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The LIGO Executive Committee
Agenda for Monday May 15, 2000 will be:
(Meeting time: 10:30 am Pacific Time)
Open meeting 10:30 - 11:30
Special Items: NSF review reprise
Alan Wiseman of the University of Wisconsin
at Milwaukee will become
the LIGO/LSC Software Coordinator. He will also chair the LIGO/LSC
Software Coordinating committee which was organized and chaired by
Stuart
Anderson. Stuart will continue to serve on the committee. The
Project and
the LSC appreciate the work that was by done
Stuart and thank him for
his efforts in beginning the software coordination
and the data
analysis proposal evaluation process.
WBS 1.2 LIGO Operations--Administration
From: Ed Chargois <chargois_e@ligo.caltech.edu>
No report this week.
From: Cleveland Mak <mak_c@ligo.caltech.edu>
| Packages | Faxes | |
| In | 31 | 51 |
| Out | 6 | 46 |
Special Projects: Assisted Liz with stuffing notebooks for NSF Review. Assisted Rita with unloading and transporting food/ supplies for NSF Review. Processed tons and tons of electronic documents (mostly LSC).
From: Esther Cunningham <esther@ligo.caltech.edu>
Press here for ACCOUNTS PAYABLE HISTORY DATA.
From: "Brambila, Ruth" <Ruth.Brambila@caltech.edu>
http://docuserv.ligo.caltech.edu/docuserv/home/accts_ops.pdf
http://docuserv.ligo.caltech.edu/docuserv/home/accts_adv.pdf
A meeting is being scheduled for the week of May 22 to force the issue of using the Caltech P-card, or another Caltech card, for use on travel. This meeting will be with the Institute Controller, Al Horvath.
Rita Torres
Started to format additions to Stanford progress report received last week but ran into problems, some text omitted from transmission. Meeting on 5/11 with B. Kratochwill to try to find a solution.
Continued to coordinate food arrangements for the 5/8-5/11 NSF review. Lots of phone calls and emails, and a trip to Smart & Final -- thanks to C. Mak for unloading my vehicle, and for general help.
Obtained Oracle requisition numbers. Did site trips updates. Spent a bit of time on Expense Reports. P-card activities, the usual chase for invoice information, and reconciling.
INFORMATION - From Caltech Weekly Update 5/8/00:
ALL CALTECH / FEDEX SERVICE USERS
All FedEx shipments must be received at the FedEx service counter by 4:30pm. Caltech is required to have all packages ready for the driver to pick up and scan by this time.
The FedEx driver must dispatch from Caltech to the Los Angeles FedEx facility by 4:40pm to assure that the packages meet their service commitment times. Details: http://atcaltech.caltech.edu/news/item.tcl?news_id=1275
Irene Baldon
Worked on preparing the paper work for 12 new trips taken recently or upcoming (12 Payment Requests and 14 Advance Requests). There are approximately an additional 15 new trips in various stages pending completion of travel arrangements before the paper work can be completed. Also, there are 3 trips that require extensive attention due to various problems incurred.
I have started the travel arrangements needed for 23 incoming SURF students, some of which will be coming from Europe. This is the highest number of students that LIGO has had since we started working with the SURF Program. We have 14 students coming to LIGO/Caltech, 3 will be going to LIGO/Hanford, and 6 will go to LIGO/Livingston. I have been able to start on some of them and will continue to push the others so that I can get the best possible fares.
Completed 35 Expense Reports, some of which were extensive, involving 2-3 or more pages each. There are 21 Expense Reports still to be done. I’m holding 2 completed Expense Reports which requires a check from the Traveler before sending to Travel Audit to clear.
Rita continues to try to fit into her schedule some time for travel. She has 9 Expense Reports to be done at the present time. She also completed 6 Expense Reports last week.
Performed normal recording and filing associated with Travel and Reimbursement. Had an extensive discussion with Wayne Morales, Supervisor, Travel Audit, regarding Advance Checks. They will no longer expedite Advances that do not get over to them before the trip begins/ends. In fact they want the Advance Request to be sent a minimum of 1 week before the trip starts. This can be difficult since sometimes I have difficulty getting an approval signature before I can send it over. I again pushed for the use of P-Cards for Travel, which Gary Sanders, Phil Lindquist and Ed Jasnow are also pushing. I will keep you informed as to what happens. I attended a meeting on Travel arranged by the PMA office conducted by Wayne Morales with Davida Perez, Mitchell Thompson, and Karen Dumbroski. This meeting was of a general nature, not much new, just a few points of fine tuning.
