Weekly Report for Week Ending April 27, 2000


 Exec. Comm. Agenda
Highlights
LSC
Administration
Hanford Observatory
Livingston Observatory
MIT
Caltech
Detector
40 Meter
TNI
LASTI
Data Analysis
LIGO II/Adv. R&D
Past Weekly Reports

The LIGO Executive Committee Agenda for Monday  May 1, 2000 will be:
 

CANCELLED DUE TO PAC8 MEETING
 

Special Items:


Special Announcements:    NSF REVIEW DRY RUN 9:00 - 2:30  SCR FRIDAY APRIL 28.


REMINDER: {GHS) It is LIGO Lab policy that all documents circulated of any consequence will receive an appropriate DCC number. It is easy to get a number. Furthermore, it is highly encouraged that documents be submitted electronically in .pdf format. These policies are particularly important for public presentations. It has come to my attention that a major fraction of the Lab's presentations at the recent LSC meeting were not submitted in .pdf format, or with a number, or neither. Acrobat software is available to all Lab staff. The result of this failure to follow the policy is that a major fraction of the work in posting the talks falls to the support staff who must find files, convert files, derive numbers, paste these into files, scan paper, etc. This is wasteful and results in these important talks remaining unavailable to interested parties. WE MUST DO A BETTER JOB ON FACILITATING THE PROCESS OF MAKING DOCUMENTS RAPIDLY AVAILABLE TO ALL. I ask that each of you make use of the available tools to use the DCC and to submit files promptly in .pdf format.


Weekly Report Highlights
 
 


LSC Issues (Weiss)


No report this week


LIGO I Construction/LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)


WBS 1.2 LIGO Operations--Administration


LIGO Weekly Site Telecon (Jasnow)

A site telecon was held Thursday, April 27, 2000. The list of current actions revised to reflect actions assigned during the meeting may be found at ACTION LIST.   The monthly financial reports can be found on the network in .pdf format.


PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Chargois)

From: Ed Chargois <chargois_e@ligo.caltech.edu>

Nothing to report this week.


DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

From: the DCC <dcc@ligo.caltech.edu>

Web pages for the DCC give simple how-to's for document numbering, easy access to the latest on-line documents, and search capabilities for the DCC database. Take a look. . . From: Cleveland Mak <mak_c@ligo.caltech.edu> Press here to access the DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER WEB PAGE.


COST SCHEDULE CONTROL SYSTEMS (Cunningham, Brambila, Akutagawa, Kaufman)

From: Esther Cunningham <esther@ligo.caltech.edu>

Press here for ACCOUNTS PAYABLE HISTORY DATA.

From: "Brambila, Ruth" <Ruth.Brambila@caltech.edu>

From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman@ligo.caltech.edu> From: Cindy Akutagawa <cindy@ligo.caltech.edu>

SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Petrac, Jasnow)

From: irena@ligo.caltech.edu (Irena Petrac)

From: Ed Jasnow <jasnow@ligo.caltech.edu>

The renewed Memorandum of Understanding between the NSF and DOE covering our use of land at Hanford has not yet been signed.   We are awaiting word as to any problems between the two agencies.


Support (Wood)

Rita Torres

Most of the week continued to coordinate food arrangements for the 5/8-5/11 NSF Review; played lots of phone tag. Prepared package to send back to Pronet 3 of the 5 unused pagers. Edited PO log sheets for D. Lloyd to capture some older information.

Obtained Oracle requisition numbers. Spent more time on Expense Reports. Usual P-card activities, chased invoice information. Ordered office supplies. For P. Shawhan created presentation templates in FrameMaker as alternative to the Powerpoint templates. Thanks to G. Billingsley and P. Lindquist for helping me to locate and import logos.

INFORMATION - Anyone interested in using the FrameMaker presentation templates may find them at torres\templates. Please let me know whether they work for you.

[GHS note: We will be reducing support for FrameMaker this year and moving to standardize on Word and Powerpoint. This is necessitated by the increased interaction with the LSC groups who cannot be expected to adopt the very expensive and far less universal FrameMaker]

Dorothy Lloyd

Processing requisitions, invoices and receiving on-line continues. For more detail see "Cost Schedule Control Systems" report by Esther Cunningham. Tracked and follow up on invoice problems.

Continue to monitor contract and blanket order funding levels and alerted task managers when supplements need to be made.

