Weekly Report for Week Ending September 7, 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  September 11, 2000 will be:
 (Meeting time: 10:30 am Pacific Time)

Open meeting 10:30 - 11:30

  1. Announcements
  2. LSC Issues (Weiss)
  3. Comments on Weekly Report
  4. WBS 1 LIGO I Construction (Lindquist)
  5. WBS 2 LIGO Lab Operations
  6. WBS 3 and 4  Advanced R&D and LIGO II (Sanders)
Executive Committee only    Topics:  Authorship on publications (11:15)
                                                              First lock publicity policy (11:25)
                                                               LIGO II Laser source decision (11:30)
 

Special Items:


Special Announcements:


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 (Lindquist)


PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Chargois)

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


DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

>From: Linda Turner - turner@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. . .

 ACTIVITY HIGHLIGHTS

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>

Prepared distribution allocation for credit check from Demco, coordinated with the campus insurance office to meet the insurance requirements on the lease agreement for storage space in Livingston.  Completed pending subcontract change orders, and placed credit card orders.

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



SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Petrac, Jasnow)

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

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



Support (Wood)

Dorothy Lloyd

Dorothy is on vacation.

Rita Torres

Irene Baldon Elizabeth K. Wood Ottavio D'Angelis --- Caltech (x 3691 room 358 WB)
Gerardo Moreno --- Hanford
Chethan Parameswariah --- Livingston

Advanced LIGO (Frey, Petrac)

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

Progress Period from 9.1 to 9.7

Accomplishments:

Schedule: 9.8 to 9.15 Anticipated Challenges: Corrective Action: WBS 1.4.1.2   Project Controls (LIGO Construction)


Reports (Lindquist)

Change Control/Contingency (Lindquist)

The following change requests have been submitted:
 

CR-990028 WBS 1.1.3 Beam Tube Enclosure Closeout (return of unused funds) F. Asirir
CR-000014 WBS 1.2.1 Additional Support Equipment for Commissioning D. Shoemaker
CR-000015 OPS Repair of Road along Beam Tube Enclosures at Hanford O. Matherny

We have scheduled a meeting of the LIGO Change Control Board for 10:30 am (PDT), Tuesday, September 12, 2000.

Press for the latest Contingency Needs Projection.


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 Petrac <irena@ligo.caltech.edu>

No report this week. See above for Operations.

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

The Invitation for Bid for the Livingston Staging Building is undergoing a thorough review before issuance.  This will result in a delay of one week.
 


LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO) Operations (Raab)


General Items:
--------------
(F. Raab)
 

People are still working tasks where possible until installation can restart. I will be moving people to new tasks to broaden the mix of skills here.
 

Controls:
---------
(D. Barker)
 

Rolf and myself installed and tested the latest version of the DAQ
system recently at LHO. The
EPICS data collection unit has been ported onto a mv162, and no longer
writes into the DAQ
reflective memory network. The controller and switch units have been
combined into a single
baja. The EDU will run at 16Hz. Currently, due to the slow processor
speed, the mv162 can only
run the EDCU at 4Hz. This will be resolved by porting the EDCU onto a
faster processor.
 

Alex and Hongyu ported the dataviewer, jdclient and matlabAPI to the new
DAQ. These systems
are being tested at LHO and LLO.
 

I replaced hanford1 with a different enterprise 2 unit in an attempt to
fix the SCSI problems seen
recently. Unfortunately the boot disk is still showing errors. If this
still prevents hanford1 from
backing up to tape drives, I will schedule a solaris upgrade and boot
disk replacement.
 

Ported our configuration control CVS from spica to ldas-sw as the
repository server.
 

Supported the new DAQ install and CDS updates at LLO last week. I
installed the autoburt backup
of all epics records on an hourly basis. This required installing the
saverestore facility to the
point where the request files were generated for the burt backup. The
LLO target upgrade
for saverestore will be completed at a later visit (requires target
renaming and rebooting).
Installed the automatic generation of the MEDM site overview screen
(updates every
10 minutes).
 

Consolidating recent CDS software changes within the CVS system.
Releasing the DAQ and ISC
software into the production areas. Upgrading the CDS RedBook to reflect
recent system changes
(the RedBook is the set of procedures for shutting down and rebooting
all CDS systems at the
observatories).
 

