engineering:apr15

Minutes for the April 15 AARM PI Meeting

The Depth paper has now been renamed “Evaluating Cosmogenic Neutron Backgrounds in Dark Matter Searches” Not everyone is an author on this, so I apologize for spending so much time on it at the meeting.

To summarize:

1. Those who are authors on "Evaluating Cosmo.." should read it through and send comments or edits. Your jobs are clearly written in red throughout the document. Thanks to DongMing and Chao (not yet entered in the draft) for your timely additions.

A. Anthony will be reading it today.
B. Tony will shorten the Borexino section and add some sentences to the bottom of the Section II conclusions which clearly explain how data matches better to simulations now and why - at the beginning of section III, he will will explain why FLUKA works well (referring back to the previous section) and what changes there HAVE been over the last 4 years.
C. Angie and her student will start writing conclusions and the table and plots for the depth and technology section. When that is finished, she will let the technology depth group: Monica, Chao, Angie, Prisca know and we will call a meeting to go over it and assign further tasks.
D. Sarah and Allison need to run the neutron yield sim using the distribution of muons sent by Angie. In general all emails about this should be cc'ed to Allison, Sarah, Tony, Anthony, and Prisca so we do not have incomplete information.
E. Relative to D, the histograms sent by Angie are from Matlab, which gives each edge of the histogram. So there will be the left side of the bin and the height, then the right side of the bin and the same height, then there will be that right side, which is now the left side of the NEXT bin and the height of that next bin, etc. Knowing this Toni and Sarah can simply omit every other set of input numbers. They have agreed to do that.

2. We will put our LRT2013 proceedings on the archive - you need to think what category they go in and they will not necessarily all be submitted to the same place.

3. We need to think about the next AARM collaboration meeting.

If we can get a no-cost extension, we all prefer a date in November (not August of this year!) Some suggestions: a very focussed meeting with a couple groups working on low energy nuclear recoil measurements for many technologies or neutron cross sections - this could be at Notre Dame or TUNL. By the way, Jodi mentioned going ahead on a white paper with some TUNL people on these measurements and it seems a little unfair not to include all the AARM people who are interested in this, and who formed a working group during the last meeting. This should be discussed.

4. All PI's need to check with their budget people and find out what is left in their AARM budget as well as what is encumbered through September 30 when the grant ends. We need to know how much is left for another AARM meeting.

5. We need to put in another proposal. The website integration is probably not hard. We discussed when. Can Richard find out if it makes any sense for us to try for a summer proposal for one year only, or whether we should wait for September?