sPHENIX is a new detector at RHIC.

[Ron Belmont <belmonrj AT gmail.com>]

Hi Anabel, All,

Many congratulations to the authors and analyzers on this very nice paper!  It does a great job of explaining clearly and in detail the construction of the blocks and of the prototype, and of the calibration and analysis procedures.  I have some mostly minor comments.  I've tried to avoid duplicates with Dennis and Jin, though there may be a few.

Cheers,

Ron

Overall comments:

1) The paper is written largely in the past tense.  Stylistically I prefer the present tense, but there's nothing inherently wrong with the choice of past tense.  However, it does lead to some odd-sounding and incorrect statements.  For example:

L181-183: "The beam was composed mainly of electrons, muons and pions, and their relative abundances depended on the energy."  This sounds weird, and is misleading and/or wrong, because it seems to imply that the beam is no longer composed of those particles and that the relative abundances no longer depend on the energy.  It would be clearer and more accurate to write this sentence in the present tense.

L186: "The beam had a nominal momentum spread..." as with the previous example, one has to think the beam still has the same nominal momentum spread.

2) The paper is missing a lot of serial commas.  For example:

L42-43: "electrons, positrons and photons" should be "electrons, positrons, and photons"

L182: "electrons, muons and pions" should be "electrons, muons, and pions"

L330: "a, b and c" should be "a, b, and c"

3) The paper italicizes the g for grams but it shouldn't, e.g. on L91 and L111.

4) Unfortunately I don't have any good specific suggestions, but Conclusion section is a bit short and abrupt.

Specific comments:

L24-32: These four sentences would probably read a lot more nicely if they were merged into two sentences.

L108: "The finished EMCal block" should be "A finished EMCal block" (since the EMCal block in Fig 2 is not the only EMCal block in the world)

L133: "Since the SiPM signal is sensitive to the temperature" I think this would be nicer/clearer as "Since the SiPM gain is sensitive to the temperature"

L171: In the 2016 beam test paper we gave a specific citation for RCDAQ (Martin's webpage).  It'd be good to do that here as well.

L176: I think MT6.2C refers to the entire hut and not just the table per se.

L216: "an approximate sigma of 3.5 cm" this sounds odd---since that's coded by hand in the simulation, it must have some exact value. Also, you haven't defined sigma.

L221: It'd look nicer to have spaces around the = sign for the Birks' constant.

L243: It looks odd to see "good" in italics.  Maybe it'd be clear to say something like "cleanly identified electrons, which we will hereafter refer to as good electrons" or something like that.

L304: This is a very smart use of the word uniforming.  Great job!

Table 2: These parameters are percentages but not indicated as such.

L349: The text here says "0.5x1.0" but Table III and Figure 9 say "1.0x0.5", it'd be good to be consistent throughout.

On Tue, Feb 4, 2020 at 11:38 AM Romero Hernandez, Anabel <acr4 AT illinois.edu> wrote:

Dear sPHENIX collaborators,

Attached is a draft of the 2018 EMCal testbeam paper for your review. The target journal is IEEE TNS. The paper includes a draft author list. The spokespeople will inform the collaboration on the procedure for finalizing the author list. We would greatly appreciate any comments, if they could be submitted by the end of the day on February 18.

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the EMCal v2.1 testbeam efforts!

Best,

Anabel on behalf of the EMCal testbeam team

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Ron Belmont (he/him/his)

Chair-elect, RHIC/AGS Users' Executive Committee

Research Scientist, Department of Physics & Astronomy

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

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