next reactor working group meeting

Dear Colleagues:

Although you haven't heard from us lately, a lot has happened since our
last working group meeting. There's been significant progress on our
working group report, and there was a "mid-course correction" meeting of
the working group leaders and study organizers on April 1-2.

The midcourse meeting included a discussion of how the final study
report will be written. The report, for which writing has not yet
been assigned, will be ~30 pages organized along physics topics.
The individual working group reports will be appended to this report.

The midourse meeting also included a discussion of how to deal with physics
topics of interest to multiple working groups.
In particular, there was a rather tense discussion about theta13 and
whether superbeams/off axis and reactors are competing or complementary
experiments. The bottom line of the discussion was that the reactor and
off-axis working groups were urged to reach some consensus.
While these groups are not likely to agree on
the mix of experiments needed before theta13 is established, we think
we can reach a consensus on how information from the two approaches is
complementary when making measurements (e.g., how do different measurements
contribute to searching for CP violation). We've already spoken with
some of the off-axis/superbeams people and believe agreement on some
issues is possible.

The superbeams group will be having a meeting at Fermilab
on May 13-14 (the days before we had planned to have our
own meeting at Berkeley), arranged to coincide with a NOvA meeting
on May 15-16.
We think there are two options for our own meeting:

1) We can keep our original plan and have a reactor working group meeting
   at Berkeley. In this case, we could try to reach a consensus with the
   Superbeam group at the June meeting (or informally before the
   final meeting).

2) We could move our meeting to Chicago (May 15) and arrange a small,
   working meeting with some of the superbeams people on the 14th.

We both feel that reaching some common ground with the accelerator group is
critical to the final report, and therefore prefer the second option. (Given
the short time before the final study meeting, it's not possible to schedule
our working group meeting and a joint meeting independently.)
We would like to get others opinions about this before making a decision.
Time is late, so we would like to get comments by this Friday. We'll then
send out a message with the plan for the meeting.

Thanks very much.
                                                 Regards,
                                                 Gabriela and Ed

P.S. Speak now, or forever hold ...
Received on Wed Apr 21 13:30:43 2004