I also assisted with NSF participants wherever possible both on their travel and their meetings here in Millikan.
Prepared the Travel/Vacation Itinerary for the Week of May 8, 2000.
Dorothy Lloyd
Continue to review "old" open purchase orders in IFIS and those converted to Oracle. Submitted approximately 20 to Acquisitions (Ruth) to "close out" and remove the encumbrance. Adjusted LIGO database accordingly.
Processed requisitions, invoices and receiving on-line. For more detail see "Cost Schedule Control Systems" report by Esther Cunningham. Volume of invoices received to process is still low.
Tracked and followed up on invoice problems.
Monitoring of contract and blanket order funding levels is ongoing.
Jim continues to maintain files and do data entry.
Elizabeth K. Wood
Dealt with the little details of the NSF site review. Many thanks to Rita Torres for taking care of the catering details and to Irene Baldon for overseeing the accommodations of the reviewers.
Began gathering together a list of LIGO publications from the past 18 months for the annual report. Not all publications produced by LIGO are submitted to the DCC.
Progress Period from 5.5 to 5.11
Accomplishments:
The committee recommends that the revised HPP include:
Given LDAS's plan of "just in time" purchases
to reduce costs, the explanatory text should provide the rationale behind
proposed purchases ahead of need.
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 |
| CR-000007 | WBS 1.2.2 | Replacement of Optical Lever Lasers | S. Whitcomb |
Press for the latest Contingency Needs Projection.
From: Kris Duncan <kris@ligo.caltech.edu>
Announcements:
--------------
(F. Raab)
We found another "surprise" magnet (see Optics report). Work continues on debugging our laser telephone system and lots of alignment activity.
Optics:
---------------------
(D. Cook)
The COC re-alignment tasks are steadily plodding along with varying
degrees of sucess. We have encountered several problems along the way that
eventually got resolved. We encountered another "stowaway"
magnet in an OSEM on the same FMY-2k optic. This time on the upper left
face magnet. While making what would have been the final tweek of the PAM
screw, the
optic made a sudden lurch. Upon looking for the
cause I discovered the culprit. We ended up removing the OSEM and
the magnet soon followed. We then pulled all of the face OSEMs, carefully
inspected the interiors for possibly breeding pairs, reset the OSEMs and
finished the alignment. I cannot explain where in the past reprocessing
of the optic that this
happened or even how it was missed on the last
episode. We have developed some new successful techniques which hopefully
will prove to give us a closer alignment.
Seismic Systems:
----------------------
(H. Radkins, C. Gray & M. Guenther)
2k HAMs--
Looked at a "wobble" issue on HAM7 which came up during Mode Cleaner
Alignment (it was thought that the table could be causing misalignments
because of "three-legged stool effects" from the Stop Screws of the Scissors
Tables). We saw a slight wobble in one axis ~roughly 1/8 mm, and
were able to decrease the wobble by ~half of that by adjusting the Stop
Screws.
Checked level/elevation of HAM10. Were within 1.15 mm in elevation and level range was 1/16 mm. No changes made.
BSC9--
EM shakers are being installed.
Controls:
---------
D.Barker
Implementation of new CDS file system almost complete. All LHO target names have been changed to conform to the naming standard [IFO][System][Location or identifier]. See the full list in http://blue.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/targets/LHOTargetsNewOld.html
Presently 26 of the 45 LHO target systems (VME computers which run the VxWorks Real-Time kernel) have been changed to the new naming convention. All LHO targets now boot from the new CDS area $CDSROOT/lho/targets.
All source code is under full configuration control using the LDAS CVS system. Using this system CDS code is mirrored at all LIGO sites.
All EPICS targets are being converted to use the save-restore faciltiy, which automatically backs up all PV values every 10 minutes. When a target is rebooted, it restores all of its values from the last backup.
All targets now have a data file, called TARGET. This is an XML file which provides CDS with information about the target. See http://blue.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/CVS/CdsCvs.html for more information, see http://blue.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/targets/LHOTargets.html for the target XML data.
