OPT-IN: Photoproduction of η mesons off the proton for 1.2 < Eγ < 4.7 GeV using CLAS at Jefferson Laboratory

[Reinhard Schumacher]

Dear Volker and other FSU folks, et al.,

I am very sorry to take until the very last minute to comment on your
draft paper "Photoproduction of eta mesons off the proton for ...".
It is a nice paper and I think it has a very good  chance of
being accepted in PRC.   I have read most of it, and here are some
comments for your consideration.

page 5, Figure 3:  something looks wrong:  why are the small peaks
not spaced by exactly 2 nanoseconds?   The spacing is off compared
to all the other similar CLAS plots I have seen.

page 7 line 70+:  I do not understand what you are doing here to
define a "normalized slope" of the CL distribution.  As a reader, I am
not sure what to make of this, including the plot shown on the right
in Fig. 6.   Can this be made more clear?   What is "good" in this
case?

page 9, line 23:  use "Eq. (4)"

page 9, line 26:  fix "i and i"

page 11, line 61: What is the "Q-value correlation uncertainty"?
More broadly, the paper does not explain how the statistical
uncertainites are handled in the Q-value method.

page 12, Figure 10:  The plot symbols here seem to be to big by about
a factor of 2.   They needlessly obscure comparison between the data
sets.

page 12, line 57:  Seems like your figures are needlessly out of
order.   Why is Fig 12 shown between Figs 11 and 13?

page 15 Figure 15:  There is no purple dashed curve:  fix caption or
fix figure.

page 15, line 16:  *which* model?

Good luck with this paper.

Reinhard