sPHENIX is a new detector at RHIC.

[David Morrison <morrison AT bnl.gov>]

Dear Collaborators,

Minutes from last Friday's general meeting, thanks to Veronica Canoa-Roman!

Cheers,
Dave

Minutes from 21st sPHENIX GENERAL biweekly meeting

[sPhenix news by David Morrison]

    QM2017:
        sPHENIX was mentioned in a number of talks.  Of particular note:
Tim Hallman's opening session and Bill Zajc's closing session
        Congratulations to Megan for an excellent talk!
    MAPS preproposal finalized and sent to BNL
        Will likely go through a BNL-organized review
        (O’Brien): There are a lot of things to take into account. We do
not know schedules or funding yet.
        New institutions interested in sPHENIX: Purdue U., Central China
Normal U. Charles U. Czech Technical U.
    Next collaboration meeting needs to be scheduled soon

[Project news by Edward O’Brien]

    A lot to do to get ready for CD1.
    new “Inner Detector Integration Task Force”. Mickey Chiu (Chair)
    MAPS:
        Q(M.Liu): Any news on maps proposal? A: There is an internal
meeting next week for this. Then they plan to expand the circle to some
other members of the collaboration.
    Possibility to do part of the MAPS assembly at CCNU in case ALICE
silicon setup at CERN is not available to sPHENIX

[Beam Test Status by John Haggerty]

    It is almost finished now.
    Great team effort and lots of fun!
    Data taken: EMCAL scan 2-16 GeV. HCAL scan 2-60 GeV. Combined scan
5-60 GeV. Quick data analysis indicate data are good quality.
Preliminary results soon.
    Personal note J.Haggerty: Calorimeters are in good shape. More
attention needs to be taken for cracks in EMCAL. EMCAL light guides need
further optimization.

[Current Tracking Issues by Tony Frawley]

    Tracking system is moving to more realistic geometry.
        Updated MAPS and INTT from cylindrical geometry to ladders.
        INTT is proving to be twice as thick in the realistic geometryt
as in the cylinder cell geometry. This caused the Upsilon mass width to
be wider than specs. RIKEN is exploring possibility to improve tracking
to mitigate this effect.
            Q: How can improving the algorithm compensate for the
material budget of INTT? A: There are indications that our tracking
software is not fully optimized for INTT.
            C: Tracking algorithm consists of track finding and track
fitting. It is surprising to think that the momentum parameters coming
from the fitting could be that wrong.
            C: Tracker depends a lot on error estimations, it is unclear
how sensitive we are at the moment to what we have.
            C: Track reconstruction for most central Hijing takes one
hour per event. That already indicates that there is a lot of room for
improvement. In comparison ALICE reconstruction takes about ~1 minute
and CMS is about ~2 minutes.
        TPC simulation is being updated too.
    Code we have now only handles one vertex. Code from M. McCumber's
code branch already use several vertexes. Some people (Gaku) will look
at that and implement in common repository.
    There is a toy model used in LiC for LHC experiments. Christof used
it to estimate raw values for resolution using our detector
configuration. Results were much better that what our current simulation
can achieve. Need further follow up on this tool assumptions. We have to
settle down few things and then go back to the toy model.
    During tracking meeting Christof also discussed about methods used
by CMS for electron tracking worth exploring.
        Q: Is it easy to read CMS code? A: No, however they also use
‘follow your nose’ method.

-- 
David Morrison  Brookhaven National Laboratory  phone: 631-344-5840
                Physics Department, Bldg 510 C    fax: 631-344-3253
                          Upton, NY 11973-5000  email: dave AT bnl.gov