CDS code is being made generic under the $CDSROOT/project areas. The goal is to generate site specific object files from a single generic source. The Vacuum Controls system was built with this design from the beginning. Existing systems will be converted to this design, the suspensions controls will be the first to be ported.
Almost all the EPICS MEDM files have been ported to the new CDS file system. All LHO MEDM files reside in a single directory ($CDSROOT/lho/medm). All files must conform to the new MEDM naming standard <IFO><SYS>_<SUBSYS>.adl. Top level and overview screens must have a _Main.adl suffix. A perl program which runs every 10 minutes collects all the *_Main.adl files and organizes them into the site map. In this way, new files are made available to all site users within 10 minutes. See http://blue.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/screenShots/sitemap.jpg for an example.
I am working on the new "CDS Programmers Development Guide" which will describe all these changes in detail.
C.Patton
Testing new vacuum control software;
PID controllers for LN2 Cryogenic pumps which maintain the LN2 liquid
level to a setpoint.
The Cold Cathode vacuum guage is now averaged over a 10 second period
before being sent to the Beam Tube Protection system to prevent gate valve
closures on a vacuum glitch.
All vacuum target systems are being changed to the new cvs system. IOC
names will become h0ve(ex,mx,lx,mr,ly,my,ey) and boot from the new $CDSROOT/lho/targets
area.
Interferometer Commissioning: A test using an optical lever on the output of the mode cleaner showed that we are not dominated by noise from light scattering in the OSEMs until at least 750 mW. The principal focus of our efforts is now in understanding the unlocked motion of the optics and the diagonalization of the length control signal. The length control signal does look reasonably diagonal.We are trying to understand why MC1 moves even when it is unlocked by putting a quad cell on the reflected beam and using it as an optical lever. It seems the motions of the mirrors pitch, yaw, pendulum and sideways pendulum motion are not very orthogonal.
Detector Installation: All vacuum hardware (gaging, annulus plumbing) has been reinstalled on HAM 3, and BSCs 1-4. During our annual crane inspection,we found the south crane bridge drive pinion gear has prematurely worn out due to misalignment of the pinion gear and the bridge runway. The south crane is still operational while awaiting parts.
General computing: We have received the installation media for Solaris 8, and are testing it on the machine formerly known as sirius. This machine is slated to become our new fileserver.
Community relations: Tours of the LLO were taken by school classes
from Houma and Baton Rouge. The Baton Rouge Astronomical Society toured
the site on Saturday night and stayed on for star gazing. Six faculty from
Southern University toured the site on May 9 (they are interested in areas
of possible collaboration with LIGO). The SPS group from Louisiana Tech
University toured the site 5/11. Two more school classes are scheduled
for 5/12.
All activities covered elsewhere.
All activities covered elsewhere.
| Installation:
Livingston |
Commissioning:
Livingston |
Other
Science/Engineering
Activities |
The newly modified current shunt has been installed. The modification consisted of replacing a pair of 1/4-W resistors for a 10-W power resistor.
The data acquisition wiring in the PSL rack has been modified to now permit removal of the generic data acquisition card without bringing down the entire Eurocard cage.
Rich Abbott
During visit to Hanford,
we installed the Tidal servo components and did modifications to the FSS.
We ran into difficulties with the FSS which are now traced to their source.
More testing is to follow in the beginning of next week and then the board
will be shipped back to LHO. Part of what we think we now understand is
the difference in the locking characteristics of the FSS in LHO and LLO.
Time will tell if we are correct.
A revision to the PSL schematics has been submitted to the DCC along with the appropriate DCN.
Many delays were experienced due to various setup problems, as this was the first time for the procedure of using ITM optics as reference. We had a big surprise when FMy PAM adjustment difficulties led to the discovery of another stowaway magnet!! And this is the same optic that had the first stowaway! The magnet was in a different OSEM; needless to say, all OSEMs on this optic were removed and carefully inspected for additional stowaways. We are now working on Faraday Isolator installation, telescope installation, and arm cavity baffle alignment. Janeen is supporting Mike Smith's target work at Hanford. Releasing those drawings.
The HAM viewport window target fixture was assembled and appropriate targets are being made to direct the output beams on HAM9 and HAM10. Preparations are in process for re-aligning the APS telescope and installing the Faraday isolator. A height fixture was made for setting the height of the PO Telescopes on the table.
