Minutes of the UVic Testbeam meeting held Friday, April 23 2004
(present: TI, TH, MF, ML, AA (AAg and RK arrived a little late due to other meetings))

Tamara reported that she has completed the study for her HV corrections. She produced plots of (Eh2inner/Eh2outer) vs. ((Eh1-Eh3)/(Eh1+Eh3)) - that's the `asymmetry plot' - for 3 different energies. Only limited number of runs are suitable to do produce this plot, and the data of 150 GeV pions has been chosen as the sample best suited to provide the base for the correction. A fit was applied to the asymmetry plot of this 150 GeV data. The fit is of the form: p0 * exp (-p1 ( x+1 ) ^ p3) + p2. Tamara applied this correction on an event-by-event basis to all runs in her analysis and found that for the runs at higher energies the resolution improves significantly, while the response is lowered by about 2% for all energies.
This correction is different from the correction in the NIM paper, largely because Tamara uses fixed-size clusters, which are bound to contain more noise than event-by-event clusters.
This leads to the next point of Tamara's efforts, which will be the study of noise. She is planning to use muon runs for that. At this point Michel explained in a bit more detail how Sven went about to subtract the noise in his analysis, which is based on event-by-event clustering: The cells numbers of all the cells included in the cluster are written to file for each event. Then these cell numbers are read back and are applied to form a `cluster' each event of a muon run. Over an entire run, this yields the background due to electronic noise.

Michel reported that he has implemented the ATLAS clustering algorithm, which was originally written by Sven, into TBRootAna. At the moment it is implemented for the 2-d case, and will be committed to the TBRootAna repository. Michel has tested it out on a pion run and it works beautifully. He explained to us the basic logic of this topological algorithm. [TBRootAna now has the systemAlg ClusteringAlg which clusters in 2d or 3d. See recent email for more info, and visit the TBRootAna example web page. This procedure could help find local hot spots of hadronic showers in the finely segmented electromagnetic part of the calorimeter.

Ashok told us that he managed to compile the Athena 8.0 source code at CERN. His next aim is to try and implement this on the local machines! The Athena releases from CERN do not contain the source code. Ashok has been in contact with David Quarrie about this. The most common way to do the transfer would be via kserver, but for that, CERN requires kerberos 4. However, at UVic we have kerberos 5. The pserver access is not really recommended, because is is not secure. David and Ashok will try to do the transfer via a password-less ssh protocol. This seems to be a bit of spearheading undertaking, and we are curious to see how it will work out. There is also some talk of including the source-code as a tarball in future releases.

Tayfun has now investigated the position resolution in terms of phi rather than x. He had found a distinct structure when plotting sigma(x_calo) vs. x_mwpc. When he plots sigma(phi_calo) vs phi_mwpc the structure disappears, at least for the high energies. However, this introduces the problem of making use of the y-information of the wire-chamber, which is not extremely reliable. (Richard suggested that a nominal y position could be used instead.)
When plotting (phi_mwpc - phi_calo) vs. (phi_mwpc), Tayfun still sees structure. The effect cannot be explained by leakage of energy. A possible cause could be shrinkage of the detector. In order to find out whether shrinkage could be showing its effects, emails have been sent to Rob and Peter Schacht, and Margret sent an email to Fares to find out whether the EMEC geometry files for the cell z and eta positions he had sent her last summer were for the warm or cold geometry. Fares as not yet replied, but Peter sent a brief explanation of how some of the alignment in the beam has been done and explained that there is one fixed point in the EMEC module and all the shrinkage happens with respect to that one fixed point.
Tayfun also showed the position resolution as a function of Ebeam for various impact points.

Margret briefly reported that she now knows where in the LArG4TB code the values for the energies in the cells are filled into the Ntuple and the LArG4 code provides her with an example of how to tackle the separation of electromagnetic and non-electromagnetic energy. What exactly classifies `hadronic' energy is not a simple thing, and Margret has contacted Fred Jones from the TRIUMF Geant4 group to find out what sort of philosophy and thought has to go in making these classifications.

Warren was unable to attend the meeting but Richard contributed an email from Warren about his activities for the minutes:

Hi Richard, I wanted to send a quick email to let you know where I'm at as far a work goes before I head out later this morning for Calgary.
- read many webpages/documents on Athena, CERN computing, HEC/EMEC Testbeam, Atlas Unix sevices, tutorial transparencies, etc...
- received my scratch space on my CERN account and have been setting up and checking out packages, and learning through playing around with the files.
- was able to check out packages relating to the beam chamber code. I've started looking over the code and will try to spend some time this weekend going over it as well.
- received an email from Rob with a LArMonitoring example this morning. I've gone through it and did get it running, and I will look into some of the code to see if I can figure out how it all works. (Michel also received this email example).
I'll still be in email contact this weekend in case you have any comments/suggestions/info to pass on from the group meeting.
Thanks again and see you next week.
Warren

Current known beam test related travel plans Margret: 4 weeks in September Michel: May 9 to May 22
Michel: June 13 to July 3
Michel: August 2 to August 14
Richard: June 19 to June 30
Tayfun: August 1 to August 29
Warren: May 16 to June 29