Comments from our phone meeting of 17 Dec 2009 (minutes by Mike):

Hello GPC,
    Thanks for meeting today.  It appears that our chairman got disconnected at the end, but I'm glad we could touch base and I think we were about finished anyhow.
    Here is what I took away from our discussion today.  Let me know if I missed anything and I'll put a summary onto the web page.

* Paul was satisfied.  He did make the comment that we could mention pp earlier in the introduction, which is probably a good comment.  I will take a look at this.

We have added a paragraph at the very beginning of the Introduction, that we hope brings the pp focus of the paper to the beginning.  We still go into heavy ions immediately afterwards, however, since it is crucial for the motivation of this analysis.

* Michal was overall happy with the analysis and with the paper, with some further discussion:
- at the end, he wants that we mention that EMCICs will be less important at LHC due to high multiplicity, not just high energy. 

[Insertion]  Michal later followed up by email with the following suggestion for the final sentence:

"Similar, qualitatively better comparisons will be possible at the Large
Hadron Collider. The much higher incident proton energies will not only
render the conservation less problematic but also give access to
correlation analyses in several multiplicity bins allowing thus to study
EMCIC weakening directly."

Well, I don't like "qualitatively better comparisons at LHC."  Come on, this is a STAR paper.  LHC measures collisions at TeV scale and above, and we measure at 200 GeV.  Our meausrements are very nice.  We can, ourselves, come back with higher-stats measurement, to make it QUANTitatively better.  I do not want to advertise that LHC will do "better" measurements.  Putting LHC as an "outlook" is fine; it is only natural, and that's why we did it in the first place.  But let's not go too far.

Also, I thought that you didn't like the word "problematic"?!  I had used "problematic" originally, but in your comment #10 to the version 2.1, you wanted to use "important" instead, which I agree is better, so I changed it to "important" in v2.2.

Also, I want to point out that in our paper we have seen EMCICs decrease with multiplicity.  See e.g. Table VIII.  But okay, I agree this will be interesting at LHC.

OK, here's what I've done for v2.3:

"Similar comparisons will be possible at the Large Hadron Collider, where the higher collision energies will render conservation laws less important, especially for selections on the very highest-multiplicity collisions."

- we discussed some more about the CPLEAR p-pbar annihilation-at-rest HBT data.  If I understand correctly, we agreed at the end that the CPLEAR data really has no relevance to be discussed in our paper.
- he urged us to use darker colors as we tweak the figures.  We will try to do this.
- it wasn't entirely clear that he was 100% happy with my proposed compromise to combine figures 8 and 9, but he was willing to leave it to me and the journal editors ;-)

* Dave didn't bring any new big issues beyond the ones he raised in the previous two iterations, but he wanted a chance to go through everything one more time.

* Tomasz said he didn't have any huge issues, but wanted to collect his comments together over the weekend and send them by Monday.

Tomasz sent a follow-up email, to which we respond below.

* Debasish couldn't join us, but sent a short mail saying that he is satisfied with the draft and our responses to his earlier detailed comments.

    Now, Michal stressed that publication of our paper is "urgent," given the imminent release of LHC data.  I actually agree with this (having seen said data), but I do NOT want to RUSH this paper through, plowing over any actual concerns.  So, the only thing to take away is a request to identify any remaining issues on reasonably short timescale, but do NOT hesitate to identify something serious that needs work.  Although some papers do proceed in "emergency panic" state in STAR, that is really not the right way to go.

    It is up to Michal and overall GPC to make the determination, but it seems to me that we are about ready to go.  I think we agreed that folks should take a look at the paper again over the weekend, to see whether there is a major issue we have not yet identified.  If it turns out that there is not, but only small wording issues that can be handled very quickly, then I will probably ask Michal to make the call and send it on to Bedanga.

Comments from Michal Sumbera sent 21 Dec 2009
 

1. line 134: second-order oscillation about the "long" direction
-> second-order deformation around the "long" direction

????  No, this is not right.  Why "deformed?"  We will replace "about" with "around," but the correlation function oscillates, it is not deformed.

2. line 137: R_{out} and R_{side} -> R_{o and R_{s}

Oops, thanks.  I'd thought I'd caught all of those on the previous iteration

3. line 205-6: ... wavefunction integradted over the source .
-> wave function integrated over the source emission points.

Okay thanks.

4.line 224: q -> $q$

Thanks.

5. Equation (14): put first two expressions onto one line (yielding
two-line expression instead of three-line)

Well, actually, Zibi made the good point that we should explicitly indicate that the spherical harmonic functions depend on angle, so now it really has to be on three lines.  The formula doesn't format so beautifully even after I've screwed around, I do admit, but this really is something for the editor.

6. line 259: phasespace -> phase space

Okay thanks.

Comments from Tomasz Pawlak sent 22 Dec 2009

1.  Line 120: do we need definition of theta and phi angles?

Well, I don't think so.  The "out," "side," and "long" Cartesian directions were defined in previous paragraph, so I think the expressions in Equation (3) are, in fact, the definitions of those angles theta and phi.  I mean, I could also right that theta=arccos(sqrt(q_{o}^2+q_{s}^2)/q_{l}), but this really is redundant with Equation (3).

2.  Line 295: "other fits" - what abuot references?

Okay thanks.  We have added a citation to Brown (2005) about the spline fits, and to Kittel:2001 and Kittel:2005 (a book together with De Wolf) on the others.

3. Figure 1: Correlation functions are not normalized. Is normalization parameter N fitted?

Yes, as shown in the fitting function in equation (5) and also mentioned in the second paragraph of Section II.C, the normalization N is an explicit fit parameter.  We generally do not list its value in the tables, or plot its value, as it is not of physical interest.

4. Table VI: deltaQinv - maybe better    \delta_sup{Q_sup{inv}}  ?

Ah thanks, good catch!  It should actually be simply \delta.  Fixed now.