Your "mail-in" peer reviews of the other
students' proposals are due one day before the respective
presentations.  You can email your review to me.  (You may skip
reviewing one of the proposals without loss of grades).

Review of Lashkar + Conor:  due Monday Dec 1, 3 pm.
Review of Siarhei: due Tue Dec 2, 3 pm.
Review of Tai + Jay: due Wed Dec 3, 3 pm.
Review of Yi + Michael: due Mon Dec 8, 3 pm

Your final reviews of all (minus one) other proposals are due on Dec 9.
Please compile all your reviews into one file and mail them to me.
These can be mostly the same as your mail-in reviews, just tweaked
based on the information you learned from the presentation (e.g.  you
may have had questions answered, or may have new suggestions).

The reviews should be at least a paragraph or two, up to one page.   You should
include the following:

 -- Summarize the proposal in a few sentences, in your own
words.

 -- Is the physics to be explored interesting and relevant?

 -- Is the proposed project feasible?  Does it extend
current knowledge significantly?

 -- Is the costing reasonable?

 -- List strengths and weaknesses of the proposal in a few bullets each.

 -- Summarize your evaluation in one sentence.  Would you recommend
that a funding agency fund this proposal?

You might also include suggestions for how the proposal
might be improved, if you have them.

Do not include comments regarding grammar, style, typos etc --
please stick to content-related comments.

Remember, the reviews are anonymous, although of course you may share
them with your colleagues if you choose.  I will pass on the essence
of your comments (digested and summarized so as not to be
recognizable) to each presenter before his talk.  (Also remember that
your proposal will not be graded based on its peer reviews; it's your
own reviews that will be graded.)  Your final review may be a modified
version of the mail-in one, after you have heard the presentation.


Here's an example review for a (sort of) imaginary proposal, to illustrate
the sort of thing I expect from you.

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"Super-Duper-Kamiokande: an experiment to search for proton decay
modes with lifetimes longer than 10^35 years"

This proposal is for a 1 megaton water Cherenkov detector, to be
sited in the Kamioka mine.  The aim is to search for proton
decay modes with a sensitivity a factor of twenty greater than
existing limits, via the well-known water Cherenkov technique.

Although so far experimental searches for proton decay have been
unsuccessful, the case for the existence of baryon number violation is
quite compelling.  The observed matter-antimatter asymmetry is
indirect evidence that baryon number is violated, and proton decay
appears naturally in GUT and SUSY contexts.  Unambiguous observation
of proton decay would be a tremendously exciting result, providing
insight into some of today's biggest problems in particle physics:
grand unification, and the matter-antimatter asymmetry.  The proposed
detector is primarily a scaling-up of existing detectors, and
therefore should be feasible.  The proposal plausibly makes the case
that lifetime limits for p -> e+ pi0 can be extended by a factor of 20
if no signal is seen, which should be useful to constrain models.
However, the cost of the experiment, at 2 billion dollars, seems
rather high.  The main cost drivers are the excavation of a new
experimental hall, and the photomultiplier tubes.  The case for the
proposed phototube coverage has not been made-- perhaps it could be
decreased to save cost.  Also, the proposers have not addressed the
question of residual cosmic ray background.  The proposers might also
investigate other locales.

Strengths:
 - compelling physics
 - well-established technology
 - clean measurement possible

Weaknesses
 - possible cosmic ray background not addressed
 - expensive

Overall, I recommend that this project be funded.

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