Minutes of the Valencia UEC meeting, 21-2-2011.

Minutes of UEC meeting at Astoria Hotel, Valencia, Spain, 21-2-2011, 20:30h-22:30h

Present: D. Ackermann, B. Blank, Y. Blumenfeld (invited), A. Bonaccorso, L. Ferreira, H. Fynbo, A. Jokinen, M. Lewitowicz, A. Maj, B. Rubio (invited). Excused: P. Regan.

Berta Rubio, Yorick Blumenfeld and Angela Bonaccorso comment on the first day of the meeting: all is going well with lot of discussions. The program is very dense but the subject is also quite wide. A number of people could not be accepted for talks because they did not understand the way the INDICO system works, disconnecting registration from abstracts. There is discussion on the drawbacks of INDICO compared to other conference website systems like the one at GANIL, or other homemade systems. Berta leaves at 21:15h because of an interview commitment.

Proposals for the 2012 Town Meeting and topical Meeting:

Lidia Ferreira proposes Lisbon and as subject of the topical meeting there is a general consensus on light nuclei (i.e everything below fission fragments, few body, clustering). Yorick reports on a proposal from the director of the IPN to hold the 2012 meeting at Orsay. Dieter and Marek suggest to have one of the next meetings on SHE. They report on a SHE meeting which is planned for next year within the ENSAR network activity (NA) ECOS Task 2 “Synergies in Super Heavy Element Research”. It might be possible to combine the topical meeting within the ENSAR framework with the activity of the ECOS network which has a workpackage on SHE. There are various comments on past SHE activities and related meetings. Adam Maj suggests to hold the 2013 topical meeting in Poland. Ari informs that also Jyväskylä would be ready to organize a topical meeting in 2013 on the SHE subject which would be quite appropriate for them. It is decided that these various places will come to the next UEC meeting with more definite proposals. On that occasion the final choice will be made. There is a discussion on which location in Orsay could be used for the meeting (the LAL?) and on the fact that Orsay does not have good hotels. Marek informs that GANIL would probably like to host the final 2014 meetings. At this stage it is clear that there cannot be two meetings in France. It is decided that Orsay and GANIL will negotiate between themselves and propose a joint organization for the 2014 meeting.

Then the dates are discussed for the next Topical Meeting. Yorick proposes the first half of 2012. It is said that in Lisbon also early Autumn could be nice. The important thing is to avoid periods with a lot of other conferences.
There is a discussion on the financial support which is needed to organize each meeting and on the complications certain countries have in spending the money from the EC. CERN, France and Finland instead deal easily with money. It has to be checked if the original ENSAR contract contains already exact percentages of each item on which money can be spent (consumable, domestic travel, international travel…etc) (At the date of publication of these minutes we know that the answer is YES).

The 2012 topical meeting would be combined with a town meeting. Yorick says that one and a half day for the Town Meeting should be enough. There would be a physics talk presenting a summary of the previous two Town Meetings, a talk on the technical advances, R&D, and one on the beginning of work under the NuPNET contract and TIARA, a talk on related facilities like ESS, MYRRHA and high power targets.
It is also mentioned that at some stage in a couple of years Isolde, GANIL and GSI will probably stop beam time for about one year at the same time and there will be problems spending the transnational access money.

Advertise various ENSAR activities via webpage once that is properly set up and permissions from the EU granted.

Next meeting probably during ARIS2011 in Luven.