STAR NEWSLETTER NUMBER 35

STAR Newsletter for August 1996

31 August 1996

Editor: Bill Christie, BNL


TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. From the Spokesman:
  2. STAR Project Summary (from the last monthly report)
  3. Notice of Meetings
  4. Christies Corner
  5. Comings and goings at STAR
  6. Employment opportunities
  7. STAR notes since the last newsletter

1. From the spokesman:

Reported by John Harris

It was good to see many of you at the Collaboration Meeting. I was particularly pleased by the strong attendance and the appearance of new and young faces in the collaboration. Progress on the various detector sub-systems and on the software is highly evident, particularly with the arrival of magnet and coil components and the success of the systems test.

This Fall the SVT will be reviewed for construction readiness and formal inclusion into the STAR Construction Project. Shortly after the SVT review, in late Fall the EMC will go through the same process. We look forward to successful inclusion of these projects into the STAR Project. We continue to seek the financial means for inclusion of some TOF for start-up of STAR. The FTPC is progressing rapidly with a new design. The FTPC group is expected to present a proposal to STAR on the physics capabilities of the design, the design and construction plans at the next collaboration meeting, which is scheduled to be held in Berkeley, January 7 - 11, 1997.

There was much discussion at the collaboration meeting regarding the need for STAR manpower at the RHIC Computing Facility (RCF). In the RHIC operating plan, 4 FTEs of manpower from STAR are expected to be dedicated to the RCF for STAR-related computing support. The STAR Council was generally supportive of the plan. However, details of the actual implementation were not clear, specifically the function, responsibilities and supervision of the STAR manpower at the RCF. A Council sub-committee was appointed to draft a statement from STAR on the issue. The sub-committee consists of Craig Ogilvie (chair), Hank Crawford and Tom Trainor. Discussion at the end of the collaboration meeting in the open session led to a general consensus that STAR should 1) consult with the Interim Head of RHIC Computing, Bruce Gibbard, to better understand the intentions of RCF for these 4 FTEs from STAR and 2) develop and submit to RHIC a plan for how STAR views the function, responsibilities and supervision of these 4 FTEs. To assist the Council sub-committee and to ensure that all the technical issues are addressed, I have asked Bill Love, Doug Olson, Lanny Ray and Mike Levine from the STAR Technical Committee to consult Bruce Gibbard and to meet with the Council sub-committee to help draft our plan for how these 4 FTEs from STAR will be utilized.

Those at the recent collaboration meeting will recall that the importance of sending letters to President Clinton regarding projected DOE funding was discussed. This was to urge him to include the Office of Energy Research of the DOE into the same category, when considering budgets, that has been afforded other agencies performing basic scientific research, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Health (NIH). As it stands, without such special consideration or other congressional action, severe budget cuts of the order of 25 percent between now and the year 2000 have been projected for the DOE as a whole. I wish to thank Tim Hallman for making this point to the Collaboration and am happy to report that we have received confirmation that at least 60 letters have been sent to the President by individuals of STAR on this matter.


2. STAR Project Summary

Excerpted from the STAR Monthly Report for July 1996.

Project Management Summary and Highlights

The Magnet Power Supply Final Specification Review was held at BNL on July 31. The committee agreed that the specification was in nearly final form. Up-coming technical reviews include the CTB Mechanical FDR (August 1), and the EMC Support System Final Design Review (August 15).

Progress on detector installation includes the placement and alignment of the main magnet rail plates onto their ties in the floor of the WAH and Assembly Building. The TPC Outer Field Cage is really taking shape with the completion of testing the inner electrode strips and the bonding of the Nomex (paper) honeycomb core.

Budget and Planning process for FY97 began. Schedules will be updated by mid-September.

TPC Summary and Highlights

All of the sectors have been assembled and with the exception of a few units have passed physics testing. Four units exhibit glow discharge and must be repaired. Roughly 14 inner sectors show sparking during long-term high voltage tests at less than expected levels. All 14 are usable as is. The honeycomb core and inner skin doublers and termination rings have been bonded to the OFC field cage inner skin. The order has been placed for the IFC termination rings. A complete set of inner skin electrode strips have been etched and will be micro-etched just prior to bonding. New candidate materials have been secured for the central membrane. The number of grips will be increased and the inner tension ring eliminated. The part fabrications for the laser covers and OFC resistor covers have been initiated. Discussions have begun with a local gas supplier to coordinate work and establish costs for installing liquid nitrogen and liquid argon dewars for the cosmic ray tests at LBNL. Steel for the cross braces for the TPC test stand have arrived and fabrication will begin shortly.

Magnet Summary and Highlights

No report was submitted this month.

