[Clascomment] OPT-IN: Shrunken particles pass freely through nuclear matter

[Reinhard Schumacher]

                                                      June 28, 2011
Hello Lamiaa et al.,

The results shown in your paper "Shrunken particles pass freely
through nuclear matter" look interesting (Figs. 2 and 3).  The target
journal is Nature, and I am not that familiar with their requirements.
The way you wrote the paper is not at all compatible with Physical
Review style, and it would be rejected instantly by Phys Rev Lett or
Phys Rev C.  My comments are colored by a bias toward these other
journals.

Who is the audience for this paper?  My concern about this draft paper
is the combination of the large number of qualitative, yet
jargon-laden, statements that you make.  A general reader will not be
able to learn much, I believe.  I would strive to define, at least in
words, many more of the concepts that you mention near the beginning
of the paper.

Title: It is an overstatement.  You claim at most a "14% reduction in
reabsorption" relative to the Glauber prediction.  And your claim
applies only to one type of meson, not generic "particles".  How about
the title "Nuclear matter more transparent to shrunken rho mesons"?

Page 2: Examples of lack of clarity that a general reader will
experience are: "color transparency" (line 7) is not defined in any
operational sense; "square of its size" (line 13) leaves unclear
whether you mean area (radius^2), area^2 (radius^4), volume
(radius^3); "A-dependence" and "diffractive dissociation" (line ~27);
"momentum transfer" (line ~34) means what?; "factorization" (line
~39).  All these things could be defined, if they are necessary to
explain the scientific result you are presenting.

Page 3: 2nd paragraph: in what sense is the rho a "tool of choice" due
to its production mechanism?  You might mention here how its
production mechanism is "simple" by saying something about the Vector
Dominance Model that you seem to be alluding to.  The claim of
transverse size scaling as 1/Q is *crucial* to understanding this
paper, yet you don't give a reference to where this is explained.  The
word "Intuitively" should be removed: the statement is not intuitive
to non-experts and only serves to make you seem arrogant to the
reader.

Page 4: Near the top of the page you introduce the results of the
experiment in Figure 2.  This is prior to any discussion of the
experiment in terms of equipment, data analysis methods, or
uncertainties.  This would not fly with Phys Rev.  Maybe it's OK in
Nature, but I find it jarring.  Why don't you include all three
calculations in Figure 3, even if the other two just predict the
slope?  Leaving off those other two results seems guaranteed to annoy
the creators of those other models.  Besides, I don't want to have to
bother translating the given numbers into how they would look on the
graph compared to the experimental error bars.

Page 5: How do you come up with the 14% and 7% numbers? It was not
obvious to me from the preceding numbers.  What are the uncertainties?
I would fail you for this omission of error estimates in a lab course!
Please specify these results more carefully.

References:  there are multitudinous spelling and punctuations errors.

I look forward to seeing the next draft,
Cheers,
Reinhard.