From fdiakono@phys.uoa.gr Tue Jan 17 09:31:50 2012 Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:31:16 +0200 From: Fotios Diakonos To: kperl@if.pw.edu.pl Cc: Davis Nikolaos , Gazdzicki Marek , Mrowczynski Stanislaw , Stroebele Herbert , Peter Seyboth , Nikos Antoniou Subject: Reply to Katja Dear Katja, first of all thank you very much for your comments/suggestions which we have taken into account and we have revised our manuscript accordingly. Let us discuss them point-by-point: ========================================================================== 1. "The author list is a very old one. Please update it." Done (many thanks to Peter). 2. "Please add also more recent lattice paper in ref [1]: Z. Fodor and S. D. Katz, JHEP 04, 050 (2004)" Done. 3. "page 2, 2nd column, 2nd paragraph: "We focus on the proton momenta neglecting the antiprotons which are clearly much less for all considered systems.". Later, you compare the signals for 40A and 158A GeV where the fraction of antiprotons is significantly different. Should we somehow comment on it?" The difference in the fraction of antiptorons between 40A and 158A GeV for Pb+Pb is not that big as the difference between Pb+Pb at 158A GeV and Si+A or C+A at 158A GeV. Therefore we think that it would be inconsistent to comment selectively only the first case. It seems to be better to have one comment valid for all systems as it is now. 4. " "The critical intermittency index is determined from first principles (universality class arguments) and it is valid for protons produced at the midrapidity region." If possible, I would add more comments why at midrapidity the signal should be better visible. " Done. 5. "In the paper the center of mass energy is given as approx. 17 Gev, approx. 9 GeV. Why not to put the exact values?" We will do it. Are the exact values 17.3 GeV and 8.77 GeV respectively? 6. "Only 33560 C+A events were used. I probably asked it some time ago but could you please remind me why 10mm C+C could not be used? Their statistics is on the level of more than 200k events. " This is a question for Nikos Davis. Unfortunately, up to now, I could not succeed to communicate with him in the army. 7. "Please define what is proton identification purity, how you calculate it (comparison with MC?), and generally how you identify particles in NA49." This is also a question for Nikos. I have sent an e-mail to him and I have left a message at his handy. I hope that he will communicate with me with the first opportunity. 8. "Also the definition of F2 can be reminded." Since we give reference to our previous paper (PR C 81, 064907 (2010)) we do not need to repeat the definition of F2 in the new manuscript. 9. "The cut |ycm| < ybeam - 0.5 should be better explained (if not, maybe this sentence should be removed). Why the value of 0.5? Does it mean that we expect that spectators are +- 0.5 around 2.9? Did you check they are real spectators for 0-12% central collisions? Finally, did you use the same cut for 40A GeV data? " The cut in rapidity was extensively discussed in the EVO meetings. It may also come up again tomorrow in the EC discussion. For 40A Gev data we have used the same cut, however with the appropriate adjustment of ybeam (it is around 2.2). 10. "Page 3 ' - you may add how mixed events are constructed." Similarly to point 8 we do not think that it is appropriate to include here the description of the mixed event construction algorithm. We have followed the procedure discussed in several meetings for this and the previous paper. 11. "Fig 1 - please add the legend (mixed/data) to the plot or to the caption." Done. 12." Fig 4: the fact that Delta_F2 so strongly depends on rapidity window suggests that maybe we should try to check what can be the systematic error connected with the change of the width of studied rapidity window, for example -0.5 < y < 0.5, -0.8 < y < 0.8, etc." The choice of the rapidity window should be as small as possible, centered at midrapidity as explained in our comment related to your question 4. According to the discussions in EVO meetings we decided to use the same rapidity window for all systems. In this case it is neccessary to make a compromise between statistics and size of the window. It turned out that 0.75 was a good choice valid for all analyzed systems. Shrinking the rapidity window will affect also the statistics. So it is not clear if we can in that way obtain purely systematic error estimate. =========================================================================== Best regards Nikos, Nikos, Fotis