Luca Matone, Betsy Weaver
Concluded a set of measurements
on the Beam Dump assembly resonant frequencies. The setup consisted on
the monitoring of two accelerometers, one placed on the Beam Dump while
the other placed on the chamber itself. By comparing the two signals, we
found 3 resonances that dominated the motion (@ 6 Hz, 14 Hz, 26 Hz). The
14 Hz contribution, often dominating the other two, had an amplitude of
~1 micron RMS. For details, see the 5/5/00 elog
Received the bare breadboard, from Thorlabs, for the ETM transmission monitors. These are now at the machine shop for the necessary modifications. Started to receive the balance of the parts for the ETM transmission monitor assembly. We should have three more complete by the end of next week.
ISCT4 for Livingston has been aligned and crated. It is scheduled to be picked up by North American Van Lines on 5/11/00 and will arrive in Livingston the week of 5/15. Myron will be in Livingston when it arrives.
Nergis Mavalvala
I have continued working
on the design of the 4km Guoy phase telescopes. This design must
take into account the mode matching telscope and the beam reducing telescope,
which I'm revisiting in light of our recent experience with the 2km arm
cavity tests.
The spectrum of the MC1 reflected light is NOT dominated by resonances of the MC1 suspension, but is broad and featureless. This clue is being actively followed up at the time of this writing.
Last week we worked on implementing the wavefront sensor alignment servo on the MC. This servo controls the direction of the input beam (4 degrees-of-freedom) to follow the optic axis of the MC. After setting the control matrix based on open-loop measurements of the sensing matrix, the loops were closed and we saw that the servo did bring the beam into proper alignment, but that there was very little gain in the system. We increased the gain by increasing the light power on the wavefront sensors by a factor of about 20 (changed a beamsplitter to one with higher transmission, and increased the overall power on the IOT1 reflection port). Subsequent closed loop measurements of the system showed that the unity gain frequency of the system is about 3 Hz (more than adequate). There is still larger cross-coupling between different channels than we would like; this will be followed up next week.
The big issue now is the pointing stability of the MC output beam. It is not particularly stable due to instability of the MC mirror angles. A measurement of position fluctuations of the transmitted beam indicated that its pointing is fluctuating by about 8 microrad-rms horizontally, and about 2 microrad-rms vertically. It is not clear yet what is causing the MC mirror angle fluctuations; tests are ongoing.
We also adjusted the position damping of each mode cleaner mirror by doing a step response measurement, and adjusting the gain to obtain a Q value of about 8. This seemed to help with the lock robustness; before this the gain was much lower (much higher Q).
This scheme also removes the epics 1Hz, or "slow data", channels from the reflected memory network. Instead, the edcu processor opens its memory up to the VME bus and the Pentium reads the data directly from that memory. Among other things, this would allow us to increase the storage rate of epics channels from 1Hz to 16Hz, though the data would not be as accurately time synced as other data as the epics systems are not synched up to the 16KHz clocks. However, this would provide more resolution, as has been requested by various folks, for diagnostics.
This new system is presently operating at Wilson and undergoing performance testing. Initial testing indicates this configuration can deliver data to the FrameBuilder at >15MByte/sec, as compared to the max thruput of the present MIPS system of 10.2MByte/sec. This is still with the reflected memory net set to "redundant transfer mode" ie all data transferred twice for data error checking
A prototype for the digital suspension LOS coil driver is being fab'd and should be tested by next week.
Bill Kells
Begin WFS tuning at CDS.
Inquiries have been made with Karl Lambrecht Corp. about the possibility of making their air-spaced double plate waveplates in a smaller package so that they can fit in the existing rotation stages.
Lee Cardenas]
Started to complete the
drawings for the new Enclosure for the 40m Lab. Sketches have done and
processed an order.
I am upgrading the MOPA
#110 in the PSL Lab. By checking all the parameters specified by the Lightwave
and re-aligned the optics inside the box to bring the previous output power.
Enquiring in obtaining a new Ref. Cav. Pump station with a new oil-free
pump and a new turbo pump. Right now, I am cleaning the laser cooling system
completely. This laser MOPA # 110, eventually will go to 40m. Lab
in the near future.
I began to setup an e2e model
to simulate the recycled michelson itf. The first goal is to observe what
the power fluctuations are once the system is locked and aligned. At the
moment, only the optical system of the model has been setup and verified.