Reviewed payments processed by Esther during the week of April 17. Payments were entered in contract summary sheets and the LIGO database by both Jim and me.

Continue to work on updating the PO Log Books as time permits.

Irene Baldon

No report due to vacation days taken and catchup. Will report thoroughly next week.

Elizabeth K. Wood

Prepared a lengthy report for Phil Lindquist on LIGO labor hours for a future proposal. Thanks to Cindy Akutagawa and Garilynn Billingsley for extremely helpful input in the preparation.

Among other things.


LIGO II (Frey)

From: Thomas Frey <tfrey@ligo.caltech.edu>

Progress Period from 4.21 to 4.27

Accomplishments:

Schedule: Anticipated Challenges: Corrective Action:

WBS 1.4.1.2   Project Controls (LIGO Construction)


Reports (Lindquist)

We are preparing a schedule for the support that is going to be required for proposals, work plans, and reports for the last half of FY 2000.  Clearly there is a lot of information needed, and there is a lot of overlap in the schedules that will have to be spread out given limited resources.

I have received Advanced R&D Report materials from all but two tasks. I have distributed "strawman" budgets based on budgets developed several years ago and modified to reflect recent information.  It appears that we will have much too much work to fit into the funding bag.


Change Control/Contingency (Lindquist)

The following change requests have been submitted:
 

CR-990028 WBS 1.1.3 Beam Tube Enclosure Closeout F. Asiri
CR-000005 WBS 1.2.1 Upgrade Pre-stabilized Laser S. Whitcomb
CR-000006 WBS 1.2.1 Re-polish Core Optics Components S. Whitcomb

Press for the latest Contingency Needs Projection.  This list should be reviewed and revised.


COST SCHEDULE CONTROL SYSTEMS (Duncan, Akutagawa)

From: Kris Duncan <kris@ligo.caltech.edu>

From: Cindy Akutagawa <cindy@ligo.caltech.edu>

SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Petrac, Jasnow)

From: irena@ligo.caltech.edu (Irena Petrac)

From: Ed Jasnow <jasnow@acrux.ligo.caltech.edu>

The design of the new staging building at Livingston is proceeding on schedule by John Desmond Associates.   Final design drawings will be available soon for review by LIGO staff.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

>From: Bill Tyler <tyler@ligo.caltech.edu>

No report this week.


LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO) Operations (Raab)


No report


LIGO Livingston Observatory (LLO) Operations (Coles)



 

Detector commissioning: Efforts have been concentrated on installing the wavefront sensors. Nergis is here this week to guide this activity. After numerous difficulties with getting various signals to work, everything is now ready. We will now determine the matrix for the feeback to implement the active control.

Beam tube bakeout: Started the y2 bake on 4/25. Temp at 75c and will ramp up later today.

CDS Installation: Alignment Sensing & Control racks at the south and west end stations are complete. We will run the field cables next week. Alignment Sensing & Control rack at the west end station is complete. We will run the field cables next week. Relocated the cable tray and conduit holding the vacuum signals to allow for the installation of the optical lever tables. Terminated the PEM microphones.  Ordered Apex PA85's (25). (They will be here in 6 weeks. This is a critical part for driving certain piezo actuators and several have failed. This will give us an ample quantity of spares.) Built and installed all the data acquisition cables that run from 1X5 to IOO and PSL (1X2 & 1X3). Also, installed 3 additional communication cables to the PSL enclosure for general computing and a new video cable which runs back to 1X22. Installed all the filters and jumpers in the 7 data acquisition chassis and installed the chassis in 1X5 (3) and 1X22 (4). We have received, from Pasadena, all 11 DAQS chassis required for the site. Connected 60 suspension points into DAQS. In the process of verifying each.


