The Collaboration Board of the Pierre Auger Observatory Project convened at Malargüe, Argentina, at November 16, 2011.
Sergio Petrera, chairman of the Auger Collaboration Board, began the meeting welcoming all participants and presenting the agenda of the meeting (see: http://www.auger.unam.mx/cb/). This page contains links to all the material for the subsequent discussions, always protected by the usual username and password. All material will eventually be moved to its permanent location at http://www.auger.org/admin/Management/collab_board/
Agenda
The session started with the presentation of the management report by the project manager Paul Mantsch. Firstly Paul Mantsch gave a detailed report on the last Finance Board meeting, which has been held in Lisbon at September, 26 and informed that Stavros Katsanevas had been elected as new chairman of the FB. Paul Mantsch informed that in September of 2010 the FB had appointed a committee to review the International Agreement and make recommendations for updates and revisions, and that the committee had reported at this FB meeting. Particularly he pointed out that some issues which deserved attention of that committee were related to i) the possible conflict of interest of FB members which are also Collaboration members, ii) to new section on enhancements and R&D, to exceptional expenses for maintenance, iii) to the revised method for operating fund requests which had already been approved by the CB), iv) to a data archiving strategy to be elaborated by the CD, and v) related to ownership of equipment brought into the country by diplomatic waiver, for which the corresponding embassies would be responsible for the disposal. Paul also informed that the Finance Board Report had addressed the decommissioning, deciding that at end of project, one additional year’s operating payment would be requested for decommissioning and in the eventuality that a country leaves the collaboration earlier, one year’s operating fund contribution based on the average of the previous three OCLs would be requested.
Paul Mantsch then informed that although there had been little change in the value of the actual Observatory expenses, the proposed 2012 operating budget request had gone up significantly from 2011. He explained that the 25% inflation in the Argentinean peso and the little change in the peso/dollar exchange rate of 20% could be credited responsible for the increase in the operating funds request for 2012. He also informed that the FB had approved the budget but $100,000 US less than had been proposed.
In the following Paul addressed the present status of Operations Funding and Operating Costs and Contributions in the period 2001-2010. He informed that the tables presented the sum of the actual operating costs from 2001 through 2010, the total contributions received from each country from 2001 to 31 December 2010, and that contributions for 2011 had been only included if they affect the current standing of the country.
Paul Mantsch then presented the spread sheet with the status of payments of each country in 2011 and warned that as of 10 November 2011 more than US$ $500,000 was still owed for operations for 2011, obliging to cut back on all non-essential spending. He also reminded about the revised sequence of funding request, based on an Operation Costs List closed on 1. September, pointing out that this list could not be changed after that date.
Finishing his report, Paul presented the funding request following the recommendation of the FB which would be sent out to each country. He further explained that the request for 2012 would show the requests for 2012 and also a column for “Owed from Previous Years”, based on the 2011 projected costs and contributions received as of 31 Dec 2011.
The next report on Operating Costs was given by Ingo Allekotte. His report presented a short overview about the financial status in the year 2010, informing that the expenditures had been within the budget at the expense of deferring some non-urgent items. About the expenditures for the year 2011, Ingo informed that the expected projection up to the end of 2011 should be 91% of the total requested budget in Argentinean pesos and 94% of the total requested budget in US dollars. Since the FB had granted only 90% of the requested budget for 2011 but giving the management the option of using reserve funds, the projection above would imply in the necessity of using 8-9% of the total reserve, corresponding to 50% of the reduced budget. In the following Ingo addressed the request for Operation Costs (US$ 2,029,526.68) plus Reserve (US$ 240,062.37), rendering the total request of US$ 2,269,589.05 for 2012. He mentioned that these numbers did not include the replenishing of the fraction of reserve spent in 2011. Since the FB in its meeting in September 2011 only approved US$ 1,929,526.68, Ingo pointed out the need of cuts in the budget in an amount of US$ 100,000.00 and that there were no contingency funds in the budget. He also mentioned that the severance fund had not been increased as required, letting one anticipate some difficulties, since 60% of total 2012 budget corresponds to personnel salaries. He recognized the situation would be less sever because of the reduction of the staff in one technician and because no purchase of batteries for the SD in 2012 would be needed, since the batteries would be paid by Brazil (FAPESP).
A for the coming years, Ingo commented that the Observatory had reached a stable maintenance and operation mode, and that the expenditures were now well understood. He added that the main uncertainties were given by macroeconomic variables like inflation rates in Argentina and exchange rates for the Argentinean Peso and US Dollar. For the years beyond 2012, since Brazil had committed to provide SD batteries until 2014, Ingo anticipated a level of expenditure consistent with that for year 2012, corrected for inflation and exchange rates, with minor fluctuations given by periodic renewal of some equipment which impact unequally in different years.
