Dear SNEWSers, Thanks to all for the meeting. Here are the minutes. Kate. ============================================================ News and status reports: ------------------------ -- Super-K (Mark Vagins and Yoshiyuki Fukuda): All running, no change in status. -- MACRO (Alec Habig): PMT gains have just been reset. MACRO will continue to run until at least May 2000. It's not clear how long it will run after that. -- LVD (Pietro Antonioli, Carlo Vigorito): Tower 3 is being completed, which will bring the total mass up to 1 kton. There will be no streamer tubes at first, but this is not a problem for supernova burst detection since muons are vetoed using scintillator coincidences. -- AMANDA (Adam Bouchta): Mainz University has joined the supernova effort. A new SN DAQ, which will serve 470 PMTS, is being readied for the new season; it's been tested in the lab. It will be installed at the South Pole in December and it's expected to be up and running by February. The new time resolution is unclear, but it might be as good as 1 millisecond. They have done some preliminary studies of template matching, i.e. how well they can extract time information in the AMANDA using a given Super-K time profile; they may be able to time the pulse to 10 ms or so. -- SNO (Art McDonald and Clarence Virtue): It's "steady as she goes": the data continues to roll in and they are fine-tuning and doing calibrations. Radioactive background levels still looking very good. Uptime is better than 80%. Clarence reported on the supernova monitor: it will report on a burst within a few minutes. Currently, the alarm is emailed to a list of a few experts, but within a week or too, the system will be modified to alert the detector operators in the case of an alarm, and they are preparing a set of instructions. The issue of alarms for SNEWS and automation will be brought up at the next collaboration meeting (Dec 11-13). They expect that within a few months a SNEWS alert sent after human-checking will be approved, and automated alerts may follow after that. -- OMNIS: Alex Murphy could not connect unfortunately (primarily my fault for not scheduling earlier). Here's his emailed report: > As to the report, as I said, we have successfully applied for $100,000 > from the university (no overhead too... it really is that much) for a > postdoc for 2 years. Also included in that money is funds for a > consultant electrician (we know who we want... and just to sort out how > to make the electronics cheaply but *reliably*), and for some minor > equipment. maybe another prototype, DAQ, and/or a few 100 T of lead. The > postdoc position is open immediately, and we welcome applications! Also > as I said before, the postdoc is to persue the traditional nuclear > physics aspects of our group, giving me more time to focus on the OMNIS > proposal. > > As to the status of OMNIS... Dick Boyd and David Cline are going to > Washington on, I think, Dec 17th, to meet with Peter Rosen and a few > others. This is in preparation for an NSF proposal which would be a line > item (hence, minimum time of review is greater than 1 year). The CARUS (aka > WIPP) is playing a supportive role, and their engineers and graphic > people have made/are making some wonderful technical drawings and also > artistic views (as one might see in Scientific American etc) of what OMNIS > might look like. Technically the former is much more needed than the > latter, but the pretty pictures will fill a hole that we've had until this > date in trying to advertise! > > Measurements of the intrinsic radioactivity of lead and steel have been > shown to be within our acceptable limits (lead rather better than > steel...) and so we continue to see no major technical hurdles to impede the > project. Coordinated Downtime -------------------- For Super-K and SNO, the scheme outlined at the last meeting (website with entries maintained by reps at each experiment) is to be approved at the next collaboration meetings (Dec 2-4 and Dec 11-13 respectively), but it will probably be no problem. For LVD it's already OK. I will set up the website over the next week. Timing Tests ------------ Clarence reported on the meeting we had at NRC in October with timing calibration expert Rob Douglas (Clarence, Mike Schwendener and myself in attendence), and subsequent work. The plan has evolved somewhat. There are now three parts to the timing test plan: 1. Surface GPS systems 2. Time transport underground 3. Time stamp of light in the detectors. For #1, Rob Douglas suggested a traveling GPS system that can be moved from lab to lab (cost $3000-5000 Cdn). He has some NRC that could be used for this. For #2, we would need a time interval counter (TIC), which would be moved from the surface to the underground lab to measure frequency variations of the signal; it would then be brought back to the surface for a "closure" measurement. Cost is about $10000 Cdn. For #3 (the "alarm clock"), we could possibly use an LED driven by a pps signal; #2 and #3 could maybe be combined. Such a system could be tested at SNO on a 2-3 month timescale, depending on resources available; also depending on resources it could also be tested at other labs in parallel. It may well be possible to have a true inter-experiment test by June 2000. Pietro reported that the director of LNGS is supportive of the SNEWS project and the timing test idea, and passed on a suggestion by Walter Fulgione to form a timing subgroup for SNEWS, to deal with technical issues. We agreed that this was an excellent idea. Security Work ------------- Alec will be working on two major improvements to security: 1. PGP signing of alarm messages from the coincidence server. 2. Secure socket implementation for the actual datagrams. AAS meeting ----------- Alec reported on the AAS meeting, which will have a series of plenary talks on neutrino observatories, plus a special session on "The Next Galactic Supernova", organized by Bob Kirshner and John Bahcall. This will have three 10-15 minute talks. -- The SNEWS Network (Alec), -- Optical Confirmation of a Neutrino Detected Supernova (Leif Robinson) -- Verification of Inter-experiment Timing for SNEWS (Clarence). See http://hep.bu.edu/~snnet/aas for the abstracts. Art suggested that SNEWS be mentioned in one of the neutrino plenary talks, preferably the first one. Schedule for work to do ----------------------- There are various jobs to do, and the AAS meeting (Jan 11-15) is a good final deadline for getting them done. Here's the list of jobs, timescales and volunteers: Deadtime coordination web setup: next week (Kate) Security coding: December (Alec) Second server at LNGS: December (Pietro, Kate, Alec) Timing tests: next few months (timing group) (BTW there are still various coding jobs to do; things are set up so that anyone can work on it, and contributions are very welcome if anyone is interested). Next meeting ------------ We agreed on Jan 10 (before the AAS meeting) as the next videocon date. We should also start thinking about having a face-to-face meeting.