Dear colleagues,

We would like to thank you for submitting a Letter of Interest (LOI). These letters have been tremendously helpful for the frontier and topical-group conveners as they plan the sessions in the Community Planning Meeting which will take place in ~5 weeks. We want to confirm that the LOIs that are submitted by August 31 (11:59pm Hawaii Time) will be guaranteed consideration by the conveners. We understand that this is a very stressful time for many of you. If you have any difficulties in finalizing your LOI by August 31, we strongly encourage you to submit a shorter draft version (even a paragraph) by that date. Conveners need timely input so that they can plan.

Best regards, Snowmass Organizing Team

Letters of Interest (LoIs) are informal documents intended to be useful in the first stages of the Snowmass study. They will help Snowmass conveners to prepare the Snowmass Community Planning Meeting that will take place on October 5-8, 2020 virtually. LoIs could include opinions, interests and proposals that could further be studied. They should contain a maximum of 2 pages of text, plus relevant bibliography. There is no further requirement on the format, but the primary contact information (name and email address) should be included in the LoI. Please make these as simple and easy to read as possible. Authors of the letters are welcome to make a full writeup for their work as a contributed paper and submit it to the Snowmass proceedings. However, a contributed paper is not required.

LoIs should be uploaded between April 1, 2020 and August 31, 2020. by the authors using

LOI upload form

An index of submitted letters can be viewed using this direct URL link. The letters will be stored permanently in the Fermilab archive Doc.db shortly after August 31, 2020. The current LOIs files organized in the directories corresponding to the primary frontiers used during submissions are shown here.

To perform search in the LoI documents, use Google search.

We would like you to understand a few issues that have come up with the LOIs:

• LOI submission is not required to be involved in Snowmass, nor are there specific deadlines or defined occasions for being part of the process. If you are interested in an existing LOI, whether you signed the original or not, start attending meetings, talk to the conveners, run simulations and do calculations, etc. Snowmass is about capturing your effort, and we never intended for LOIs to be essential – they were a starting point. No one is going to be locked out because they were not on an LOI.
• LOIs can be modified, but small changes and author additions, etc. are not going to change convener activities. Our job is to coordinate and draw out your ideas. Some of you want an LOI to have a full author list and final polishing “for the permanent record”. We do not have the infrastructure of the arXiv. We ask that you have all changes to LOIs by the CPM and to submit only one set of changes; after that time we will make all received updates and move on. Directions are below.
• If there is substantive new content that conveners need to see, please let us know, and we hope that will come out in TG meetings or one-on-one contact with conveners.

We hope no one feels frustrated and disengages as a result of the designed informality of the LOIs.

Changes in LoI after the deadline is possible in exceptional cases when the contact name of LoI changes or there are very significant modifications in the text that modify the meaning of the LoI. Generally, the conveners are not collecting names of all LoI authors, so changes in the list of authors will not be considered.

If you would like to revise your LOI, please email to Young-Kee Kim ([email protected]) with the following

• Full file name of your original LOI: “Official” name shown in our wiki page. e.g., SNOWMASS21-EF9_EF6_EF10_EF5-NF6_NF3_NF10-RF6_RF0-CF7_CF0-AF5_AF0-UF1_UF2_ForwardPhysicsFacility-193.pdf
• Your revised LOI (pdf file)
• Short descriptions of changes

One can submit LoIs after the deadline (Aug 31, 2020). However, they will be marked “late” on the web page. Such LoIs will not be included in the tar file with all LoIs prepared for the conveners. If you submitted a LoIs after the deadline, you should directly contact the corresponding topical conveners.

LoIs for a given topical group are shown automatically on the wiki pages of the topical groups.

The frontier conveners can download all LoI PDF files as a *.tgz file (zipped tar file) for further examination on a personal computer. Contact “[email protected] (B.Bernstein, S.Chekanov, M.Peskin)” for the instruction.

Assuming that the downloaded file with PDF files is called “summaries.tgz”, one can look at all files that belong to a given frontier as:

bash> tar  -zvxf  summaries.tgz
bash> cd summaries
bash> ls -laht  */*pdf | grep EF

In this example, we sort all PDF files using timestamps, and selected LoIs submitted to the energy frontier (“EF”).

Topical and frontier conveners can create the standard spreadsheets that can be imported to Google Sheets and shared between the conveners. Here is the example for the EF1 topical group:

curl https://www.snowmass21.org/docs/files/list_get_csv.php?frontier=EF1  --output EF1.csv

Replace “EF1” to any other topical group. This creates the CSV file EF1.csv.

The CSV files can be imported to an OO/LibreOffice spreadsheet as this:

soffice EF1.csv

and select the “semicolon” for value separation in the dialog (and deselect all other options).

The CSV files can also be imported to Google Sheets directly. Go to Google sheets, click upload from the computer, and add semicolon ; for custom separation of values.

The conveners need to fill the contact people for the LoIs. This command fetches the most updated list of LoI. Documents submitted after the deadline will have the comment “late submission”.