Pumpdown of the TNI chamber went well. We quickly got down to
a moderate
vacuum, then turned the pumps off to do some noise measurements.
By
comparing measurements of our mode cleaner in air and in vacuum (with
the
stops clamped down), we are able to separate acoustic noise from seismic.
As Riccardo predicted, the noise on top of our stack below 100 Hz is
mainly
seismic, and the component above 100 Hz is nearly all acoustic.
We also measured the finesse of the mode cleaner, and found it to be
5,260
+/- 500, just what we expected it to be. There was some worry
that the
finesse of this cavity would have been degraded by our having worked
with
the mirrors in air for several months, but this does not appear to
have
happened.
We now plan to release the stops and start looking
at a suspended cavity.
Nothing to report.
Lock Acquisition
Matt kept working to push the acquisition more robust. Luca is working
with Matt to study the locking scheme for the Michelson cavity by
introducing
mirror angular motion.
DEC-ALPHA
all e2e softwares, alfi4 and modeler/modeler_freq, have been compiled on
sadan. The programs run fine without code change. modeler runs around
twice
as fast compared to the run on SUN Ultra-30 (rana). Both are compiled
with
g++ -g -O2. There are some problems with support softwares, like ddd,
but
it is promising. Matt is going to run the Lock Acquisition code
on
sadan.
alfi
Basic validation of alfi4 is done and will go into filed test after
one
more
bug is fixed. alfi is compiled on DEC-Alpha (sadan) and seems to be
working
fine. After a few more essential bugs are fixed, rename/save as, cut
and
paste
and junction point will be iomplemented.
LDAS pre-version 0.0.11 was once again built and installed
at the sites for testing this week. All earlier bugs have
been fixed except a rather large memory leak in the FrameAPI.
This will be tackled in two ways: The managerAPI has the
functionality to test memory usage in all distributed LDAS
APIs so it will look for APIs exceeding a some configuration
size and restart that particular API as soon as it is no longer
being used. Secondly, several memory allocation/garbage collection
packages have been identified and will be incorporated into
the LDAS system in a transparent manor so as to allow better
leak detection and garbage collection of fragmented memory.
A pre-release of GNU's GCC-2.96 was built and used to test
several problems with classes from the standard template library
which ranged from memory leaks to non reentrant code. These
problems are all fixed with by this version of the compiler.
However, this compiler is further along in its implementation
of the ANSI C++ standard and identified several area where the
LDAS code was not meeting the standard but meeting the 2.95.2
compiler. These non standard lines of source code have been
identified and fixed for the general and framecpp libraries.
Other code has yet to be tested and made more complient.
The output data structures for the wrapperAPI were completed
and tested this week. This means that data can now be sent
using message passing call to and from the master and slaves
within the parallel code.
With the NSF review bringing several key figures from the LSC
here to CIT this week, Kent had the opportunity to hold several
lengthy meetings on the dataConditionAPI, the wrapperAPI and
the Mock Data Challenges (MDC)s. All meeting were extremely
productive and resolved long standing technical issues that
have been difficult to put to rest over the phone.
An attempt to enable status and health monitoring functions in
our DB2 server failed and resulted is a zombie database table
on the CIT database. A replacement table set was immediately
created, but the stale tables have not been removed. We have
been modestly successful at getting support from IBM but as
of yet have no working solution.
----- Forwarded message from Omar Rashad (LDAS SysAdmin) -----
Activated additional network ports and hubs for use during the NSF review.
With the arrival of the new UPS, development has restarted on performing
controlled shutdowns in the event of an extended power outage.
Setting up new user workstation m90 for new user.
Checking new dataconditioning server for use of Intel chipset under recall.
Installing new keyboard/monitor switch so new dataconditioning server
is
accessible.
Performing monthly backup while simultaneously testing new ait2 tape
drive.
MIT:
Nothing to report.
Livingston:
Testing out Solaris version 8 on the SUN E3000.
Hanford:
Moving licenses to a new license server but this should not affect
the users.
CIT:
Minor changes and fixes have been performed on both the LIGO web server
and the
LIGO internal web server.
Just as a reminder concerning viruses. We've had a number of machines
with virus
attacks but the virusscan s/w has been able to take care of the problems
but we
still need to be careful.