Building the LHO target database (an XML based system). Each target
entry shows information about
the target's name, ip, operating system, location, shutdown
instructions, dependencies with other
systems, etc. I will coordinate with LLO to get their target
database/RedBook updated.


LIGO Livingston Observatory (LLO) Operations (Coles)



 

OPTICS/COC/SEI INSTALLATION: We have completed the re-survey and re-alignment of all COC in the RC, and used the CAS in BSC-2 for the final positioning of the BS. The CAS misbehaved again, necessitating manual repositioning of the air bearings. Ken Mailand is now able to begin the repositioning of COS components, and we will assist him with this task. (Jonathan Kern)

CDS: The Livingston branch of CDS completed testing of the cryopump controls at the west end station last week. The pump reservoir is now full and PID tuning is in process. Training sessions for our operation specialists were held at the south end station. The alignment sensing and controls rack is still missing a couple of boards but all other internals are complete. In an effort to conform to our minimum traffic in the LVEA policy due to the doors being removed we are making distance measurements and will prep all the field cables in the OSB. Fabrication of the one arm test LSC cross connect is complete. General arrangement drawings for the latest LSC configuration have been received and fabrication is underway. Expecting a visit from Jay in two weeks for testing. The data acquisition system has undergone a complete overhaul this week and is being tested. This will enable us to continue our PEM audit including signal characterization. We have also received the hardware and software required to begin implementation our electronics configuration control plan. Completed wiring of 1X9 cross-connect. Received and installed replacement satellite amps at both end stations. (Rus Wooley)

General Computing: We are in the process of upgrading Sun workstations to Solaris 8.We have ordered a large disk for our PC server to help with backing up the PC files to tape. (Tom Evans)

PSL: The output beam alignment stability from the PMC was checked. As the looking point of the PZT was varied over its full 200 V range, the beam showed a displacement of a few microns. The stability of the beam over a 10 hour period was measured to be about 0.1 microns. (Joe Kovalik)

Vacuum Equipment: Y arm cryo pump has been tested and passed for Ln2 level control. We replaced a faulty valve positioner from there with the x arm corner station and have ordered a new one. Y arm end station is under going leak test. (Allen Sibley)
 


MIT (Shoemaker)


Covered elsewhere.


Caltech (Sanders)


Covered elsewhere.


Detector/Technical Support (Whitcomb, Coyne)


 
Installation & Commissioning:
Hanford
Livingston
Other Science/Engineering Activities:
Design/Analysis/Fab
Issues/Concerns
See also the Installation web page

1.1 LHO INSTALLATION & COMMISSIONING

2km Commissioning

Daniel Sigg, Nergis Mavalvala, Dick Gustafson, David Shoemaker, Josh Myers, Robert, Schofield
In anticipation of  full ifo locking next week, we have turned our attention to the frequency noise on the light incident on the arm cavity. We have measured the loop gain in the MC length loop and recalibrated the error signal in order to quantify the residual frequency noise at the mode cleaner error signal. We then spent some effort trying to reduce the 60, 180 Hz line noise. The level of the frequency noise on the MC error signal at 60 Hz is of order 1 Hz pk-pk. An isolation transformer in the RF line from the RFPD made about 8 to 10 dB improvement. We have determined that the RS 232 serial cable from h2iool0 to the MC demod board adds about 15 dB of line noise. We made a couple of futile attempts at putting in an opto-isolator; the RS232 port on the 162 processor seems not to be able to power the opto-isolator. Since the 60 cycle noise does not seem to be on the photodetector, we have amplified RF signal to reduce the effective frequency noise due to lines. We intend to use an arm cavity to further investigate the frequency noise. We have also noticed that the level of the line spikes changed by about 10 dB over the course of a day, and, sadly, in the wrong direction.

Bill Kells
Revving up on the current "full" e2e version for LHO 2k modeling. Should be facile by next week.

Suspension Controls

Jay Heefner
Seven high current and 3 low current satellite amps have been sent to LHO.

Input Optics

Dave Ottaway, David Reitze
Beamtube connecting PSL enclosure and HAM 1 in process at UF.

Core Optics Support (COS)

Betsy Weaver, Mike Smith, et. al.

