[Clascomment] OPT-IN: Subthreshold photoproduction of phi mesons from deuterium

[John Price]

Gee, Reinhard, you really shouldn't mince words like this...  :)

I'm not going to presume to lecture you on this, because, well, you're
smarter than I am, and I would look foolish.  However, I do have one
point to make regarding your comments:

On Fri, 2010-04-09 at 11:07 -0700, Reinhard Schumacher wrote:
> At the bottom of page 2 you point out that the threshold for phi
> production is at 1.57 GeV, but soon the reader finds that you select
> the photon energy range of 1.65 to 1.75 GeV for the results you
> report.  Thus, your results are not \"sub-threshold\", but \"near
> threshold\".  Am I missing something here?  You owe it to the reader to
> acknowledge this, and to comment on its meaning for interpreting your
> results.

I'm not trying to put words into the authors' mouths here (although that
might not be a bad thing...), but if I understand it correctly, the
value of 1.57 GeV is for all the reaction products moving straight down
the beam pipe.  Such an event would not be detectable by CLAS.  In order
for us to see the event, there must be some center-of-mass motion of
these particles as well, to give them some perpendicular momentum so
that we can see them.  The energy for this must also be budgeted in to
the incident photon energy, but "shouldn't" count as contributing to the
production itself.

That's not the best way to say that, of course; some further
wordsmithing would be necessary to get it to the "first-draft" level,
let alone publication-quality.  I agree with you in general that the
paper is not ready for publication.

John

-- 
John W. Price
Professor of Physics
CSU Dominguez Hills
310-243-3403