STAR Flow, Chirality and Vorticity PWG

[Huan Huang <huang AT physics.ucla.edu>]

Fuqiang/Han-Sheng,

  I am not pleased with your sloppy work and strongly biased conclusions in this paper. If I looked at your Fig. 7, I would conclude that your ESE results have not demonstrated anything conclusive and your ESS results clearly showed that your toy model missed important physics dynamics responsible for the background that we wanted to suppress in CME searches. Your Fig. 4 already gives a hint on what aspects of hydro physics are missing in some models. So it is a good example of garbage in and garbage out. 

  You draw a strong positive conclusion about ESE in the conclusion part which is not supported by your simulations. At least, you need to have enough statistics in Figure 7 to show that ESE definitely works and ESS failed to correct for the background. But you did not bother to generate enough statistics, yet it does not stop you from drawing such a strong conclusion about ESE. From what we have studied about ESS over the past few years, the reason that made the ESS fail for the background correction in your toy model will fail your ESE method correction as well. Remember that we only intended to correct for hydro related background, and your toy model does not describe the event-by-event correlated hydro aspects in the resonance and single particles. So if you take your time and do a thorough simulation with enough statistics with the ESE method, you would find that the ESE method would fail with the toy model too. That is what we call garbage in and garbage out.

   At this moment, I do not know what you are trying to achieve with your paper. As you may know, we have been working on the ESS method for years and our paper draft is in the PWG for review. The questions you raised in the paper had been our focus as well and we tried very hard to understand limitations of our method. Yet we did not expect that you would post a sloppy work with such biased strong conclusions, which cannot even be supported by your own data points. You have failed the basic collegiate test.

   I would suggest that you withdraw the paper until you have enough statistics to support your conclusions. But I do not expect that my suggestion will be listened to based on my past experiences. But at least, you need to continue to carry out the simulations to have enough statistics and update your paper when your conclusions can be supported by your data points. I believe that you owe it to the STAR colleagues to do a decent job on this aspect. You cannot leave sloppy results and conclusions in the public literature which would hurt the STAR collaboration. If your simulations really show that some aspects can be improved in the suppression of the CME background, we would be happy to take your advice and work to improve the CME search method.

  Again this has been a surprise to me. If the work is solid and the conclusions can be supported by the simulation results, I would be happy to learn about new CME search approaches, as you may know I myself and my colleagues here at UCLA have been focusing on the CME physics for quite a while. But strongly biased conclusions and the unjustified attack on the method that we have spent many years to optimize from your paper with the quality of simulations that you have done in the paper are beyond my comprehension.

  Huan

On Mon, Jul 22, 2024 at 9:13 AM Han-sheng Li <li3924 AT purdue.edu> wrote:

Dear All,

We just submitted a CME paper to the arXiv.

You can find the paper in the following link:

https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url="http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fabs%2F2407.14489&data=05%7C02%7Cli3924%40purdue.edu%7Cc35c8e5a8e8149fd632f08dca9ea02a3%7C4130bd397c53419cb1e58758d6d63f21%7C0%7C0%7C638572069749521632%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=RZEvuxxyp0uQQ5ucGZOdtamjE%2Bll4Vm7awCJ0Nd51Uw%3D&reserved=0

Best regards,

Han-Sheng