4km Installation Readiness

John Worden, Kyle Ryan, Mark Lubinski, Larry Jones
Spool WBE-3B was removed from between WBSC 2 and WHAM 4, the O-rings were replaced, and the spool was reinstalled. A dry air purge connection is being installed at WHAM 6 (a connection valve already exists at WBSC 1). The leak that stopped when sprayed with acetone at the mode cleaner flange of WHAM 2 has started leaking again; this will be disassembled and repaired.

Betsy Weaver, Doug Cook, Larry Jones
Hung, balanced, and glued ETMy optic; this will be ready for placing into the oven for baking tomorrow.

1.2 LLO INSTALLATION & COMMISSIONING

Commissioning

Peter Saulson
No conventional commissioning took place last week at LLO, due to ongoing installation activities.

Joe Kovalik started work on the PSL section of an Operators' Manual. (Previously, a chapter template and 1st draft of the IO section had been written by Peter Saulson.)

Mark Coles, Rich Riesen, Rus Wooley, and Joe Kovalik have produced v1.0 of an Operator's Daily Task List. It contains a substantial list of checks for instrument status, health, and performance.

Input  Optics

Sany Yoshida, David Reitze, Malik Rakhmanov, Haisheng Rong
Measured beam position fluctuation/drift at PLS/IO hand-off point: observed beam position changes of up to ~1 mm at the PSL/IO hand-off point for unknown reasons.  To understand this, we installed a quad sensor near the hand-off point monitoring the beam position. The sensor is placed in a distance of 96" from the PMC and a converging lens with f=687.5 mm is between them, 36" away from the PMC

Preliminary results of a 24h data set show that the beam clearly drifts, but the magnitude is much less than 0.1 mm.  One other noticeable effect is that the beam position changes slightly (15 micron at the monitor point, and this corresponds to a 35 x10^-6 rad angular shift of the beam directly out of the PMC) but clearly when the PMC is locked at different bias voltages. This could be a indication that either the PZT actuator tilts slightly as it moves along its axis, or the beam is not perfectly centered on the curved PZT mirror.

More details can be found in the elog.

LSC

Jay Heefner
All drawings and cross connect lists for the LLO 4K LSC rack (1X9) are complete and have been sent to LLO for fabrication. Jay will be at LLO the week of 9/18 to check out the slow control software, wiring and operator screens.
 

DAQ/LSC Software

Rolf Bork
Finished installation DAQ V3.0 at Livingston.

Suspensions

Jay Heefner
Four low current satellite amps were sent to LLO. These modules complete the deliverables for the LLO 4k.

Core Optics Support (COS)

Ken Mailand, Mike Smith, et. al.

PSL

Peter King
The modified frequency servo has been installed.  Some simple tests were applied.  The frequency servo spontaneously recovers, at full operational gain settings, when the mixer is disconnected and re-connected. Ditto for the wideband input and phase-correcting Pockels cell output.  The unity gain frequency was estimated to be approximately 300 kHz.  A copy of the as-built schematic was placed in the control room.

The current MEDM PSL operator screens were installed.  The default menu for pulling up the sitemap on the workstation inside the PSL Enclosure was modified to pull up the latest sitemap.adl, which in turn pulls up the latest PSL screens.

An AutoCAD layout of the PSL section of the IO/PSL table is near completion.  The remaining things to be drawn are the holding forks, monitoring photodetectors and CCD cameras.

Rich Abbott
Completed the upgrade of the frequency servo at LLO.   The system now performs as well as the two that were tested in the basement of Lauritson Lab.  The servo exhibits spontaneous locking characteristics without oscillatory tendencies.  The noise measured inside the loop is better than before but awaits final comparison with the modecleaner derived signal.

LIGO-TriNet seismic stations

Szabi Marka
Finally, after extensive testing, Quanterra shipped the datalogger units. According to FedEx tracking they should arrive this week. The delivery of the LHO fiberglass is also scheduled for this week.

2.0 Other Engineering and Scientific Activities

2.1 Design/Analysis/Fab

Optical Metrology

GariLynn Billingsley, Helena Armandula
RM03 measurements have just finished as of this afternoon.  Helena has flown solo on this measurement and is doing a great job.  After shipping RM03 we will take a quick look at a piece of Sapphire then proceed on to measure the Beam Splitter for the Hanford 4K.