Electronics Summary and Highlights

Systems Test

System Test data taking has continued alternating pedestal runs, cosmic ray muon runs and occasional laser runs to study two track resolution. The Trigger VME crate has been fixed. The software has undergone major improvements, and is now set up to be run from a single terminal. Data can now be stored on tape and/or broadcast to a network socket. Other programs, such as the pad monitor and STAF based analyses, can receive this network feed, greatly increasing the system flexibility, and making this system a notch closer to the final STAR system. A graphical user interface has been developed feeding a simple run control system. Preliminary results on the laser track studies indicate that the two track resolution is as expected.

Front End Electronics (FEE)

The FEE work has focused on high statistics pedestal studies, with an emphasis on pedestal stability. The pedestals appear fairly stable, with the exception of one system-wide excursion which is not yet understood The slow pedestal variations from time bucket 1 to 512 are now understood and corrected. The revised FEE cards have now been produced as well as 4 boards populated with parts. If nothing untoward appears as these boards are tested, 250 will be produced for the 4% build. FEE purchased additional memory for the DAQ Cyclone boards. The memory is required for the i960s to be able to calculate and store pedestals. Ferro-resonant power supplies for the cosmic ray and system test have been purchased; they should arrive in August. The SCA chip testing continues. Likewise, the next readout board design is progressing. Installation and Test needs are now being looked at.

Data Acquisition (DAQ)

The last mezzanine cards and Cyclone cards were delivered to the LBNL for the TPC system tests.

Several flavors of cluster-finding code have been benchmarked on the newest i960 processor, the i960HD. Measured times were faster by 70-100% than those run on the i960CF.

Hardware designs are underway for a prototype receiver card and a prototype mezzanine card, using the i960HD processor. The receiver card design is virtually complete.

Systran's diagnostic code for their ScramNet VME boards was ported from vxWorks (68K) to vxWorks (i960). A series of performance measurements for the SCRAMnet ring have been made.

The ASIC design underwent a CDR at Innovasic on July 30-31. As part of this CDR, one minor glitch was found. This problem is expected to be resolved in early August. Test vectors are being constructed, and a pinout has been determined. The ASIC should be released to the foundry for prototype production by mid-August. Prototype chips are expected at BNL in early January 1997.

Trigger

The production DSM board is currently being fabricated and will be delivered August 8. The front panels are being drilled and will be painted next week.

The TCU production board is being designed. The prototype schematics are currently being modified to accommodate all specification changes. Agree- ment has been made to complete our migration to GSTAR and STAF. This is expected to take about 6 months to complete, during which time we will not perform any major simulations other than simple event generators with various knobs in action.

Slow Controls

The protoype state manager (psm) server is operating on the slow controls workstation at LBNL and an epics channel access client has been established. Certain slow controls functions have been mapped onto the psm sequencer state model; these include the execution of "geometric" events and the read- back of data from the event buffer over the hdlc link.

Computing Summary and Highlights

Software Infrastructure

STAF work consisted of adding user help and additional functionality to the base system, including the interface with Hbook ntuples and a version registry. STAF was also ported to run on Solaris and AIX. The network interface in the I/O library was modified to enable access to "live" data coming from the system test DAQ.

On-line software

The network interface to "live" data was enabled so that pad_monitor and STAF-based analysis of data could proceed in near real time. This was used as part of the system test running to look at cosmic rays, laser tracks and monitoring of pedestal data from the TPC FEE. As well, the VME-HDLC, minidaq and Trigger subsystems are working on integrating the prototype state manager into their control. A prototype run_control user interface for the system test is under development.

Simulations Software

With agi/gst/g2t/STAF now in full swing, it has become clear that there is a substantial disk space and CPU time cost to run full simulations with "physics on".

G2T was revised and reinstalled so that it can handle full Au+Au events with "physics on." The TPC geometry package, tpg; TPC fast simulator, tfs and EMC analysis package, ems were ported to STAF.

A new agi geometry description of the magnetic field was developed. It gives one the opportunity to read in the field from the Ross-III fieldmap file, or a constant, or no magnetic field.

Analysis Software

The conversion of the event reconstruction software from TAS to STAF con- tinued in July. A number of STAR physics related simulations were com- pleted and presented at the "Event-by-Event Physics in Nuclear Collisions Workshop" at the University of Washington.

Systems Integration Summary And Highlights

In July, integration effort focused on the Central Trigger Barrel. A visit was made to Rice University where the current CTB mechanical configuration was discussed.


3. Notice of Meetings:

XIII International Seminar on HEP Problems: Relativistic Nuclear Physics and Quantum Chromodynamics Held at Dubna, Russia. September 2-7. For further information please contact A. M. Baldin (ISHEPP@THSUN1.JINR.DUBNA.SU)

RHIC SPIN Collaboration meeting, September 16-17, Marseille France. For further information please contact Jacques Soffer (soffer@frcpn11.in2p3.fr)

STAR prereview of SVT construction readiness presentations/materials. October 22, at BNL. For further information please contact J. Harris, Yale.

