1. EHE unblinding proposal -

Aya presented the unblinding proposal to look for EHE neutrinos in IC9.
See -
http://www.ppl.phys.chiba-u.jp/~aya/EHE9/EHE-9string-unblinding-proposal-v1.ppt
http://www.ppl.phys.chiba-u.jp/research/IceCube/EHE/analysis/

The analysis looks for events with very large total numbers of photoelectrons. The two observables are the line fit direction, and the number of pe. The atmospheric background is predicted using a formula from Elbert, with two free parameters fitted to the actual data. Corsika was not trusted at these energies and thus not used. The 2D cut in this plane is quite tight - about 10^-3 background expected and 0.02 events from GZK.

I'll just summarise the conclusions from the discussion-

Gary, Marek, Doug, Ty and Spencer will act as the review committee. Some questions which have already come up are -

a. What does corsika predict for the background? We want to see the predictions to see if the decision to drop corsika is properly justified.
b. What is the neutrino effective area as a function of energy? This should be calculable even with the analytic nature of some of the analysis.
c. Should the cuts be relaxed further? The cut leaves almost zero background, maybe doesn't need to be that tight. (or one could also do a likelihood fit of the events across the theta-npe plane)
d. Can IceTop act as a veto at these energies? What if we see an event in the signal region with an IceTop hit - we would obviously veto it, why not do that in the first place if possible?
e. How do the results of the standard candle measurement impact our understanding of the energy scale in this analysis?