[d2n-analysis-talk] Referee comments on A1n letter

[Diana Parno]

Hello d2n,

Last week I heard back from the Physics Letters B editor about our A1n letter submission (attached). The referees were generally positive (I’ve attached their full reports) and we have a little less than two months to revise and resubmit. I’ve already made some progress addressing their concerns, but there are a few items where I would greatly appreciate the guidance of the group. The attachment labeled “ResponseToReviewers” gives a numbered list of each reviewer’s comments, and I’ll refer to those numbers here. These are the items that require some non-trivial amount of additional work and/or a judgment call about how we want to position the paper. What do you think about these?

Reviewer 1, item 5 (migration between x bins in BigBite): I’ve already talked with David a bit about this, and he remembers doing a small study on how electron energy loss affected bin assignment (but will have to dig into his notes). I took a very look at the kinematics plots for the 4.74-GeV data set and, in the DIS range we’re reporting in this letter, most of the counts are fairly central within the x-bin. We see about a 25% drop in counts between one edge of the x-bin and the other, with an approximately linear falloff in between. My gut says this is not a huge effect given our energy resolution but I don’t have numbers to back this up.

Reviewer 1, item 7 (world fits): David and I have already talked about this and it seems the COMPASS data were casualties of last-minute thesis chaos. He’s already planning to redo the world fits on the timescale of the next week or two.

Reviewer 1, item 9 (including JAM parameterization in Fig. 1 of A1n vs x): Personally I think the reviewer makes a good point; we do assume the Q^2-independence of A1n in our extraction. In discussions between Wally and David everyone agreed that it didn’t make sense to plot the JAM parameterization at a very different Q^2 value for the flavor-separated PDF ratios, but I don’t think those arguments apply to Fig. 1. We might even consider plotting the JAM fits with and without explicit quark OAM, which is a nicer comparison for A1n than LSS(BBS) versus the much later Avakian et al parameterization.

Reviewer 1, item 10 (including A1n world data from deuteron targets): My vague recollection is that we stuck with 3He out of tradition and a desire not to clutter the plot. I am still a little concerned about cluttering the plot but would be willing to give it a try. It’s not hard to get those published A1n data.

Reviewer 1, item 12 (including g1p data in the world fit, scaled by some reference value of F1): This question seems tougher to me. I am not immediately sure how well fixed F1p is in this kinematic range (although it must have been measured a lot?) and what kind of systematics we might introduce this way. I’m sure David and Zein-Eddine have thought about this …

Reviewer 1, item 13; Reviewer 2, item 5 (constructing PDF ratios from different experiments): While I see the reviewer’s argument, this strikes me as a lot of work to do on other people’s data and I am not persuaded that the results would be very comparable to our data points. At the same time I don’t want to discount the other work that’s out there, and the caption is already rather long for adding in another explanation of why we don’t plot [fill in work here]. And there is the fact that both reviewers thought something was clearly missing.

Reviewer 1, item 17; Reviewer 2, item 8 (upcoming JLab A1n experiments): Perhaps I oversold the check of Q^2 dependence! I can reword that. I think the reviewer’s other point, that the placement of this advertisement at the end undercuts our results, is probably a good one. We could shift the advertisement a paragraph earlier, to line 249 in the revised draft. If we go into a little bit more detail about the possible sensitivity of those experiments as suggested by Reviewer 2 (and is that sensitivity something we want to comment on?) then I definitely think we should move this discussion a little earlier in the paper.

Reviewer 2, item 3 (figure defining angles): It looks like the first three figures don’t even count against the length requirement, so we have plenty of room for this figure. I think I even prepared one for my thesis, too, so I can just use that.

So … what are your thoughts?

Thanks,
Diana

Attachments:
A1nLetter-FirstSubmissionPLB.pdf — For reference, this is what we submitted to Phys. Lett. B last month.
Reviewer1-plB-D-14-01723.pdf — Full report from Reviewer 1.
Reviewer2-plB-D-14-01723.pdf — Full report from Reviewer 2.
ResponseToReviewers_01302015.pdf — Point-by-point listing of both reviewers’ comments, with a draft of our response for each item I have addressed as of today.
A1nLetter_01302015.pdf — Partially revised paper, current as of today.

----------------------------------------------------
Diana S. Parno
Acting Assistant Professor
Associate Director, CENPA
Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics
University of Washington
Box 354290

Email: dparno at uw.edu
Tel.: (206) 543-4035

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