MIT (Shoemaker)


Report items covered elsewhere


Caltech (Sanders)


Report items covered elsewhere


Detector/Technical Support (Whitcomb, Coyne)



 
Installation:
Hanford
Livingston
Commissioning:
Hanford
Livingston
Other Science/Engineering
Activities

1.0 INSTALLATION (including fabrication and subsystem test)

see also the Installation web page

1.1 LHO

Vent Housekeeping

John Worden, Hugh Radkins, Gerado Moreno, Mike Landry
The dome of WBSC 7 was removed for seal inspection; two hairs were found and removed from across the outer O-ring.
Betsy Weaver, Dennis Coyne, Larry Jones
Chamber entry inspections were performed on WHAMs 7 & 8 and WBSCs 4 & 7, and optics table pigtail connections were added at each chamber. Two problems were discovered during inspection which could be significant:
a. The BSC optics tables, which had been leveled to within 0.3 milliradians, are now out 0.6 & 0.8 milliradians, respectively, indicating differential drifting of the seismic stacks.
b. The ribbon cables in the BSCs had three instances of touching: one cable touched a leg element between the support table clamp and the first leg element clamp, two cables touched the support table in the similar run in the other chamber, and two cables touched each other between the top leg element clamp and the top down tube clamp. All three of these touchings have been corrected. Previously, two touchings had been seen at WBSC 6; these were similar to the last two touchings of this inspection. It is clear that cable inspections are required for all chambers; it is not clear that a single "tuneup" repair of touchings is sufficient for preventing future touchings.

Seismic Isolation

Hugh Radkins, Mark Guenther
The seismic coarse actuation system was exercised on WBSC 7 and confirmed to be operational. The air bearings on that chamber were floated and found to be free. These tests were conducted as readiness checks, made possible by the theodolite setup being available to monitor ITMx alignment

PSL

Peter King
All the New Focus 9807 center mounts in either the main beam or the sample beam have been replaced with Newport Ultima U100-A28s.

The output of the pre-modecleaner (PMC) has been aligned to traverse its old path.  The output power at the PSL/IOO hand-off point was measured to be 7.25 W, with a Scientech AC50HD calorimeter.

The new high voltage power supplies for the PMC and the phase-correcting Pockels cell amplifier have been installed and replace the two HP power supplies and Bertran high voltage power supply.

After optimizing the temperature of the laser, the output of the laser was measured to be 8.80 W, for a diode current of 25.85 A and a diode temperature set point of 23.4 degrees.  The temperature tuning resulted in a gain of approximately 200 mW.

The new reference cavity and its associated hardware, vacuum chamber, heater jackets and insulation have been installed on the PSL table.  The pressure in the vacuum chamber is approximately 1.0E-9 torr at present.  The cavity visibility, using the dip on reflection, is approximately 84%.

Both the PMC and frequency servos have been locked simultaneously. Tweaking of the servos will take place next week, when the new frequency servo is installed.

Lee Cardenas
-finished hanging and aligned the new upgraded  Ref. Cavity that will replace the existing one at the 2K Interferometer in LHO.  Pictures and measurements provided.
-turned it on and tested the MOPA # 107  10watt Laser the one that I installed in the optic Lab at  LHO.   I have checked all the parameters and I let it run for a whole hour.  the power is 10.65 watts. Lightwave claims 11.6 watts as the optimum power.  It needs small alignment to get the power wanted. All the optics inside the MOPA are well secured.  I have not found  nothing loose.
-made some sketches and working on the drawing for the new Periscope that will replace the existing  ones  for the beam output from the Laser at LHO,  as well as the ones close to the reference cavity.
-have taken apart the old PMC ( small PZT) and I will clean the optics as well as the cavity. I will assemble one completely and will be sent to LLO.
 

ISC

Mike Zucker,  D. Ottaway
Completed assembly of ISCT9 & enclosure; staged table for installation. ISCT10 has been removed from service location and its "1-arm" optics configuration stripped down.  Beamline alignment for the full interferometer configuration of ISCT10 is underway in the ISC assembly area cleanroom.

Continuing installation and test of chamber video cameras for core and input monitoring. The video system has proved very popular and useful, so there has been some growth in scope arising out of commissioning on the 2k interferometer; MZ is putting together a revised installation configuration, inventory and (with Dave Barker) channel assignment.

Ken Mason
Supplied documentation and parts for the ISC table installation happening in both Hanford and Livingston

COS Alignment

Hugh Radkins, Mike Zucker, Daniel Sigg, Richard McCarthy
The Total Station theodolite was set up at the spool position of the X beam manifold on the 2K beam line and used to measure the direction to the normal of the face of the ITMx optic. This demonstrated a repeatable, "high" value of yaw (80 microradians in the -Y direction) which was not understood until it was realized that the ITMx ASC controller crate had crashed prior to the reading. After the repairs to the crate, the yaw value was at a more believable value of 10 microradians. This demonstrates the importance of confirming that settings and readbacks of both the offset and dynamics controllers prior to making critical alignment sightings of optics!

