Meeting of November 7, 2011
Please send corrections and additions to the whole list.
Phone Meeting 2
*Today's date: *11/07/2011
Next phone meeting: 11/21/2011
Present: Chou, Denig, Ritz, Essig, Wilke, Batell, Tanner, Carosi, Irastorza, Boyce, Jaeckel, Buckley, Zioutas, Holtrop, Pivovaroff, Baker, Fisher, Collar, Schuster, Cowan, Jaros, Wester, Weltman, Steffen, Echenard, Gasparian, Lindner, Toro
Meeting slides are available from:
https://twindico.hep.anl.gov/indico/categoryDisplay.py?categId=34
Our working group's website is:
https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/hspawg/Intensity+Frontier+Workshop
Meeting Summary:
John began the meeting reviewing news from the workshop organizers, including a summary of the workshop preparations and more details about the workshop goals (see slides). We also have a new name (again): "Hidden Sector Photons, Axions, and WISPs"
Matt Graham asked about the purpose of the workshop. The DoE wants to have a clear consensus emerge from the workshop that the intensity frontier is worth pursuing, that the science is interesting, and that the community is behind this program. We don't have to rank the efforts.
Peter Fisher said that the workshop intent is very clear. If we fail to produce a meaningful program as a result of this, it will be very, very bad for everyone. The workshop's success will be measured by how many people show up and show an interest in it. Moreover, having other meetings that are negative towards this effort will not advance anybody's interests.
Rouven then discussed the preliminary agenda for the working group parallel session (see slides). Many talks have been confirmed, and the agenda will be brought closer to finalization over the next two weeks. The major outstanding issue is the structure and content of the discussion sessions (see also below). Anybody not on the schedule who wants to present a talk should please contact the conveners with a title and brief abstract.
Oliver Baker asked about the poster session. We don't have enough info on this yet, but will pass it along when we receive it.
Ashok Gasparian sent an email to John with a suggestion for a talk. The conveners will discuss and reply to Ashok.
Maurik Holtrop asked if the fact that many of our experiments are cheap should be emphasized (in addition to emphasizing the interesting science of course). No objections were raised to highlighting this point. Oliver Baker also agreed, but pointed out that more costly experiments often have more influence.
Bertrand Echenard asked that the length of each talk be made clearer on the schedule. We will do that as we finalize the schedule.
John then presented some ideas for the discussion sessions (see slides). The main idea included to have short talks (strictly 5 minutes or less) to present a topic and encourage discussions.
Joerg Jaeckel suggested that we soon solicit ideas for 5 minute talks and a list of questions, and discuss these at the next phone meeting. It would also allow people that can't come to the workshop to contribute. The 5 minute talks should be structured in a way that they lead and prompt further discussion.
Peter Fisher agreed that this is a good idea. David Tanner agreed, but said that the 5 minute talks really need to be different that the other talks during the working groups. Bertrand Echenard said that it will be important to enforce the 5 minute discussion time. Another caller (sorry, didn't get name) said that the number of 5 minute talks will depend on the time available. Jason Steffen pointed out that we might also want to have discussion during the talks instead of only after each talk.
The meeting ended with another request to send in outstanding data sheets. The data sheets are available on our working group website (see link above) and may also be made available on our indico page.
William Wester mentioned the axion workshops next year, and that our intensity frontier workshop will be a good step towards that.
Thank you for a productive meeting. The next meeting will be in two weeks, 11/21/2011, 9am Pacific (same time as today). In the meantime, any feedback, comments, or suggestions are very welcome.
Comments to these Meetings that were sent to everybody
from Amanda Weltman:
Hi All
Firstly thank you for putting together these meetings - I think the long term goals here are very exciting and I hope the workshop will bring us closer to those.
I wanted to raise a few points. Firstly, I understand from yesterday that you are looking for someone to speak on Chameleon theory. I do wish I could make the meeting as I would be very happy to speak but given that it is impossible I wanted to recommend that you do find someone with a lot of experience with the theory and if possible connection to experiments. I think Amol Uphadye has broad experience in both or Justin Khoury if either is available. I emphasise this area of course because it is my own but also because I think there are a lot of subtleties in the kinds of experiments that you can do and that with creativity you can test this theory in a broad array of different kinds of experiments and in so doing test a broad range of the parameter space.
And to this end I wanted to lend support to the suggestion made after the last meeting (I believe by Zioutas) to look at space based tests for searches for these fields. The most vanilla chameleon models are best tested in space tests of gravity. Tests such as those that were planned for the next decade though I am not certain of their futures. Microscope, SEE and Galileo Galilee in particular. Clarity on these plans would be very useful and perhaps inviting or talking to people from these projects would be useful as we should try to ensure that these experiments have a component to test for axion like particles eg chameleons.
Thanks again.
Kind regards
Amanda Weltman