February 26, 2003

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Compiled by Bill Christie / Edited by T. Hallman

Present: T. Hallman (Chair), S. Vigdor, J. Thomas, H. Wieman, H.G. Ritter, D. Majka, J. Dunlop, P. Jacobs, G. Eppley, B. Christie, M. Kaplan, D. Keane

Phone Link: J. Marx

Time of Flight Proposal Report and Discussion

Dick Majka summarized the report of the STAR Committee that had reviewed the TOF proposal. The committee had two recommendations regarding the content of the TOF proposal:

1. There should be a rapid check to confirm that there are no technical integration issues for the TOF that could be "Show Stoppers".

    

2. A rough estimate of the budgetary impact of the integration issues should be compiled.

    

The Advisory Board was polled with the result that the Board strongly supported the TOF proposal for STAR, and believed it should move forward to the next step in the approval process, carrying out the above items quickly in parallel.

Report by the STAR Talks Committee Chair

Declan Keane gave a presentation to the Board on some current STAR Talks Committee policies. Various options were discussed on how to deal with various sorts of requests for STAR talks at conferences. One topic discussed was how invited talks should be dealt with. At present, everyone who is invited to give a talk on STAR results is expected to inform the Talks Committee of the invitation, but individuals are not expected to get approval before accepting the invitation.

There was discussion around the point that this policy should perhaps be changed so that in addition to informing the committee, an individual should wait to respond to the invitation until the STC gives its approval. It was noted that this is the way some other collaborations (specifically PHENIX) approach this question. It was discussed that in the vast majority of cases, the person invited to give the talk would likely be approved to to accept the invitation. The sense of the Board was that STAR should consider adopting such a policy regarding invited talks.

It was noted that Carl Gagliardi was scheduled to give a presentation to the STAR Council on Policy Issues regarding STAR talks, that this issue might be one that he and the Talks Policy Committee had already discussed. If not, the Talks Policy Committee should be asked to consider addressing this issue.

Discussion of whether to extend the Charter of the Advisory Board

The discussion centered on the fact that when the STAR Council set up the STAR Advisory Board it was explicitly stated that the utility of the Advisory Board must be revisited after one year, and that a positive vote of the STAR Council would be required to extend its charter. There was some discussion that perhaps the makeup of the Advisory should be revisited.

The point was made that the Advisoryy Board was set up to advise the STAR Spokesperson and Council Chair in carrying out their duties. Both Tim and Jay indicated that they'd found the discussions with, and advice from, the Advisory Board very useful, and that they both wanted to see it continue.

Brief discussion of any forseen issues with the FY03 Shutdown plan

The primary points raised in this discussion were:

• Jim Thomas will inquire what the SSD group's priorities and plans are

   

• The upper EEMC lifting fixture is a critical path item

   

• There may be an issue with the clear fiber production schedule for the BEMC

   

Discussion of new responsibilities of the Deputy Spokespersons

This was an informational item for the Advisory Board. Tim Hallman discussed that he had asked Jim Thomas to take responsibility for tracking the progress of new detector sub-system projects. This includes tracking projects through the design, construction, installation, and initial commissioning stages. In this role Jim will also be a point of contact for BNL Management and DOE if they have questions on the progress of ongoing STAR upgrades.

Tim also discussed that he had asked Steve Vigdor and Dick Majka to help guide the efforts within STAR related to further development of STAR's future upgrade plans. This effort involves building on the work by the Upgrades Steering Committee, Chaired by Tom Ludlam, and performing simulation studies and R&D to further define and refine the physics issues to be addressed in the future, as well as the ability of proposed detector technologies to extract this physics.

Discussion of FY03 Capital Equipment and R&D funds

• STAR received a recent disbursement of about 250 k$ for FY03 capital equipment. These were used largely for the construction of the Forward Pi Zero Detector. In addition, RCF funding allocated for STAR use was increased by approximately $150k, allowing for the purchase of a number of additional tape drives for STAR to allow synching and analyzing data at the same time efficiently.

   

• An additional 250 k$ has been requested as part of a revised FY03 request to the DOE. We should know more about these possible additional funds within a few weeks.

   

• It is also expected that information regarding the amount of R&D funds available to STAR should be known in a few weeks.