Mike Smith, Ken Mailand, Janeen Romie
The alignment targets for the ITM, FM, BS were designed, manufactured, and assembled. Several remaining parts for the MMT3 and MMT2 targets will arrive at LHO on 4/27.  The HAM viewport window target fixture was completed and shipped to LHO, awaiting assembly next week. A target for aligning the PO mirrors was completed.

COS 2 km interferometer Assemblies

Betsy Weaver, Doug Cook
The X arm cavity baffle was installed in the X beam manifold, awaiting later alignment.

Mike Smith, Ken Mailand, Betsy Weaver,  Janeen Hazel
PO Telescopes and PO optical train:
A new HAM viewport alignment fixture has been designed and is being fabricated.

Mode Cleaner

Haisheng Rong, David Ottaway, David Reitze, David Tanner
Bounce mode frequencies of all SOS mirrors and MMT3 have been measured. See elog entry of 4/25 for details.

We have taken MC1 out of HAM7 and moved it to the optics lab to change its suspension wire, so all cavity mirrors will have the same bounce mode frequency. Before taking out MC1 we checked and recorded the beam centering on MC1 and MC3. The beam was centered within 1 mm vertically on both mirrors but about 2-3 mm off center to the right on MC1 and the same amount to the left on MC3 (looking at the front face of the optics), that is, with respect to the center line of MC1-MC3, the beam was parallel displaced towards MC2 (South). To confirm this we also inspected the beam centering on SM1, and we observed the same amount of shift (towards South).

LHO 4k IFO: Parts for six small optics suspensions have been shipped to LHO, where they will be vacuum prepped.
 

1.2 LLO

ISC

David Shoemaker, Anthony Rizzi
ISCT3 at LLO has all optical components mounted and nominally aligned.

COS

Lee Cardenas
Cavity beam Dump and Mounting Bracket Assembly in progress.  All parts are setting together and waiting on a few hardware for a complete assembling.

Mike Smith
The structures for the RM beam dumps for HAM2, HAM3 were completed and willbe cleaned and baked at LHO. The glass is being manufactured and will be shipped to LLO.

DAQ

Rolf Bork
Worked the better part of a day with Russ Wooley getting the data acquisition Analog Data Collection Unit (ADCU) 1&2 up and running at LLO.  We ran into some bad hardware and the GPS receiver in that system takes a long time to lock. Now, all 6 ADCU at LLO are on line.

Sander Liu, Paul Russell
Received the last partial shipment of 100 filter modules from Frequency Devices. All units were shipped to LLO.

2.0 COMMISSIONING (incl. diagnostics and characterization)

2.1 LHO

Engineering Data Run

John Zweizig
After much hard work we have finally started a preliminary offline trigger run. Triggers are being generated on fortress from the engineering run data and are being sent to the LDAS metadata API for ingestion. As of Wednesday evening, we are writing the triggers to a test database so we can make sure everything is working correctly, but we will switch to a the real database on Thursday morning. In addition to the triggers being generated, frame files containing trends in the power in several of the known optic resonances are also being written. The resonance trender is the first monitor to use the new Monitor data server class which allows inspection of intermediate results as the monitor is running - in this case power spectra around each of the resonances.

Input Optics

Guido Mueller
Guido has further analyzed all of the mode matching data and is preparing a second version of his document summarizing the results. At this point, the data are consistent with a mode mismatch that can be corrected by moving MMT2 close to MMT3 by a distance of ~ 0.9 cm +0.3/-0.5 cm, with the error bars due to fitting uncertainties and lack of knowledge of the influence of the Faraday isolator.

Bill Kells
Remnant analysis of recent 2K arm run data, especially  the question of the true mode match into the x arm.

2.2 LLO

Mode Cleaner and PSL

Peter Saulson, Joe Kovalik, Sany Yoshida, Rai Weiss, Nergis Mavalvala, Steve Penn, Stan Whitcomb, David Shoemaker.
We were able to get back to a state where MC lock acquisition was easy and locking was robust, by turning down the power into the MC to a level of about 150 mW. The onset of the "high power problem" was occurring at lower levels than we thought. Some work today appears to indicate that this sensitivity has changed as suspension damping gains are being adjusted. This needs more investigation.

