Minutes of the DESPEC Ge array working group meeting
in Surrey, April 7th 2005

Participants: Luis Caballero, Bill Gelletly, Andrea Jungclaus,
              Marc Labiche, Zsolt Podolyak, Berta Rubio, Cath Scholey 
              
	 
- Zsolt presented the HISPEC/DESPEC talk he gave to the NUSTAR PAC
- Berta reported on the discussion within the PAC about HISPEC/DESPEC,
  however there is no official report yet. Inofficially it seems that
  the high energy part of HISPEC and DESPEC will get a relatively high
  rating whereas the low energy part of HISPEC is rated lower.
- Berta and Bill informed that there might be a new discussion about
  the distribution of the money assigned for the experimental program
  within the original plans of FAIR (CDR).Originally, from NUSTAR only
  the Super-FRS was included with 40 Mio Euros in the 150 Mio Euros
  foreseen for experimental equipment. Some people feel that there is
  too much a preference given to hadronic physics in the "old" distribution. 
- Luis, Marc and Andrea reported on the status of the Monte Carlo simulations
  of possible geometries. First numbers for efficiencies and P/T ratios
  are available for geometries based on both Clover as well as stacks of
  planar detectors.
- We had a long discussion about the necessity of very high segmentation.
  The participants of the meeting question whether the very high segmen-
  tation possible with the planar detectors as described in the TP is really
  necessary. The reasons are the following:
  1) The prompt flash problem exists only for isomeric decay studies and
     will probably be reduced by the use of digital electronics.
  2) The possibility to track back the origin of the g-ray ( to allow
     for longer correlation times ) as mentioned in the TP does not exist.
  3) It is not clear whether angular correlation experiments which need
     high angular resolution are really envisaged for DESPEC.
  In order to get additional information about this point we decided to send
  around an email asking for the types of experiments people have in mind
  and their experimental requirements.
- We discussed that for the design of the Ge array it would be very important
  to get all available experimental information with respect to the prompt
  flash and decided to send an inquiry to all spokespersons of the RISING
  experiments performed so far.
- We discussed the question whether it might be reasonable to consider the
  construction of a second, much simpler focal plane DSSD besides the very
  sophisticated one planned so far.