseger@creighton.edu) by email as soon as possible. Creighton University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE POSITION RELATIVISTIC HEAVY ION COLLISIONS
The Ohio State University
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Group at The Ohio State University invites applications for a postdoctoral research position available immediately. The successful candidate will spend half of his/her time on the RHIC STAR experiment carrying out physics simulations and/or working on hardware for the Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) and the other half on the CERN NA44 experiment which is a focusing spectrometer scheduled to begin taking data with 200 GeV/nucleon Pb+Pb collisions in the Fall of 1994. The OSU group is also a member of the E896 experiment at the AGS (H0 search) so some participation in that activity is also possible. The candidate should have strong programming skills. The OSU Relativistic Heavy Ion Group currently consists of one faculty member, one postdoctoral researcher, and three graduate students. Interested candidates should send an application consisting of a curriculum vitae, a description of research experience and interest and the names of three references to Professor Thomas J. Humanic, Department of Physics, Smith Laboratory, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 or via E-mail to humanic@ohstpy.mps.ohio-state.edu. The Ohio State University is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer and encourages all qualified candidates to apply.
FACULTY POSITION
Experimental Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics
University of California, Los Angeles
The Department of Physics at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) seeks to fill a tenure track faculty position in experimental relativistic heavy ion physics. The position is expected to be at the assistant professor level, but exceptional candidates can be considered for a higher rank. Applicants should have a Ph.D. in physics, a record of research accomplishments and a strong interest in teaching; and they will be expected to pursue a rigorous and successful research program. Current research effort at UCLA in experimental relativistic heavy ion physics include analyses of data taken at the Bevalac Dilepton Spectrometer, participation in the NA49 experiment at CERN, and a major commitment to work on the design, construction and testing phases of the STAR detector for RHIC. A program to study multiple strange baryons, especially the Ho, has been approved at the AGS. Applicants should send a resume, a publication list, and the names and addresses of three references to :
Prof. F.V. Coroniti, Chair
Department of Physics
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90024-1547
The University of California is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.