Led by Nergis, we have embarked on bringing up the WFS system. After numerous puzzles, it now appears that all heads and electronics are working. Confusion cleared after it was discovered that our WFS heads had a different attenuator switching arrangement than had been used before. We have completed a system check out of al hardware and software and have measured some signals on the wavefront sensors due to angular drives applied to the PZT steering mirrors.

We also completed many "housekeeping" chores, including: setting MC LO drive level, LO phase, and RF modulation level, as well as fixing an electronic problem in the FSS servo. We investigated  the MC loop transfer function (it looks good), and hunted for saturation (none), and offsets (found and diagnosed one, but have not fixed it) in the MC servo electronics.

Steve and Sany are measuring the position pitch and yaw spectral densities for all MC optics for a few gain settings to find the optimum SOS local damping settings(which minimizes the rms motion of the optic). Sany has been working on measuring frequencies and Q's (in air) of LOS violin modes.
 
 

3.0 Other Engineering and Scientific Activities

3.1 Design/Analysis

CDS Software

Rolf Bork
Met with Matt Evans to further discuss lock acquisition for the LSC. He sent over some preliminary software for timing tests on our Pentium VME processor. The software was set up with conditions of "worst" case processing for the timing test. Initial runs of this software indicate an execution time of ~4usec. So, it looks like, even if lock acquisition had to run at the same time as the detection mode code, all servo processing would be complete within 35usec. Data acq and test points add to that, at 500nsec per channel.

Started work on writing code for the digital suspension controller.  Most of the I/O routines already exist in the ASC and DAQ code. I'm starting by putting these routines into a library and then will start on the main thread. Hope to do some initial testing next week.

LSC CDS

Dale Ouimette
The first article LSC Anti Alias Filter board is stuffed and ready to test. The LSC Whitening Filter board is being laid out now. I hope to have it done this week or early next week. I have to LSC photodiodes half assembled. If I can't get to them soon I will send them to MIT to complete assembly and testing. I need to complete a redesign of the PC board before I fabricate any more. This is next in my queue.
 

ASC/LSC/Suspension

Jay Heefner
- The prototype for the Universal dewhitening is due this week.
- WFS PDs, Demod boards, Whitening/Interface boards are being stuffed for the LLO ASC system.
- Work on the modulated OSEMs continues, but has been slowed by other demands.

PSL

Lee Cardenas
Finished completely the assemble of the new PMC (cleaned mirrors, new HV PZT) and It is installed in the Laser enclosure at CIT for futher test.

ISC

Ken Mason
Drawings were submitted to the DCC for the initial release of the ETM Transmission monitor assembly.  There have been some changes from this first release that I will submit to the DCC after this first set is approved.

I have spent most this week machining parts for the next ETM transmission monitor that is due to be finished in early May.  I am waiting for the breadboard to be delivered from Thorlabs-it is due in either April 27 or May 4- then it needs to be machined.)

Vacuum Procedures

Helena Armandula
The gloves from a second source that Hanford would like to use (since the lead time can be long for the currently approved gloves)  went to JPL for evaluation.

Engineering Tools

Ken Mason
A new version of Nastran finite element analysis 4.5 was installed on several pc's at MIT. Also Solidworks 3D design software was installed. Solidworks exchanges files back and forth with both Nastran and Autocad, allowing you to make design iterations easier.

Anti-aliasing Filters

Sander Liu
Seismic System antialiasing filter printed circuit board No.1 design is now complete. PCBs are on order.

Core Optics Metrology

GariLynn Billingsley
The three flat test is still underway.  Tim Ranalli has been assigned by physical plant to help with the chilled water problem.  Now, if I could only get hold of him.

The three remaining uncoated Recycling Mirror substrates were checked for inclusions.  All three substrates meet the inclusion spec.

Suspensions

Janeen Romie
Got a second quote for Macor new osem heads - twice the first quote

Seismic Fine Actuator

Virginio Sannibale
After talking with Rolf I have evaluated the possibility of using the dsp+adc+dac boards I'm currently using for the ip control to the feedforward loop on the fine actuators. It seems to me that no additional hardware is needed to proceed on this test.

Peter is going to come to caltech next week for other issues so it will be a good time to evaluate if there are any tangible advantages on doing this exercise. One of the advantages is that if the itf is available, we are probably ready to run the test now.
 

