[Clascomment] OPT-IN: Electromagnetic decay of the ??*0 to ???

[Dustin Keller]

Hi Reinhard,

Thank you for your careful consideration and suggestions on our paper. 
The first suggestions you mentioned are mostly easy fixes.  In your last 
comment you mentioned that the discussion of the uncertainty when 
compensating for events lost in doing the two confidence level cuts was 
unclear.  The correction for events lost is inherent in the ratio 
calculation seen in Eq. 21 for the simplified two channel case.  In the 
original study of the confidence level cuts optimization Eq. 21 was used 
to calculate the resulting ratio from a Monte Carlo mixture of  radiative 
and pi0 decays.  The recovery uncertainty was minimized while considering 
both the level of statistics seen in the data and the statistical 
uncertainty produced in the ratio.  After using these studies to find a 
range of optimized confidence level cuts for P^a and P^b a variation of 
these cut was chosen that would lie just outside the optimization range 
for each cut.  The cut and the effect of the variation is listed in Table 
3.  For presentation clarity the numerical specifics are omitted and only 
a general statement is given however the CLAS-note 2010-015 goes into this 
type of study and is available for the general public.  We give the 
appendix to help guild a motivated reader through the calculation of the 
full ratio.  So with the acceptance terms in Table 2 and the resulting raw 
counts from the fits in each case one quickly knows the corrections for
each channel.  What maybe confusing in the discussion you mentioned is the 
phrase "recovery" uncertainty.   This is the difference between the 
ratio input to the Monte Carlo and the value recovered using the described 
analysis framework with specific confidence level cuts.  We would be 
interested in clearing up any confusion with the hope of conservatively 
adding to this discussion as to not dilute the more critical points.

thanks again,
Dustin