In the next item in the agenda Sergio Petrera mentioned that the candidature of the colleagues of the University of Kansas were still pending, since they had to prepare a MOU before becoming member of the collaboration. He informed further that the candidature of Peter Gorham and his team from the University of Hawaii was also delayed.
In the following Sergio Petrera informed the CB that the colleagues from APC Denis Allard, Cyril Lachaud, Alexandre Creuzot, and Etienne Parizot had decided to leave the Pierre Auger Collaboration and dedicate themselves to other projects. Sergio added that their membership in the collaboration would end at December 2011 and that they would remain on the author list for another year. He informed also that the APC team would work with the SDE task leaders and the observatory staff to hand over the responsibility for the maintenance of the UBs.
Then Sergio informed about the status of the membership of Croatia, which had been accepted as member associated to Slovenia in November 2008. Sergio reminded the CB that they were given a 3-year term to build up a group, find financial support and participate in and contribute to activities of the collaboration. He then gave a report of the activities in which the group were involved during this period, and finalized informing that they had asked for an extension of their status as an associate member for an additional period of two years. The CB voted and the extension was approved by majority, with 4 abstentions.
The first proposal was presented by David Nitz, informing additions for the SD trigger and referring to the installation of the time-over-threshold-de-convolved trigger (ToTd) in the full Auger surface array. David Nitz informed that the ToTd had been designed to lower the surface array trigger threshold of reconstructable events, to reduce the composition dependence of the trigger at low energies and to improve the photon and neutrino trigger sensitivity. David also mentioned the creation of a Trigger Review Committee to review ToTd (and later MoPS), chaired by Carla Bonifazi and including also Olivier Deligny, Lorenzo Perrone, Ioana Maris and Patrick Allison. The committee will present the final report to the Technical Board and to the CB at the next collaboration meeting in March 2012. He further informed that the planned request for the Technical Board include operating ToTd in one BSU sector of the standard array while the reviewing process is going on and continuing the MoPs operation in the test array until March 2012 for tests.
The next proposal has been presented by Giovanni Maresella, coming from E. Conti and the teams from the Universities of Padova and Lecce. Giovanni Marsella reported about a verification of the feasibility and performance of the Near-Infrared Fluorescence technique in detecting ultra-high energy cosmic rays. He listed the need of a place for the telescope, if possible with a long line view covered by the SD, the need of electric power and access to Auger data to check trigger/efficiency/noise. He also invited all interested collaborators to join these efforts. Giovanni Marsella further announced that a full proposal would be presented in the next meeting in March 2012. A Review Committee was nominated formed by Radomir Smida (chair), Paul Sommers, Matthias Kleifges and Julio Martino.
Ad van den Berg presented the proposal of an international team formed by Dutch and Argentinean collaborators dedicated to study the characterization and monitoring of the Argentinean western border using a permanent seismic network. Ad van den Berg informed that the project is aimed at the installation and operation of a dense permanent seismic array for detection, characterization and monitoring of the seismic and tectonic processes connected to the Southern part of the subduction zone formed by the oceanic Nazca plate and the continental South American plate. Ronald Shellard suggested Karl-Heinz Kampert writing a letter to welcome the efforts of the team and offering the support of the Auger Collaboration in this enterprise.
Members of the CB recommended that all the proposals to be presented in the next meeting in March should include also a costs estimate.
Sergio Petrera started the discussion of the next item in the agenda, referring to the rules for payments of operation costs for retired collaborators. The CB decided that a proposal for a change in the corresponding rule should be presented in the next meeting in March 2012.
Sergio Petrera mentioned that he had been contacted by some CB members expressing their uneasiness about the last election of Spokesperson/Co-spokesperson and requesting a change in the rules. Ronald Shellard argued that no discussion of change should be initiated without a written document explaining the reason for reviewing the rules. Karl-Heinz Kampert added that he saw no reason to change rules, but only to give guidelines to the next search committee. Lukas Nellen then proposed opening a channel for discussion in order to get feedback on this issue. So any CB member should contact him and express his/her feelings on this issue.
Sergio Petrera informed that the review of AMIGA would be presented at the next meeting. He also mentioned that there was need of finalizing MOUs for enhancements, since the Finance Board expressed worries about extra costs. Sergio Petrera reminded that at the next meeting in March there would be elections for Chair and Co-chair of the Collaboration Board. A Search Committee had to be nominated and he then proposed the name of Johannes Knapp as chair of this committee. The nomination of Johannes Knapp was approved by the CB by acclamation. His first duty is forming a team to constitute the Search Committee.