3.2 Issues Concerns

Optical Lever Lasers Reliability

Mike Zucker, Ken Mason
Mike Landry has taken on measurement of COC witness samples for reflectance at 670 nm, the favored wavelength for replacement lasers (favored by much greater lifetime). We are considering better ways to bound the problem; spectrophotometer scans would be very useful.

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)




Thermal Noise Interferometer (Libbrecht)


This week we corrected the problems we were having with our PSL, and we are
now able to acquire lock quickly and easily.  The lock is also quite
robust, remaining stable with the Pockels-cell loop either open or closed.
The problem was, as we had suspected, that two of the op-amps in the fast
(PZT) loop were railing in response to a dc offset.  We were able to
compensate for most (but not all) of this offset by tuning the "input
offset adjust" pot inside the servo module.  The remaining dc offset was
nulled by adjusting the common and fast gains, each of which seemed to
contribute to the offset with different signs.  With the dc offset removed,
the system performed wonderfully.  We also note that the Pockels-cell
amplifier no longer exhibits a high-frequency railing, which had been a
problem in the past.
 

We have extracted a Pound-Drever-Hall error signal from our mode cleaner,
with the mirrors held in place by their earthquake stops, and we have been
looking at noise in this fixed cavity.  We see some "jitter" between the
frequency of the laser and the length of the cavity, which appears to be
due to motion of the suspensions.  By locking the laser to the mode cleaner
(which is much easier than locking the mode cleaner to the laser) and
observing the error signal, we took a spectrum of this noise.  The spectrum
is quite broad, and we suspect that it is acoustic in origin, rather than
seismic.  This agrees with the conclusions of one of last summer's SURF
students, Sam Makonnen, that the dominant source of excitation on our stack
in air is acoustic.
 


LASTI (Zucker)


No report this week


Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)



 

Simulation and Modeling

Lock Acquisition

Matt is working with Rolf to port the lsc code for cds.

Thermal noise

Biplab is working to implement the thermal noises based on Sam Finn's
work.
Most of the noises can be implemented using digital filters.

Adlib

sos based digital filter is implemented.
The 3d suspended mirror primitive is tested.

alfi

Version 4.0.9 has been relieased which looks quite stable. After a
little
bit of testing by limited people, it will be available for generic use.
This is still beta quality.

From: Stuart Anderson <sba@srl.caltech.edu>
Stuart: Starting work on incorporating data validation checksums to the
main LIGO data archive.

Continuing to setup new server for dataconditioning API.

Researched available ftp daemons in search of more security and configurability.

Enabled the starting of nttcp on all systems for network benchmarking
from any
computer to  any computer.

LIGO Data Analysis System

Work continued this week on preparing a version of LDAS (0.0.11) which
could be used in conjunction with the GDS's DMT to ingest trigger data
into the LDAS data during a re-processing run of the DMT using the E1
data. On Wednesday night, the DMT and the LDAS were successful at putting
trigger metadata into the LDAS database. This data was just a test run
using the development database tables. But a production run using the
production database tables at Hanford will most likely begin before the
end of this week. Several unexpected challenges occurred when the software
was moved to Hanford. These were fixed up in a couple of hours and then
some differences between the test LIGO_LW (XML) files generated back at
the time of the engineering run and this weeks test had to be sorted out.

The LDAS also continued to make progress on new code and functionality
this week. Much of the development and implementation work for the data-
ConditionAPI matured this week. Among the most significant achievements
were the completion of PERCEPS filters to support LAL standard LaTeX
docmentation within Source Code. Also, several of the data conditioning
algorithms were wrapped up using SWIG for the first time this week, making
these algorithms available to the TCL interpreter that the dataConditionAPI
runs in.

The C++ classes used by the wrapperAPI to communicate input LDAS data
from the master process to all the slave processes was finished this week.
The next step is to develop the classes used to communicate the data products
from the dynamically loaded libraries running on the slaves back to the
master where they can be injected back into the LDAS system.

A problem reading frames at Hanford was identified this week. The problem
is associated with the integration of the version 4 compatible FrameCPP I/O
library into the framebuilder. But the exact source of the problem is very
difficult to identify at this time since the problem only shows up when the
FrameAPI is run at Hanford and not here at CIT.

