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STAR Newsletter #96September 2002 |
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| Star Home Page |
Editor: Howard Matis
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STAR Newsletter #96September 2002 |
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| Star Home Page |
Editor: Howard Matis
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Tim Hallman is on travel in Italy and the Ukraine and so it is my pleasure to say a few words on behalf of the Spokesman's office.
This is STAR News Letter #96 and historians will note that the Newsletter has been published continuously since 1993. It is only through the dedicated efforts of the Editor that the Newsletter makes it into print and, this month, I would like to express my appreciation for the work that Howard Matis has done for us since September 2000. Howard's newsletter is an invaluable resource and it is a major source of news and communication for the collaboration. Howard will be stepping down from the Editor's position at the end of this month and this will be the last time that his name appears on the masthead. Thank you Dr. Matis! A new editor has not yet been appointed and volunteers are strongly encouraged to contact the spokesman's office.
Congratulations to everyone who attended or participated in Quark Matter 2002. Barbara Erasmus and the Nantes team hosted an outstanding collaboration meeting and the Quark Matter conference was one of the best that I have ever attended. The transparencies are on the web and can be found at:
http://alice-france.in2p3.fr/qm2002/ScientificProgram/program.htm
Now that the meetings are over, please don't forget to prepare your written contributions for the proceedings. They must be finished by September 15th and submitted to the collaboration for comment so that we can make the final submission to the QM folks by September 30th.
Two important meetings were held at BNL shortly after the QM conference. The first meeting was the RHIC Facility Review. This is an annual exercise in which a group of officials from the DOE, and outside scientists, come to BNL to review our progress. All of the collaborations made presentations and STAR was recognized for its outstanding scientific productivity. Overall, the review panel applauded the scientific program and encouraged our work. However, they did not like the proposed plan to upgrade RHIC and the detectors in one large effort. Rather, they felt that the electron cooling upgrade for the accelerator should be decoupled from the detector upgrades. Thus eRHIC has taken on a new meaning: "e" means extended. Extended-RHIC is the new name for the old eRHIC proposal plus the electron cooling project, and all detector upgrades that were dependent on the electron cooling project. Independently, we anticipate significant funding over the coming 5 years for detector upgrades not tied directly to electron cooling upgrade.
The Program Advisory Committee meeting was the second meeting of interest that took place in August. The main purpose of the PAC was to approve our beam use request. It came out pretty much as expected and so the 2002-2003 run will include a long run with deuterons on gold, a short run with polarized protons, and 1 week for beam diagnostic studies with the possibility of doing low luminosity physics during the week
Important dates to remember are:
- September 9 -12 - SPIN2002 at BNL
- October 7 - the detector rolls into the collision hall for the last time,
- October 9-12 - DNP meeting at MSU
- Week of October 21 - Trigger workshop and Star Analysis meeting at BNL
We will start taking data on January 3, 2003 after a RHIC machine startup on December 1.
No contribution this month.
As I indicated in my presentation at the recent STAR Collaboration meeting in July, a number of STAR sub system schedules have slipped relative to the STAR shutdown schedule. To gather the most current status and schedule information from the various sub systems, and then to arrive at a final, optimized overall STAR schedule for the remainder of the current shutdown period, a STAR Operations planning meeting was held at Brookhaven on August 19th. A key date for this exercise is the schedule for RHIC collider commissioning. The Collider Accelerator Department (C-AD) schedule for RHIC operations shows the collider rings cold, and collider commissioning starting on December 1st. The updated STAR schedule can be found on the Web at the following address: http://www.bnl.gov/STAR/STSG/newshutdown.htm.A general observation from this latest schedule exercise is that with the installation tasks still planned to be done during this shutdown period, and then the debugging and testing effort necessary to get STAR ready to take physics data again, that time is getting short. Ralph Brown is currently working on generating a resource loaded schedule given the updated STAR shutdown schedule. Ralph and I will meet soon with our C-AD Liaison engineer (Al Pendzick) and the head of the C-AD Experiment Support and Facilities Division (Phil Pile) to go through the STAR schedule in detail and try and line up the various resources necessary from C-AD to accomplish the plan.
No Contribution this month.This guest column is the first of what I hope to be a regular feature of the newsletter. If you wish to volunteer for a future edition please contact me. - editor
FTPC (from Volker Eckardt)
A new production run of minimum bias data was performed after the correction of a mapping error and the inclusion of better calibration parameters. About 80k complete events and ~320k events with one sector missing are available for further studies and physics analysis. The previous distortions in the phi-distribution of the East-FTPC are gone and flow studies have started. Precise measurements with the drift velocity monitor show small systematic time-dependent shifts which we are still investigating.
