Dear colleague,



The Scientific Program of the WPCF 2006 is in the webpage of the  workshop, http://www.ift.unesp.br/wpcf2006/scientificprogram.htm , and it is coming to its final form soon.


Regarding the so-called "Hands-on Activities" in the program, together with Mike Lisa and Scott Pratt, we have elaborated its functional structure during the workshop. Those sessions will be dedicated to collect, discuss and summarize the accomplishments in HBT/Femtoscopy of relativistic collisions, focusing in building a
consensus of the participants of the WPCF 2006, as explained in the text below. Accordingly, the other two topics initially proposed for these sessions have now been rescheduled for the second part of those activities, related to the discussion of the open issues and the paths to be followed in order to resolve them.


If the above activity achieves its goal, perhaps in the future WPCF meetings it could be incorporated into the workshop structure, possibly becoming its unique signature. For the success of this objective, we count on the collaboration of all participants!


We are all looking forward to seeing you soon in Sao Paulo!



     Sandra S. Padula
For the organizing Committee



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dedicated Session: Community Consensus Initiative

Accomplishments and Open Questions in Femtoscopy:
the view of WPCF participants

 

One goal of the workshop will be to generate a white paper with two Sections. The first, Section 1, will list and briefly discuss the broad and most important accomplishments in femtoscopy of relativistic collisions.  The second, Section II, will discuss the most compelling open questions in our area.  Items in this Section will be accompanied by a description of what calculations, measurements and analyses are necessary to settle the questions.

This white paper is not intended as a review of the field, but as the "sense of a cross-section of active workers in femtoscopy." (i.e., WPCF participants). It can serve as a focal point of discussion among experts and as a milestone -- a brief, broad documented status of our field in late 2006.

We envision generation of the items to appear in this white paper to go in four stages:
  i) A straw-man list of "consensus" (TBD) accomplishments will be generated by volunteers Scott Pratt and Mike Lisa. These meant only as seeds for discussion.
 ii) During the discussion sessions, we expect items for both Sections I and II to emerge spontaneously. These will be noted on blackboards (which will remain throughout the Workshop) by the discussion leaders, who will be responsible for preparing a short (2-5) bulleted list of open issues, along with sub-bullets f what work needs to be done to answer the questions. Those topics ill be revisited at the end of the workshop. 
iii) At the end of the Workshop, a discussion session will be devoted especially to the items for the white paper.  Since the discussion sessions mentioned the previous step will focus most of its time on particular in research directions (e.g. back-to-back correlations, small systems etc), it is expected that other items for the white paper, not related to these directions, will emerge in this discussion.

 iv) After we have returned home from the workshop, a few volunteers identified at the Workshop will draft the white paper. It is hoped that they will be able to send the rough draft to all Workshop participants  within ~2 weeks, soliciting comments and discussion on an email list (*). Items may appear, vanish, or change during this discussion.

This white paper is not meant to be the Magna Carta.  We are all busy, and if we become too ambitious about goals of the white paper, it is likely not to materialize. A well-written "sense of our field" will be extremely useful to us and to the broader community, and need not require monumental effort. It is envisioned that the white paper will appear in the proceedings of the Workshop and on the physics arXiv.

(*) Authorship on the white paper: This can be discussed at the Workshop, but the first idea is that all Workshop participants (perhaps including WPCF05 participants) will be co-authors on the white paper, though of course anybody can "opt out", if they wish.