We measure the Beam Splitter at 0 and 45 degrees incident angle. At 45 degrees incident angle there is significant turbulence in the beam path so the measurements can be hit and miss.  Martin Stadnik, a SURF student, predicts ~ 4nm change in measured sag over the central 150 mm when comparing the 0 and 45 degree incidence measurements.  This is based on modeling the effect of coating non-uniformity (as measured by CSIRO with elipsometry) on measurements at different incidence angles.  Experiment bears this out, except that the sign is wrong.  The experiment is consistent, so the guess is that there is some inconsistency in sign in the model.  Once this is resolved we hope to argue that 0 degree measurements can be made on Beam Splitters, without the backup of 45 degree measurements.

PSL

Rich Abbott
Began the process of turnover to Rick Karwoski for PSL related details.  Have met, and continue to meet with Dale to get information about the LSC system.  Am in the process of reading the available literature on the LSC.

Modulated OSEM Design

Jay Heefner, Rich Abbott
- It appears as though up conversion of scattered light to the OSEM modulation frequency may be a limiting factor in the amount of scattered light rejection that can be obtained with a modulated OSEM design. The rejection may only be ~20dB. Measurements are being performed at Caltech and MIT to confirm the results.
- One prototype of the suppressed carrier circuit board will be sent to Rai at LLO for testing.

New OSEM Heads

Peter Fritschel, Myron McInnis, Janeen Hazel-Romie
Plating. A test run of plating zirconium nitride on 3 osem heads with much better surface quality than the first batch unfortunately showed poor results; the adhesion of the plating to the material was again very poor - some of it came off during ultrasonic cleaning, and the remainder could be easily scraped off. Myron and I visited the plating company and talked with the folks involved; the more knowledgeable fellow claimed that ZrN was a difficult coating to make work with glass or macor (until now we had been communicating with a less knowledgeable employee, who thought the problem was with the surface finish). We've decided to abandon ZrN as a plating. The plater thought that silicon carbide would be a good first coat to get achieve good adhesion to the macor, probably followed by a coating of carbon-doped diamond to achieve good smoothness (low friction) and the appropriate conductivity. This coating will be tried Thursday. Another option if this doesn't work out is a silver plating.

Myron and Peter have also been experimenting with methods of attaching the glass filters to the ceramic boards. The idea of using a spring clip that is bonded to the board looks very attractive, and we are trying different spring materials and shapes. We are also running tests on variants of the original ceramic bonding of the filter.

Digital Suspensions

Jay Heefner
A schematic of a possible LOS coil driver circuit has been sent to interested parties for comments and suggestions. Once the comments have been received the design for the coil driver and the bias modules will be completed and prototypes fabricated. These prototypes will then be tested on the LHO 4K along with the rest of the digital suspension system.

DAQ/LSC Software

Rolf Bork
Received new PCI bus reflected memory cards for Suns with 64MByte memory (present older version has 4MByte). Began incorporating this into the development system at Caltech.  This unit would allow a larger data buffer for the Framebuilder to reduce the possibility of missed data as present system only holds 1/4 second of data.

Rebuilding LSC development system to make/test requested software changes.

Data Monitoring Tool

John Zweizig
This week I continued to work on building a distribution kit of the most recent DMT software version. This has run into a problem which I now believe has to do with an incompatibility of compiler options used the compiling framecpp and those traditionally used to compile the DMT software. I also helped several people with problems they were having using the DMT software.

EO Shutter Controller

Sander Liu
Shipped the last unit to LHO. This completed the order for EO Shutter Controllers.

Global Diagnostics

Sander Liu, Paul Russell
Paul finished building and shipped the first unit to LHO for field testing. Balance of the Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) are being assembled by Accu-Sembly.

2.2 Issues Concerns

New OSEM Heads

Problems with the conductive coatings on the new OSEM heads have caused us to reject the completed head fabricated to date.  We are currently evaluating alternative coatings, substartes and suppliers, but it appears unlikely that we will have any of the new OSEM heads before the end of October.  This will delay the installation of the LHO 4 km interferometer.

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)




Thermal Noise Interferometer (Libbrecht)


No report.


