Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 21:24:04 +0000 (UT) From: Physical Review D Subject: Your_manuscript DU8917 Toback To: wagnp@fnal.gov Dear Dr. Wagner: The manuscript ``Prospects of searches for neutral, long-lived particles which decay to photons using timing at CDF'' (DU8917) by Toback,David and Wagner,Peter has been reviewed by one of our referees. Comments from the report are enclosed for your consideration. The first referee was not available to review the manuscript again. When you resubmit your manuscript, please include a summary of the changes made, and a brief response to all recommendations and criticisms. Sincerely, Urs M. Heller Senior Assistant Editor Physical Review D -------------------------------------------------------------------- Please note that you have not provided us with any PACS numbers. At least one PACS number is needed at the time of acceptance. Please provide us with one or more ( up to four ) PACS numbers when you resubmit the paper. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Report of the second Referee: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- In their work the authors present a very useful study on signatures which typically occur in gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking, but which are more general in nature. Because I am not an experimentalists I will not consider the technical details of the study, which look solid to me. Instead, I am going focus on the phenomenological aspects. The paper looks very sound, I have only very few comments which I would like the authors to adress: * Could the authors please elaborate on one of their main issues, namely the use of EMTiming? For a phenomenlogist, a more detailed discussion of this issue for example for Figs.6,7 would be useful. Moreover, in their conclusions they could add a few more sentences about the effect of EMTiming on the cross section limits and on the coverage of the GMSB parameter space. * p.4. Strictly speaking, the neutralino lifetime \tau is not defined. More importantly, for the SPS points discussed in Section III it is not clear which parameters are fixed, which are varied, and how the values for the neuralino life time is obtained in relation to the SPS parameter points. * p.5. How critical are the assumptions on the systematics listed in Tab.1? The authors briefly talk about that later, but it would be very sueful to add a few sentences either here or later in the discussion. For example: what would change if we knew the backgrounds better/worse by a factor of -say- 50%? * p.5. The authors refer to some details of the analysis in Ref.[19]. It is not clear at first sight what these details are and where this reference would come in. * p.8. What do cross section limits mean for the general GMSB analysis? Do the authors now consider cascade decays to neutralinos from squarks and gluinos? If yes, how different is the acceptance for direct production and for cascade decays? Basically: what is \sigma_95 in Figs.10,11? * p.9. `There is good reason to believe that...' is a litte vague. Maybe the authors could make it clear what they refer to as `advertized' and why there should be an improvement, if they would like to include a comment like that. * p.34. The mass and life time are the same as in Fig.15? It would be useful to mention that in the caption to Fig.16 and following. * For all supersymmetric cross sections mentioned in this paper there are NLO results available in public computer codes. By not assigning a large theoretical error to the PYTHIA predictions, the authors implicitely use these numbers. I would like them to briefly check that the NLO cross section predictions do not alter significantly the GMSB parameter space coverage. * Could the authors very briefly mention how the coverage of the parameter space develops with luminosity, to give the reader an idea what the statistics vs. systematics limits on this analysis are? * There are a few layout glitches in the text and in the size of the figures. I suppose they will be taken care of in the final version? As mentioned above, I consider the paper interesting and useful. If the authors properly adress all the points mentioned above I recommend its publication. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please supply PACS categories for your manuscript. List the principal categories first and subsequent categories in numerical order. 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