The next item in the agenda was the presentation by Piera Ghia of the report from the Publication Committee. Piera presented the new procedure to form Editorial Boards that should be responsible for writing full-author-list papers. She also informed the CB about the recent improvements in the PC website, which followed the recommendation that the relevant material of each paper should be linked in the website. Piera finished her presentation presenting the full statistics of full-author-list and short-author-list papers in 2011. She also addressed the concentration of papers in Astroparticle Physics and the suggestion from the PC for a larger diversification of journals in which the collaboration papers are submitted/published. She alerted that this diversification would open a debate in the CB about the responsibility for the payment for eventual publication charges.
Piera further informed the CB that the Publication Committee should be renewed at the next meeting.
Related to the presentation of the Publication Committee, Xavier Bertou presented some thoughts about Open Access Publication. He exposed his ideas about the reason for publishing and some arguments in favor of going to Open Access, pointing out that in the current system, society as a whole has no access to most scientific publications, making science look like a closed world. Xavier mentioned that 2 full-author-list papers had already been published in Open Access, as had some conference papers and that all papers actually had Open Access through ArXiv. He added that Open Access would not mean lower quality journals, since many top journals already offer Open Access for a fee and that even impact factors of some journals have increased after opening access, as is the case of Journal of Instrumentation, after publishing results from LHC. He then presented some suggestions of ways the Auger Collaboration could handle this issue, for instance publicizing that all Auger publications are Open Access through ArXiv, or considering including an item in Operation Costs for Open Access publications or joining some consortium for Open Access, for instance expressing support to SCOAP3 - Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (http://scoap3.org). He further explained that SCOAP3 is a consortium of High-Energy Physics funding agencies and laboratories of leading national and international institutions, and that LHC experiments had expressed their support to this initiative since 2007.
At the end of Xavier’s presentation, Sergio Petrera opened for manifestations of CB members and it was decided that Xavier Bertou should be encouraged to present a proposal at the next meeting.
In the next item Enrique Zas presented the report of the Conference Committee.
He reported about the number of Auger talks per year since 2002 up to November 2011 and about the distribution of talks per country and per collaborator up to 2010/2011 and in 2011.
Enrique reminded all potential speakers that only published results were allowed to be presented at conferences. He added that all national representatives and task leaders had been asked to nominate candidates for potential speakers, but that not all have responded. Enrique also urged all speakers to send him their presentations and texts for proceedings so that they could be included in the page and linked in the list.
Giorgio Matthiae announced that this presentation would be his final report about the status of AugerAccess.
He reminded that the project was financed by the European Commission with about 800 kEuro, a contribution from Universities in Spain of 150 kEuro and a similar amount from Argentina (Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnologia e Innovación Productiva) and from Brazil and Clara - the Cooperación Latino Americana de Redes Avanzadas, to improve the connectivity between Argentina and Brazil. Giorgio Matthiae informed that the Auger Observatory had an Indefeasible Right of Use (IRU) on a capacity of 1 Gbps for 15 years from the Observatory to Buenos Aires and/or Santiago and that the Observatory had to pay for the international access to Europe and to US. He added that the actual contract refers to 32 Mbps.
Giorgio informed that the AugerAccess connectivity has been provided by the provider Silica Networks since December 2010. He also showed typical traffic profiles before and after the advent of Auger Access, pointing out that 3 Terabytes had been sent from the Observatory and 1 Terabyte of data received at the Observatory in the period Jan-Aug 2011. He reported that the peak usage had been between 6 and 9 Mbps (before AugerAccess: 0.5~0.6 Mbps), with a maximum of 15 Mbps (before AugerAccess: 1 Mbps) and that an expert from GARR was working with Ruben Squartini during this meeting in order to prepare a document for the European Commission on the final technical testing.
Sergio Petrera informed that Jan Ridky had offered to host the next analysis meeting in Prague in the period 18-22 June 2012. The offer was approved by the board by acclamation. Jan Ridky informed that the registration fees would be 160 euros including all lunches and students could ask for reduced registration fees.
Sergio also informed Rosella Caruso had accepted to be in charge of organizing the March 2012 meeting in Malargüe.
Sergio Petrera announced two forthcoming meetings to be held in Lisbon and Geneva at the beginning of 2012.
Mario Pimenta presented the motivation for a workshop discussing future directions for the Auger Observatory and the urgency in presenting a strong Physics case for studying composition and hadronic interactions at the 100 TeV SCM energy scale. With this purpose in sight he invited collaborators to join the workshop “Particle Physics @ Auger” in January 2012. He also presented a preliminary program, including Particle Physics, Muons, RPC at Auger and Upgrades of Auger South.
Karl-Heinz Kampert announced the symposium to be held at CERN from 13 to 16 February 2012, a follow-up of the Nagoya Symposium in 2012. He also informed that the scope of the symposium would include discussing the highlights and challenges of UHECR observations, preparing for a next-generation ground based giant detector, evaluating the complementarity of ground and space based observations and identifying technological challenges and related R&D work.
There being nothing more to be addressed, Sergio Petrera closed the session, thanking everybody for participating.