LASTI (Zucker)


No report.


Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)



 
 

Simulation and Modeling


Lock acquisition

Matt improved the lock acquisition logic, using the ratio of the error
signal and the transmitted power, instead of the error signal itself, and the lock
acquisition time could be dramatically reduced, at least in the
simulation.

Biplab studied the effect of the mirror misalignment on the lock
acquisition.
A preliminary result shows the locking is not much affected is the
misalignment
angle is less than 5x10^-8.

Hanford 2K IFO model (Han2k)

Matt has made a detailed model the Hanford 2K IFO system, for now
focusing
on the length locking. e2e has been improved to support macro data file.

Han2k has been modified to use the macro data base, so that physics
parameters
can be easily modified. The document, "End User's manual" is now being
prepared
so that anyone interested in using Han2k can use the program.

Stack model

Biplab made HAM and BSC stack model based on the Ed Daw's fitting of the
transfer function. Now, in e2e, 6x6 transfer function of the two stacks
can be simulated.

Suspension model document

Malik started to write a LIGO document about the basics of the LIGO
suspension
system. This will cover the basic formulation of the dynamics, analytic
solutions,
simulations, measurements, etc. A preliminary discussion of the context
has
started among the authors, Malik, D. Tanner and Hiro.

Alfi

A multi line editor is integrated in alfi. This enables editing of
settings
consisted of long strings, like a long list of zeros and poles of a
digital
filter.
Ed is working on a major improvement of the graphics rendering.
Other bug fixing are going on as well.

Installation document

Ed is working on the document how to install the e2e related softwares.

New programmer joined

A new programmer, Ottavio D'angelis, has arrived. He is going to work
mainly on the improvement of the simulation code.

LIGO Data Analysis System

  • Software Systems (Blackburn)

  • The visits made by B.S. Sathyaprakash and Sanjeev Durandur harvested
    two interesting results for LIGO Data Analysis. Sathya was able to
    demonstrate a 5X speed up in the computation time for templates and
    Sanjeev was able to formally show a ~10x speed up for hierarchical
    searches by including the time dimension in the hierarchy. The hierarchical
    search would take place over data corasely sampled in the postNewtonian time parameters and
    the time itself. Both methods for improving the
    computational performance are still under development but demostrate
    the protential for performance boost that new thinking on the binary
    inspiral search can still bare. Saytha submitted a LIGO technical
    document on his results which can be found in the DCC.

    The dataconditionAPI was found to have new (at least previously
    unknown) memory leaks this week. It has not been determined yet
    if these are in the C++ shared object or in the TCL code managing
    the shared object. The dataConditionAPI also appears to have cases
    where failed attempts to allocate memory are not being trapped which
    causes ill defined behavior for larger data sets. Attempts to track
    these bugs with a debugger have not been succcessful, though we were
    able to attach a debugger late last week.

    The build instructions and process are now being exercised on a
    linux workstation which was wiped clean to provide a common starting
    point for members of the LSC that may desire to build LDAS. This
    has identified may shortcomings in our instructions and will make
    the process go smoother for those less familiar with the environment.
    Along these lines, UWM now has a full build of LDAS on their Alpha
    systems. They have yet to test the LDAS there but plan to do so soon.
    The next effort in this exercise will be to develop the necessary
    instruction to be able to run LDAS on systems outside of the target
    environments found in LIGO. This has already been accomplished at
    UTB by Joe Romano, but instructions for the procedure are not spelled
    out yet.

    MPICH has pre-released a new version to us (thanks to the contributions
    that Masha Barnes made to that consortium). This release is reported to
    have several fixes to the MPI 2.0 C++ exception handling which will be
    tremendously valuable to the LDAS wrapperAPI. The pre-release is some-
    what immature, lacking bullet proof installation procedures. We are now
    working with NDU to sort out the build process so that we can test the
    new release.

    The version of GCC that we are using in LDAS seems to be very sensitive
    to options associated with thread safty and memory allocation at the
    time that GCC itself is compiled. This effects the behavior of code that
    is compiled with GCC and produced several problems with LDAS execution.
    We are looking into the best set of options to allow thread safty in
    the standard library and the LDAS modules.