Also, there is a minor security problem with Internet Explorer. Check
http://www.peacefire.org/security/iecookies
for more information, I don't think
most people have anything to be concerned about but it may be worth
checking
out.
Stiff isolation system (S. Richman)
We have closed all 12 loops on the stiff two-stage prototype, using
geophones and relative position sensors. This allowed for the
first time a
measurement of top-to-bottom horizontal isolation from ground noise.
At 10
Hz this is 33 dB, most severely limited by position sensor noise.
The
vertical isolation at 10 Hz is 63 dB. The stability appears quite
good,
and the forcers use only about 5% of their dynamic range. We
expect it
will be fairly straightforward to configure filters in the horizontal
loops
to reduce the position sensor noise contribution and significantly
increase
isolation performance.
Today (Wednesday) we took advantage of our severe environment to do
a
robustness/stability check. Tuesday night the high bay air conditioning
died and this morning the temperature was about 24.5 deg. C.
We closed
loops and let the system run throughout the day. The A/C was
repaired in
the afternoon, and the temperature came down slowly. We opened
the loops
at the end of the day, after 8 hours of operation with a ~3 deg. C
temperature drift and the dull roar of construction next door (though
thankfully the pile driving has ended).
SAS system report
From: Riccardo DeSalvo <desalvo@ligo.caltech.edu>
Szabi
All oil bearing hardware in house, start testing.
Design CRS platforms for IP and TAMA towers in new location
Alessandro
Calibrated Horizontal accelerometer Transferred controls of Hareem,
gone
back to Pisa.
Making LVDT and possibly all other coils in Pisa.
Starting design of Vertical accelerometer with F. Fidecaro.
Virginio
Achieved DC controls of position of IP. Grounds moves tens of
microradians a day, requiring a few grams of actuator force each day
to
keep IP in position.
Preparing for Accelerometer characterisation with Hareem.
Akiteru
Learning controls from Virginio.
Writing TAMA suspension description document. Present design
a single
intermediate mass supporting a mirror and a concentric recoil mass.
Actuation from recoil mass and from filter. Total MGASF filter <=
10
Kg, will need thinner blades.
Hareem
MGASFs tuned to correct diameter and generated updated blade design
for
G&M. Blades in production.
Measured 176 mHz vertical resonance frequency (see outreach) with
present parameters, going for low frequencies when convenient.
Measuring Q-factors at various frequencies.
Going to measure temperature coefficient at 350 mHz and at lower
frequencies.
Riccardo
Mounted larger diameter disk on old GASF filter, achieved 220 mHz VRF
(see outreach), Hareem will measure Q-factors later.
Flavio
Nothing relevant new.
Chenyang
Working on actuator report.
G&M
Received modifications of design from RDS, new raw materials for
corrections arriving this coming Friday, machining asap, delivery
of
TAMA IP suspended waiting for modifications.
Baking bodies of TAMA MGASF filters, final machining from the 11th,
all
material should be shipped by end of next week (19th of May).
Outreach program: Riccardo, Chenyang, Flavio and Hareem.
Received professor Ronald Lu and five High school students from the
LA
county school of arts (and Martina DeSalvo slipped in from St. Elisabeth
middle school) for a day of hands on activity.
They measured the frequency response of both MGASF and GASF filters.
A ringdown curve:
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~citsas/Picture_Gallery/12_8mm64.828.pdf
A frequency versus height curve
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~citsas/Picture_Gallery/fq_12_8mm.PDF
It was great fun, they are smart kids.
From: Helena Armandula <ahelena@ligo.caltech.edu>
Today, Wednesday, we received the two AR coated sapphire pieces from
REO.
Looking for an alternative coating source, and following Ramin's (REO)
suggestion, we contacted Anthony Louderback from MDL, Eugene, Oregon.
Mr. Louderback, together with Dr. David Wei, developed Ion Beam coatings
for Litton, their names are in the patent assigned to Litton.
MDL is able to handle only small substrates at this time. They can
not meet
our uniformity specs. on large optics because they do not have the
appropriate rotator. We plan on sending same samples to get coated
to
evaluate their work.
(Incidentally, I've known Mr. Louderback for a long time; he trained
me to
continue the coating work when he left Litton.)
For additional information about this report, contact sanders@ligo.caltech.edu