[Clascomment] OPT-IN: Comment on the narrow baryon peak reported by Amaryan et al.

[Hicks, Kenneth]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your comments.  I will stop by at your office later today and 
perhaps we can work together to further improve the draft paper.

Best regards,
Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: clascomment-bounces at jlab.org [mailto:clascomment-bounces at jlab.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Carman
Sent: Monday, November 14, 2011 8:14 AM
To: clasmbr at jlab.org; clascomment at jlab.org; battaglieri at ge.infn.it; burkert at jlab.org; hovanes at jlab.org; griff at physics.wm.edu; mestayer at jlab.org; schumacher at cmu.edu
Subject: [Clascomment] OPT-IN: Comment on the narrow baryon peak reported by Amaryan et al.

Folks,

I have read the note prepared on the reply to the Amaryan et al
preprint. I include my comments below. Let me know if you have any
questions.

General remark - I think that some of the issues raised in this
paper are not clearly communicated. However, I do believe that the 
main kernel of this reply, the statistics associated with the purported
signal before and after the t-cut is sound. I find that the second section, 
"CLAS Collaboration Internal Reviews", adds very little in its current state. 
Also several statements in the section "Statistical Anomalies" are strongly 
stated, but I do not believe them to be correct.

1). Page 1:
  - Paragraph 1
    > Line 7. Notation problem with "\gamma p K_s" system".
    > Line 9. You should use "above the background".

2). Page 2:
  - I do not agreed that this particular analysis was reviewed for nearly
    4 years. Analysis reviews involving Moscov et al certainly have gone on
    for this long, but his current preprint is not the analysis that was
    first reviewed.
  - The sentence "The vote failed." is awkward. Better to say that the CLAS
    Collaboration found in its vote that the analysis results did not support
    the conclusions in the paper and thus the collaboration could not endorse
    it for publication.

3). Page 3:
  - The sentence "However, within a priori justification of the particular
    value of a cut selection, it is simply not possible to assign a 
    meaningful statistical significance or degree of confidence in the
    analysis result." is a strong statement that I do not believe is
    correct.
  - The sentence "If the peak corresponds to a new state, we should also
    expect to see a peak in the specta before the cuts, ..." is also not
    a fully reasonable statement to make. Reactions with very small cross
    sections do not easily reveal themselves in raw spectra.

4). I do not like the label "ODU group". The ODU group is more than just
    Moskov et al and lumping them all today is not appropriate.

Regards, 
Daniel
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