    Lazzarini and Blackburn will have a weekend meeting with UWM principals in the MPI
    search code MDC development to (hopefully) resolve several issues associated with the interface definition between
    LSC-provided LAL C code and LDAS-provided C++ code.

  • Hardware Systems (Anderson)

  • A final selection for the next LDAS development beowulf system at Caltech
    has been made: 16 933MHz PIII PCs.

    Arrangements with CACR have been made for terminating the new single mode
    fibre runs needed for the LDAS Gigabit Ethernet data analysis network
    at Caltech.

    The Sun HPSS performance testing for September has been postponed to
    after SC2000 (early Nov) where Sun will have an E4500 demo system running,
    and after the official Sun supported release (v4.2) scheduled for Nov 30.

    The LIGO data archive at Caltech is currently unavailable due to a
    prolonged software upgrade at CACR, for updates and announcement of
    availability, see, http://www.srl.caltech.edu/personnel/sba/ligo/hpss

    A major upgrade of the LDAS system at LLO has been scheduled for
    the last week in September.

    The upgrade of all LDAS systems from Solaris 7 to Solaris 8 is proceeding
    without any major problems encountered yet.

     
  • Data Analysis Activities

  •  

     

    LIGO-SNEWS (Szabolcs Marka):
    Please visit our homepage at: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~smarka/SN/
    You can sign up to receive the alarm. (We will redistribute SNEWS/GCN
    and ultimately LIGO alarms after the testing phase.) E-mail enabled cell
    phones, pagers and other handheld devices are OK.
    The first version of the alarm receiver/distributor code is being tested
    for durability and stability.
    Benoit Mours (VIRGO) joined the project and work with us during the
    crucial development phase.

    Benoit Mours:
    Studying a technique to generate a reduced data set for production:
    started to work on the construction of a chisquare metric to describe
    the power spectrum stability of monitoring channels.

    General Computing


    MIT:
    Some minor changes to e-mail. Still some people are have a few problems that may
    need to be worked on.

    Livingston:
    Nothing to report.

    Hanford:
    Nothing to report.

    CIT:
    (Barbara)
    - Made another round of changes to the roster database for Advanced LIGO
    and for contractors appearing on the LSC roster.
    - Continued efforts on the LDAS Equipment Inventory web forms and database.
    Add and edit forms are finished.  The Search/Display forms are just about
    complete.  Only delete forms and reports remain.
    - Finally found the secret trick for transmitting the Real media files via
    FTP to Eric at Hytec.
    - Added the roster databases to the TimeTarget backups.
    - Researched a problem with the weekly compact/repair process for the DCC
    databases.
    - Installed the summer edition of the newsletter.  Made other quick web
    site changes.

    (Sam)
    - Did everything possible to make Rich Abbott's PC happy
    - Rebuilt two machines, including imaging them
    - Answered many pc related questions, most interesting of which was how to
    connect two PC's into one
    - Burned CDs
    - Worked on Backups a bit (I helped change tapes)
    - Looked into purchasing camera and microphone
    - Tons of physical therapy.
    - Playing with office2000 trying to figure out how it will work with old
    documents and with Staroffice.

    (Lisa)
    - Finished monthly backups
    - Diagnosed a hardware problem in Rich Abbott's PC.  Sam helped out on this.
    She did a great job in helping to pin this down.
    - Working with Ed Chargois on getting equipment surplus out of Wilson House
    - Putting together a Req for upgrading our modem pool
    - Worked on making VME crates boot off luna.  I added an entry to the FAQ that
    is a list of things that need to be in place in order to support the VME crates.
    This is a critical step in the decommission of kater.
    -Pushed out a couple more Ultra 10's.  I added an entry to the FAQ that is a
    step by step on how to build the new workstations.
    - Started working on getting the IC package of Cadence running.  I borrowed a
    Cadence Design Kit and some sample setup files to make this move along quicker.

    (Suresh)
    - Installed and configured Solaris 8 and staroffice software packages in four
    new Sun Ultra 10 systems.
    - Worked with Larry to provide two 115 subnet connections to 40 Meter Lab. Took
    out unneeded fiber cables from network closet.
    - Made a tape backup of /usr3 partition of Janeen's machine (mintaka) before
    replacing this with a Ultra 10 system. Replaced Drum kit for color printer in
    Millikan 6th floor.
    - Set up two new users accounts.