STAR prereview of EMC construction readiness presentations/materials. Sometime in mid Fall. For further information please contact J. Harris, Yale.

RHIC Technical Advisory Committee construction readiness review of the SVT. November 12-14, at BNL. For further information please contact T.Ludlam, BNL.

RHIC Technical Advisory Committee construction readiness review of the EMC. Early December timeframe. For further information please contact T.Ludlam, BNL.

Annual RHIC TAC review of STAR. Early December timeframe. For further information please contact T. Ludlam, BNL.

Conventional Systems Plan Review, early Fall time frame, at BNL. For further information please contact Bill Edwards (LBNL) or Bruce Miller (BNL).

STAR Collaboration meeting. January 7-11, 1997, at LBNL. For further information please contact J. Harris, Yale.


4. Christies Corner

Greetings from beautiful Long Island. Those of you that are in the U.S.A. probably heard that a Hurricane was headed our way over the Labor day weekend. It was getting a bit tense here on Long Island until about 12 hours before the Northward track of the storm would have reached the island, at which point the storm moved a bit to the East and for the most part missed Long Island altogether. Having never experienced a Hurricane I was sort of excited about the prospect of the storm passing over the island, however when the local media listed some of the things that one should do to prepare for a Hurricane (put plywood over the windows, reinforce the garage door, store water, food, batteries, candles, etc.) I started to think that I might not enjoy it.

More of the magnet steel has arrived at the Assembly building (AB) since the collaboration meeting here at BNL a few weeks ago. The second outer ring, second main magnet support, and six more of the backleg pieces are now here. The last nine of the thirty backleg pieces should be in within the next week or so, at which point all of the magnet steel except the pole tips will be at the AB. The steel plates on which STAR will roll should be grouted in next week, and a week or so later the main magnet supports will be placed on the rails. For those of you not fortunate enough to be here at BNL to witness the assembly of STAR you can see a picture (updated daily) of what's going on in the Assembly building via the STAR home page on the WWW.


5. Comings and goings at STAR

None reported this month.


6. Employment opportunities

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH POSITION IN RELATIVISTIC HEAVY ION COLLISIONS

The Ohio State University

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Group at The Ohio State University invites applications for a postdoctoral research position available this Fall. The STAR experiment at RHIC, scheduled to take data in 1999, will employ tracking, time-of-flight, and calorimetric detectors to search for and study quark-gluon plasma (QGP) formation at high energy density. The E895 experiment at the AGS, which will measure 6 and 8 A GeV Au+Au collisions this November, uses the EOS TPC to build an excitation function of exclusive variables in a previously unexplored energy range: 2-10 A GeV. The successful candidate will spend approximately half of his/her time on the RHIC STAR experiment carrying out software development for physics simulations and event reconstruction for the two main tracking detectors, the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) and the Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT). The other half of the time will be spent on the E895 experiment on event reconstruction and physics analysis. The candidate should have strong programming skills. The OSU Relativistic Heavy Ion Group currently consists of three faculty members, one postdoctoral researcher, four graduate students, two undergraduate students and an electrical engineer. Interested candidates should send an application consisting of a curriculum vitae, a description of research experience and interest and the names of three references to Professor Michael A. Lisa, Department of Physics, Smith Laboratory, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 or via E-mail to lisa@mps.ohio-state.edu.

The Ohio State University is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer and encourages all qualified candidates to apply.

Tenure Track Faculty Position and Postdoctoral Positions

Experimental Nuclear/Particle Physics

Penn State University

Penn State University anticipates an expanded role in the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory with particular emphasis in high pT physics, calorimetry and polarized proton measurements. Penn State invites applications for a tenure track assistant professor position and two postdoctoral positions. The successful candidate for the faculty position is expected to be dedicated to teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate level and to conduct significant research. Postdoctoral candidates with backgrounds in collider physics or high energy spin physics are encouraged to apply. Faculty candidates should submit a letter of application, a curriculum vitae, a brief description of research plans, and the names of at least four references to Professor Howard Grotch, Head, Department of Physics, Box 1997, 104 Davey Lab, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802. Postdoctoral candidates should submit the above information to Prof. Steven Heppelmann, Penn State University, 303 Osmond Lab, University Park, PA 16802. Applications received by January 1, 1997 will be assured of consideration. An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. Women and Minorities Encouraged to Apply.


7. New STAR NOTES since the last Newsletter

SN0253 - H. Wieman
Calculation of Drift Distortion Due to Imperfections in a TPC Cylindrical Field Cage