[E02013] GEn prl

[Pete E.C. Markowitz]

Hi Bogdan, Gordan, Nilanga, and Seamus,

Congratulations!  The reviewers obviously agreed that the results
are important and that the collaboration did a good experiment.  I think 
you also were able
to answer their comments.

As a collaborator, I do have a couple of questions but I doubt
that you need to change your draft to answer them.

One of the reviewers asked about overlapping data with other experiments,
and you mentioned the low Q2 point under analysis (but it not in the paper).
Could you tell us what the status of that point is?  When might the analysis
be completed on that point, and is there a preliminary number which
you can share with us now?

You are all doing an commendable job of pursuing the systematic 
uncertainties, and
I applaud you for implementing the change between the May 2010 results 
and the
present October 2010 results. The change is modest (and basically brings 
us back to
December 2009).  But having 3 sets of numbers in 10 months might suggest 
that the
numbers are possibly not quite final?  Are there any issues you know of 
which could again change the
results?

One intriguing comment was regarding the Plaster results.  The disagreement
is slightly less with the (new) October 2010 results, but the point that 
the results may not
be compatible escaped me until the reviewer pointed it out.  Plaster was 
deuterium,
and this 3He result has different systematics but the GEn values are 
still more than 1 sigma
away from each other.  [Your new fit sort of splits the difference, and 
your statement that
it is about the same fit even without the new data suggests that the 
final point from Plaster
may be inconsistent with the other previous data.]  However, any 
discrepancy is de-emphasized
in your current paper, especially by removing the lower panel in Fig. 
2.  Although the results in
the upper panel might be consistent, the results from the May 2010 lower 
panel of Figure 2
look like they could not be consistent.  Was that why it was removed?  
It obviously does
not save any real space, since you blew up the top panel.

     -pete

On 10/23/10 4:10 PM, Bogdan Wojtsekhowski wrote:
> Dear Collaborators,
>
> We have received a response from PRL which was quite positive.  Two of
> the referees made some constructive suggestions for changes, and we
> have modified the manuscript accordingly.  Attached to this email,
> please find three documents.  One, labeled GEn_update.pdf, is the
> updated manuscript, with all sentences in the text that have been
> changed highlighted in blue.  The second, Response_to_ed.txt,  is,
> as the name suggests, the text we have prepared to send back in an
> email to the editors.  Finally, we also include a document containing
> the response from prl (From_editor.txt).
>
> We note that since the time we submitted our paper to prl and the
> arXiv, we discovered a 3% (relative) error in our target polarimetry.
> Half of this was a bug in a target-polarimetry code, and the other
> half was due to a systematic that, in previous He-3 experiments, was
> negligible, but because of the high performance of the GEN target,
> became large enough (~1.5%) to worry about.  We have made the
> appropriate adjustments to the results that appear in the abstract and
> the tables, and have also noted this in the attached response to the
> editors.  We also needed to increase the target polarimetry error from
> 4% to 4.7%, which has very little effect on our overall error.
>
> Please send any comments over the next week.  We would like to
> resubmit on Friday, October 29th.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Bogdan, Gordon, Nilanga and Seamus

-- 
Dr. Pete E.C. Markowitz       Florida International University
Internet: markowit at fiu.edu        Fellow of the Honors College
Phone: (305) 348-1710                       Physics Department
FAX:   (305) 348-6700                    CP209 Miami FL, 33199