Slow Controls (from Mike Cherney)
The process of power up and configuration all of the EMC electronics including the 30 Tower crates, the 8 SMD crates, and the TDC crate was automated. Development of the user interface for EEMC has been created and tested with simulated electronics. A tutorial for new EPICS users was developed. Two new users have been trained.
EMC (from Jose Riso)
No contribution this month.
TPC (from Blair Stringfellow)
No contribution this month
Level 3 Trigger
No contribution this month.
Endcap EMC (from Will Jacobs)
Retrofit and repair of all 23 radiator laminates are just finished (on 9/5) for the Endcap EMC lower half. Stacking and assembly of the structure will be completed next week. A truck is arranged for shipping to BNL on Saturday September 21; the active elements will be packed and shipped a day later. On September 30, we plan to begin mounting on the west poletip. Many other installation activities are proceeding in parallel.
Photon Multiplicity Detector (Subhasis Chattopadhyay)
No Contribution this month
TOFp - (Bill Llope and Frank Geurts )
No Contribution this month
Before starting this new section, I would like to thank the Collaboration for all its support and attention given to Software and Computing issues. In particular, at the last Collaboration meeting (see the Software & Computing session), the collaboration at large, the STAR management and the Physics working group conveners recognized and endorsed two of the main projects which are critically important for our Physics goals: the Integrated Tracking Task Force and the DAQ100 Cluster Finder evaluation.
DAQ100 Cluster Finder
As advertised at the Collaboration meeting, it is time to make a serious effort in evaluating the DAQ100 Cluster Finder (developed by Tonko Ljubicic and Jeff Landgraf) on our data analysis quality before switching to this mode of operation.
Feedback was required from the PWG conveners in addition to what was done in the past. As of today, we have received an overwhelming number of comments and suggestions - so far none.
Integrated Task Force
Another important task is the review of the work of the Integrated Tracker Task Force (ITTF). The review meeting was therefore announced and advertised in Nantes. This will be an important turn for STAR, since this work will greatly impact on our Physics program and capabilities.
In addition to the verbal support we got during our meeting in Nantes, the special attention and interest this project is generating was made clearer in last month's newsletter.
As a reminder, this effort was initiated as we recognized the need for a better tracking precision and efficiencies, but also since the inclusion of several new sub-systems requires a more transparent way to simultaneously use the information from all detectors. Furthermore, in the light of our Physics program and the number of events required for the proposed future analysis, a new tracker is a necessary step to make our new Physics goals achievable.
The dates for the review have been fixed to be on September 23 and 24. It will be held at BNL and everyone is invited to join.
The committee will be presided by Rene Bellwied from Wayne State University. Karel Safarik from Alice and Alan Poppleton from Atlas. We would also like to thank all who have agreed to be on the committee. Special thanks to Jim Thomas (deputy Spokesman) and Morton Kaplan (STAR Council) who have also accepted our late invitation.
This section contains summaries of the status of the physics working groups. These articles are in a protected area for STAR collaboration members only. This link uses the standard STAR account and password for physics results. If you do not have this information, please contact your council representative.
No contributions this month
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Fellowship in Experimental High Energy Nuclear Physics (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Nuclear Science Division is seeking a scientist with outstanding promise and creative ability in the field of experimental high energy nuclear physics. The appointment will be as Divisional Fellow for a term of five years with the expectation of promotion to Senior Scientist. The successful candidate will have several years of experience beyond the Ph.D. in nuclear or particle physics and will be expected to assume a leadership role in the Relativistic Nuclear Collisions (RNC) Program at LBNL.The RNC group has a key role in the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The group currently has a strong physics program in nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and intends to become a major player in spin physics. Candidates having an interest in spin physics at RHIC are encouraged to apply.
Applicants are requested to E-mail a curriculum vitae, list of publications, statement of research interests, and the names of at least five references, no later than October 1, 2002, to afnsemployment@lbl.gov and to hgritter@lbl.gov. Please reference job number AF/014946/code in your cover letter. Berkeley Lab is an EEO/AA employer.
Postdoc (Creighton University)
The High Energy Nuclear Physics group at Creighton University seeks applicants for a postdoctoral Research Associate position, beginning immediately. Applicants should have a Ph.D. and an interest in ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions and/or hardware controls systems. Successful candidates should want to work with undergraduate students on the STAR experiment. He/she would have the option of being based at BNL. Additional information about the department can be found at http://physicsweb.creighton.edu. Applicants should email a statement of their research interests, their CV and the names and email addresses of three references toProf. Michael Cherney
Physics Department
Creighton University
2500 California Plaza
Omaha, NE 68178Creighton University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.
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