[DIRC] good news!

[Pawel Nadel-Turonski]

Hello Everyone,

Jerry could unfortunately not be here, so the chair (Ian) was the main 
reviewer for our proposal. We did receive a very positive response 
overall, and were recommended to be funded in full. The committee had a 
few minor comments (all originally put forward by R. Klanner), for 
instance some more detailed simulations showing more quantitatively the 
impact of an extended momentum coverage on the measurement of TMDs in 
various kinematics. On one hand this requires from non-trivial theory 
input, but on the other it is something which we already discussed with 
Alexei, and something that is on his radar to accomplish over the next 
six months. They also wanted to have a more quantitative input on how 
and how much we hope to improve the various parameters that go into the 
theta_c resolution. We probably can provide some general answers to both 
of these, and perhaps some additional, comments when they present the 
written report, and hopefully have some more detailed answers by the 
time of their next meeting. The slides from all the presentations, 
including ours, can be found below.

https://wiki.bnl.gov/conferences/index.php/December_2011

Ultimately the funding decision will, as last time, be given by Tom in a 
separate announcement, but although the proposals were not rated, given 
the verbal responses to ours and the other ones, I have a feeling that 
our funding should be secure - also in view of that BNL (Tom) was 
interested in expanding the collaboration with PANDA/GSI also in other 
areas than the EIC, and wanted to organize an EIC detector workshop with 
many participants, including PANDA. The recent GSI visit must have left 
a good impression! I told him that this seemed to be a very good idea 
and that our experiences JLab with the collaboration with GSI were very 
positive. And perhaps such a workshop could also be a good opportunity 
for all of us to meet as well?

One interesting detail, which goes beyond the DIRC proposal, was also 
that the committee, and the chair in particular, said that for the next 
round of R&D proposals he wanted to see a more detailed exposition of 
the differences and requirements of the two detector designs, with a 
particular focus on small-angle detection and IR design. Given that one 
of his comments on the DIRC proposal was that he appreciated the global 
impact on the design of the central detector (following from the radial 
space budget) depending on which PID option is chosen, it seems to me 
that he shares our ideas on detector design, building it in a "top-down" 
manner, rather than Elke's approach of starting with a jigsaw puzzle and 
trying to see how one eventually can make all the pieces fit. This could 
present interesting opportunities! Abhay also underscored that a deeper 
collaboration between people involved in the BNL and JLab efforts would 
be welcome, which would be a nice change in policy from some of the 
things we have seen lately if BNL would really move in that direction. 
Thus, generally, I took away a very positive impression from this meeting.

Cheers,

     Pawel