    (Larry)
    - Worked through a number of procurements and have put in the paperwork for a
    couple of the SUN maint. contracts. As a side note the SUN 450 units that were
    recently purchased have a three year warranty.
    - Purchased a number of PC's to upgrade some of the DCC equipment and more
    laptops for travel.
    - Worked the the 40M group to get a few network problems resolved. It appears
    that a couple of fibers may have been damaged during the move. We have worked
    around them but will still get them checked out to see if they can be repaired.
    - Generating another list of equipment to be turned over to Caltech.
    - Working on new installations of both SUN boxes and PC's.
     


    LIGO II/Advanced R&D (Sanders)


    From: Bill Kells <kells@ligo.caltech.edu>

    1. Running MELODY through its paces, trying to get a basic
      run equivalent to a basic FFT config. Already have ferreted
       out bugs in Melody: probably minor wrt LIGO II designing.

    2. Ongoing (with Jordan in OTF) investigation of coated m-axis
      Sapphire: are the mirrors birefringent?
    .
    4. Consulting on 40m upgrade issues.

    5. Consulting on LIGO II COC issues.

    6. 40m recycling paper.

    Sender: smith@acrux.ligo.caltech.edu
    LIGO 2

    A preliminary draft of the AOS DRD was completed and was sent to the other AOS subsystem designers for review and updating.

    From: Peter King <pking@ligo.caltech.edu>
    LIGO II PSL
            The quotation that I was waiting for has finally come in.  This
    should permit me to proceed with the cost estimation for the opto-mechanical
    parts of the PSL.

    From: Janeen Hazel Romie <romie_j@ligo.caltech.edu>

    Working with Alan W. on 40m suspensions
    requirements. Working on Advanced
    LIGO costs.

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

    Specs for Pathfinder IIA (the 150mm dia sapphire blanks) were completed and circulated for comment.  Comments are requested by 9-8.  Assuming no major changes, these will be sent to GO and CSIRO for quotes.  For the time being we have settled on a sag tolerance of ±10 nm for our pathfinder and advanced LIGO estimating.  Check out the design baseline (as of this writing)for the advanced LIGO optic specs.

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

    We tested bonds made with substrates cleaned with calcium carbonate; compared their strenght with substrates cleaned with Liquinox and with the original bonds made at Stanford were the surfaces were not previously cleaned or just wiped with methanol.
     

    The test's results showed that bonds made on substrates aggressively cleaned,(water wets the surface), are more robust.
    The results obtained compare closely with J. Gwo's reports.

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

    >From next week we move from the larger meeting room to the smaller one
    (just next to it).
    Next week I will be in Japan to study feasibility of Cryogenic Thermal
    Noise Interferometer, Virginio will hold the meeting.

    Alessandro
    Writing thesis
    Shipping accelerometer aluminium mark 2 with electronics

    Giancarlo
    Simulations finally converged with agreement between simulation and
    prototypes.

    Akiteru, Szabi
    Reconstructed IP with 7.6 mm flex joint, started measuring transfer
    function.
    Needed wider holes on IP bases to allow perfect alignment of legs
    parallelism.
    Oil bearing now perfect but below 500 mHz problems with directional
    guide stiction.
    Need to coil actuator coils soon.

    Virginio, (Stanga, Giovanni)
    Closed all accelerometer loops for inertial damping.  No LVDT
    integration yet, slow drift of system. Instability at high gain and low
    frequency, hit walls in 120 seconds.
    Need better low frequency characterisation and diagonalisation matrix
    and merge in LVDTs.
    DSP runs OK without crashes.

    Francesco
    Calibrated Aesmart amplifiers with 50 and 500 KHz pulse bursts 50 cycles
    long.
    r.t.= burst length, f.t. = 1 ms on both HF and LF channels.
    Loaded blade over week end and listened to acoustic noise.
    60Kevents of which 300 compatible with acoustic emission in 5 days.  To
    be analysed.
    Add load to watch acoustic emission increase.
    Measured anticorrelation of creep oven internal and external
    temperatures, definitely need temperature controller in auxiliary
    stabilized box.   Reconnecting LVDTs to readout.
     


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