General Computing


MIT:
Nothing to report.

Livingston:
Ordered new PC's and preparing for the increase in computer usage over the
summer.
Tom is now working with Shannon R. who is taking on some of the Sys. Admin.
duties at this time.

Hanford:
Oudone has installed the latest version of Exceed on the PC's and completed
installation of the CIT licensed Nortons Anti-Virus.

Preparing for future computer upgrades and usage.

CIT:
More changes to the WEB servers. In the final stages of getting docuserv moved
to a new server and off of gsparc.

Discussing the transition to Office 2000 with the other LIGO locations.

Suresh has been working on setting up and debugging DHCP.
 


LIGO II/Advanced R&D (Sanders)


From: Jordan Camp <jordan@ligo.caltech.edu>
SAPPHIRE

We have received 1 inch c-axis and m-axis sapphire substrates, coated by REO. The
coating transmission design was 100 ppm. A ringdown of a cavity composed of the
c-axis part and a previously measured optic showed the c-axis part transmission
to be 80 +/- 10 ppm, within the design tolerance. A measure of total coating
absorption of this cavity showed the coating absorption of the c-axis part to be
less than 1 ppm. So it appears possible to produce super mirrors on a sapphire
c-axis substrate. Next we will repeat these measurements for the m-axis piece.

From: "Ryan C. Lawrence" <rclawren@ligo.mit.edu>
Core Optics Compensation:

Spent some more time looking for a clever way to get the equations for
cylindrically symmetric thermal deformations into a usable 2D elliptic
format.  It appears I'm not clever enough, so I'll probably have to use a
brute force 3D modeler.  I've put the modeling effort on the back
burner, for now.

Instead of a raster-scanning pattern, I've switched to an polar-type
scanning pattern, and have re-rigged the galvo electronics accordingly.
I've got the CO2 laser aligned through the galvos and into the tank (and
onto the test optic).  I'm going to switch out the old heater assembly
tomorrow (thursday) and install the shielded ring heater (which has a
clear aperature through which the heating laser can actuate) along with
some additional insulators and reflectors.

From: Riccardo DeSalvo <desalvo@ligo.caltech.edu>
Soft isolation

Szabi
IP oil bearing still in production
Testing thermometer acquisition for creep measurement
Earthquake simulation ongoing
Supported GASF Ham simulation ongoing

Alessandro
Compared new accelerometer with Barry Controls geophone (model unknown),
performances agree to the seismic activity floor of ground and ?K stand.

Need better isolation to characterise the new accelerometer floor.
Waiting to go on IP.
Started electropolishing setup for thin joints.

Virginio
Encountered without recognising ground tilt problem from water swelling
cork under Synchrotron concrete slabs.  Delayed control and damping
startup.
Found limits of non linearities with old voice coil actuators,  soon to
implement the zero gradient ones.

Akiteru
Simulation of TAMA-SAS recoil mass and recoil cage controls.
Recoil mass controls are simpler, otherwise have similar performances.
Present TAMA coil driver noise will dominate the mirror noise at about
10-20 m/RootHz
Could downsize controller because SAS will deliver much smaller residual
R.M.S. movement. Also could use multiple level actuation.

Riccardo
Received new blade testing setup for MGASFs, assembled works OK

Flavio, Alessandro, Szabi
Measured actuation capacitance with glass mirror mass, 50 pF, could use
higher value idf we do not find a better ferrite.
Achieved a drive circuit of Q=140 at 350 kHz, 400V p-p with 4 V drive
and 100 mW power.
Next step with new ferrite at 20 kHz and hopefully Q=500, power
consumption will decrease.
Receiver the laser drive to pump the coils through Marconi drive.
 

From: GariLynn Billingsley <Billingsley_G@ligo.caltech.edu>
Core Optics

Identified topics for this year's Advanced R&D.  The topics covered under
the heading of COC are:
Identification of alternate coating sources,
Improvements in the large optic cleaning method,
Improvements in the IR interferometer,
Development of off-wavelength analysis for the IR interferometer,
Further characterization of absorption in Fused Silica.

From: Helena Armandula <ahelena@ligo.caltech.edu>

We received two coated sapphire samples from REO.  Testing will start this
week.
(SEE JORDAN's RESULTS ABOVE)
 


For additional information about this report, contact sanders@ligo.caltech.edu