Notes of the 21th teleconference of the IACHEC Working Group Chairs
WebEX
19 March 2015

Participants: A.Foster (AF), C.Grant (CG), M.Guainazzi (MG), V.Kashyap (VP),
	      X.Li (XL), E.Miller (EM), H.Marshall (HM), L.Natalucci (LN),
	      J.Nevalainen (JN), P.Plucinsky (PP), S.Sembay (SS), S.Zhang (SZ)

Apologies: V.Burwitz (VB), J.Nevalainen (JN), Y.Terada (YT)


1. IACHEC scientific program
----------------------------

 The draft scientific program of the 10th IACHEC circulated by MG before
the meeting is discussed. The following changes are proposed:

- Harvard professor Xiao-Li Meng offered to give a 30-minutes talk, or a
  1-hour tutorial on astrostatistics. It is agreed to accept the latter
  possibility. MG will contact him shortly to have a teleconference on the
  content of the tutorial. Everybody is welcome to attend. The astrostatistics
  lecture will be placed at the beginning of the morning session of the 22nd of
  April, and will be followed by a 30-minutes Q&A session. The conference fee
  of prof. Xiao-Li Meng will be waived - XL to make sure this happens.

ACTION 1/20150319 on MG: contact prof. Xiao-Li Meng to hold a teleconference
       		     	 on the detailed content of his astrostatistics
			 tutorial
Deadline: 22/3/2015


ACTION 2/20150319 on ALL: provide suggestions on the detailed content of
       		     	  the astrostatistics tutorial
Deadline: before the teleconference as of ACTION 1/20150319

- AF will give a 25+5 minutes talk on the calibration and data analysis
  aspects of the detection of a possible sterile neutrino X-ray spectral
  signature at 3.something keV in EPIC and ACIS spectra

- There is no answer so far from Tamura-san on EM request to give a similar
  talk on the analogous measurement by the Suzaku/XIS. MG will follow-up

ACTION 3/20150319 on MG: contact Tamura-san
Deadline: 27/3/2015

- It is unclear if the whole half-day allocation for each WG session is really
  required. The WG Chair should verify this, and feed-back

- The current schedule of the WGs does not take into account the possibility
  that colleagues from other time-zones may be interested in joining remotely
  (Skype connections should be possible in all the meeting rooms)

ACTION 4/20120319 in WGs: tell MG if a) each WG session needs less than the
       		     	  currently allocated 4 hours; b) there are colleagues
			  intending to join the WG sessions remotely, and
			  from where
Deadline: 26/3/2015

[Inputs received so far:

JN:
---

1) The galaxy mass session
The number of secure remote attendees at the moment is only 2.
There are 9 papers, and I possibly cannot cover all the points and angles
of the 7 missing ones. Last year we already has a mini-teleconference on cluster
masses and this would not add much. I propose we cancel this event due to
lack of interest.


Monday afternoon:

2) Multi Mission Study
A few weeks ago I initiated discussions for this session, and the response
has been less than enthusiastic: none. Anyhow, I will present something
and try to get this going.


3) HIFLUGCS XMM/Chandra follow up.
I asked Gerrit to prepare something on the point of effective area time
variability using multiple pointings of the same clusters. If we get some
sense out of this, I hope we can guest in the Effective area WG session on
Tue.  We will also discuss a cross-calibration project based on the Fe XXV/XXVI
line ratios.


4) Coordination of Astro-SAT, and ASTRO-H cross-calibration with IACHEC.
   This is TDB from last year but has not progressed.

CG:
---

The CCD/background WG has never needed more than two hours, so I think we would
be fine with half an afternoon, instead of a full afternoon.
]


- The goals of the special session on "Path for improvement of the
  cross-calibration status" is discussed. It is agreed that there is no
  dearth of suggested methods: a) the Guainazzi/Pollock/Sembay proposal; b) the
  "spline" method advocated by Marshall; c) some variant of the PyBlocks
  philosophy (a code aiming at including cross-calibration uncertainties in
  data analysis should be made public by J.Drake shortly). The problem is that
  no project has started yet to apply these method to the current
  cross-calibration status, due to lack of time/resources/priority. The goal
  of this session should be verifying if time is ripe for such a project to
  start, and which of the available approached to use.

  It is therefore agreed to: a) include a discussion on this topic in the
  session of the "Calibration Uncertainties" WG; b) use the evening special
  session on the 21st of April to report to the whole IACHEC plenary session
  the discussion at the WG

- AF proposes to discuss the following topics in the special session of
  "High-resolution data analysis challenges": a) accuracy of atomic databases;
  b) data analysis tools in XSPEC and other spectral fitting packages: are
  they sufficient for high-resolution data analysis? The current two-hours
  allocation should be sufficient

- Given the large number of changes discussed on the draft scientific program,
  it is deemed premature to publish it. MG will prepare a revised version
  by the end of next week, using the inputs received by then


ACTION 5/20150319 on MG: circulate a revised version of the scientific
       		     	 program
Deadline: 27/3/2015