Work will continue on RPC's and at least one alternative technology. It is hoped that electronics design can proceed as a collaborative effort among all the interested groups. Groups interested in studying magnet and steel engineering include Argonne, Livermore, and Rutherford. Tom Fields reported some preliminary results from magnetized plate design calculations carried out by Larry Turner at Argonne. A conventional copper coil might require 100 kW to produce fields in the 1 to 2 T range in 6 m diameter octagonal plates.
Octagonal plates have a substantially more uniform field than square plates.
A preliminary permanent magnet calculation yielded fields above 1 T using strips of a special permanent magnet material inserted in 5mm radial gaps in a soft iron octagonal plate. This technique may be quite expensive, however. Major simulation work is being performed using the Soudan Monte Carlo program and a neutrino event generator at Caltech. Although it may be difficult to merge the two software packages in the end, there was general agreement that several independent approaches are likely to be helpful at this early stage. The goal of this work is to optimize detector parameters such as steel plate thickness and spatial resolution, and to determine the usefulness of capabilities such as magnetic analysis and pulse height measurement.