While in Germany last week, I met with Werner Hoffman and Stefan
Wagner of the HESS collaboration, two of our counterparts on the
committee that has been formed to discuss cooperation between our
collaborations. The HESS team continues to produce exciting results,
and they do have a strong interest in working with us to get the best
science.
During these discussions, there were three points that should be
useful for us to start with. At some point before too long, we
should arrange a meeting of the full 8-person committee. That may
have to be a teleconference, unless we tie it to some other meeting
like the LAT Collaboration meeting in Stockholm. Here are the three
topics that I found of particular interest:
1. We agreed that a useful starting point for discussion would be for
each team to develop a "wish list" of what they would like from the
other team. This list will certainly be science-driven. It can give
us some very specific topics on which to build our discussions. An
example from the HESS side would be a wish that LAT would provide
them information about ANY flare from low-z AGN, even if the flare is
below our threshold for public announcement. A wish from the LAT
side might be any HESS information available (detection or upper
limit) about any source seen by LAT whose spectrum might extrapolate
to the HESS threshold. There have already been some good discussions
of such topics within Julie's TeV group. I suggest we enlist that
group to help develop the list from the LAT side. I am sure each of
you has some topics that can be added to this list. Please circulate
your thoughts among our group, then plan to assemble a draft list to
send to our HESS colleagues.
2. The HESS publication policy as currently formulated is that all
HESS collaboration members are on every publication. That policy may
evolve, but that is where it now stands. They seemed interested in
our Category 1/Category 2 approach. They certainly recognize the
possibility of having results that do not stand alone (such as upper
limits in one energy range that provide only modest constraints on
detections seen in the other band). What they asked is that our
committee come up with a proposal to take to the HESS collaboration
for a modification of the publication policy. We need something in
between a long list of specific rules and a wide-open "deal with it
on a case-by-case basis." We clearly need to work with our HESS
counterparts on what might be feasible. We do need to be aware that
we are talking about changing a policy that affects the whole HESS
collaboration. Any thoughts?
3. The HESS team has a concern about confidentiality. There is an
interest in sharing preliminary and tentative results, but they need
some reassurance that telling the LAT team does not automatically
make results public, especially to the other TeV groups. The LAT team
has a significant connection to the MAGIC and VERITAS collaborations,
in particular. The HESS group understandably prefers that
preliminary results shared with the LAT team do not get announced at
the next meeting of these other collaborations. My analogy is to the
process of refereeing papers. When we do that, we treat the results
in confidence and agree not to discuss or publicize the paper
contents. We need to educate the LAT team that HESS results marked
PRELIMINARY should be treated in the same way - not for distribution
and should not show up on public LAT Web sites. Can we do this, or is
the LAT collaboration so large that we should not make any promises
about confidentiality?
These same questions will (and have) come up with the other TeV
groups. Let's draw on that experience and extend it as we work with
the HESS team.