Minutes: PANDA design studies meeting (September 22nd 2006)

Participants:
Aida Galoyan (Dubna),
Olaf Hartmann (Frascati),
Rene Jaekel (Dresden),
Soeren Lange, Stefano Spataro (Giessen),
Dima Melnichuk (Warsaw),
Andrei Sokolov (Juelich),
Alexander Buerger,  Bertram Kopf, Matthias Steinke, Jan Zhong (Bochum)

technical problems with VRVS conection:
Annalisa Cecchi, Elisabetta Prencipe (Ferrara)
Piotr Hawranek (Cracow)

1. Summary about the present situation of the software activities and their consequences

Bertram gave a short summary about the situation of the software activities, about the 
consequences and about the plans for the fast reconstruction ( see slides: 
"http://www.ep1.rub.de/~bertram/vrvs20060922/PlansDesignStudies.pdf")
First of all he briefly summerised the decisions of the coordination board which have 
been made at the last Collaboration Meeting at Vienna:

* immediate start of a new software project called "PANDAroot": The decision was to take
  over the existing code written by the CBM experiment which is strictly based on the
  ROOT package from CERN. The cooperation with the CBM experiment and possibly with 
  other experiments at the FAIR project as well as the support of the GSI computing
  group will result in a syergy effect. The hope is to develop the code in a more 
  efficient way as before. 
  Bertrams personal opinion is that this code development is a long term project due
  to the fact that a lot of things for the global infrastructure are completely missing. 
  A lot of personpower is mandatory in order to provide especially such global tools.

* design studies in parallel with the old code: design and physics performance studies
  will be done with the old software as long as detailed studies are not possible with 
  the PANDAroot code.
  Urgent questions have to be answered in the near future. E.g:
  - EMC:
     + is the backward endcap necessary?
     + which single crystal energy thresholds are possible and necessary?
     + crystal rates for the different spatial regions?
     + granularity for the different spatial regions?
     + electron hadron separation power?
     + ...
  - charged tracking in the theta region between 5-10 degrees?
  - new support structure for the inner detectors of the TS?
  - solenoid: present design vs. Dubna design?
  - design of the MVD?
  - chicane vs. dipole option?
  - TPC or STT option?
  - ...
  In addition we have to fulfill the next milestone until end of January 2008, the 
  Physics Book, which is part of the EU design project. We aready got and still get a
  lot of money from this project and thus we have to pull the duty to study physics
  channels as realistic as possible. In Bertrams point of view there is no other chance 
  to use the old code for this purpose.

* the consequence of these decisions is that two software activities have to be done in 
  parallel for at least the next 1.5 years.       

2. (Next) tasks for the fast reconstruction activities
  In order to make the fast reconstruction with the limited personpower as realistic as 
  possible there is the idea to include the complete tracking based on Ghits from the 
  bogus simulation output. Another idea is to combine the full 
  reconstruction (partly available for the MVD, TPC and EMC) with the fast 
  reconstruction of the remaining subdetectors. Rene will complete his work for the 
  full reconstruction of the MVD. Also Piotr would like to go on with the implementation
  of the full reconstruction for the Dchs (in case that this is officially allowed). That
  means that the global tracking plays an important role in the plans for the design 
  studies. Therefore there is the intention to continue the work of the global tracking 
  in the old code.
  Aida has already improved the parametrization for the elastic scattering in the DPM 
  event generator. She will also think about the possiblility to include the charmed 
  hadron production in the background event generators. Furthermore she added reasonable
  (global) PID probabilities with the TOF detector in the fast reconstruction. 
  In addition the following tasks have to be done:
  - release management for the complete software (Matthias)
  - maintenance for specific parts of the general code (Matthias)
  - maintenance and some improvements for FastSim/FastReco (Bertram, Jan)
  - maintenance of the analysis tools: Beta, Simple Composition, fitting tools (Marc)
  - global tracking (tracking subgroup)
  - specific design studies 
    + EMC: Jan, Alex
    + MVD: Rene 
    + ... 
  - in the near future an amount of personpower is needed for
    + the mass production for the Physics Book
    + the benchmark studies for the Physics Book

3. The next VRVS meeting will take place on Friday, October 6th @ 14h00