Weekly Report for Week Ending September 14, 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 18, 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 11:30 - noon   Topics:
 

Special Items:


Special Announcements:  GOOD NEWS FROM TAMA :  TAMA had an extended run during the last few weeks. They have done quite well. They took data for more than 160 hours during a 2 week period in late August, were able to operate with daytime cultural noise, and were able to operate for more than 23 hours in a single day. The report a best strain sensitivity of 5 x 10-21 Hz^-1/2 at about 1 kHz.  Follow this on the TAMA web site.


Weekly Report Highlights
 


LSC Issues (Weiss)


No report.


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>
Packages Faxes
In 11 27
Out 11 33

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>

Working on the cancellation of pager service from Metrocall and also Pagenet.  Working with Siemens as it appears vendor is duplicate billing us for fire alarm service, which is included in the maintenance contract.  Working with purchasing a tractor for LIGO Hanford through the GSA office.  Working on UC Berkeley to obtain billings for FY2000.

Closed out FY1999 PO's and provided Dorothy with printouts of encumbrances for a decision to be made whether to release funds and close PO or leave open.  Will continue working on closing PO's from last fiscal year.

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)

Rita Torres

Irene Baldon Dorothy Lloyd

Three day report (returned from vacation 9/11): Concentrated on processing a heavy load of invoices which came in while I was away, and worked on tracking some invoice problems. For more detail see "Cost Schedule Control Systems" report by Esther Cunningham. Also processed several requisitions and entered all the requisitions that were processed while I was away (thanks to Rita and Gina), into the LIGO database.

Elizabeth K. Wood


Advanced LIGO (Frey, Petrac)

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

Progress Period from 9.8 to 9.14

Accomplishments:

Schedule: 9.15 to 9.22 WBS 1.4.1.2   Project Controls (LIGO Construction)


Reports (Lindquist)

Change Control/Contingency (Lindquist)

A LIGO Change Control Board was held on September 12, 2000.  The following change requests were reviwed and approved:
 

CR-990028 WBS 1.1.3 Beam Tube Enclosure Closeout (return of unused funds) F. Asirir
CR-000014 OPS Additional Support Equipment for Commissioning D. Shoemaker
CR-000015 WBS 1.1.4 Repair of Road along Beam Tube Enclosures at Hanford O. Matherny
CR-000016 WBS 1.4.3 Early Installation of Linux Clusters A. Lazzarini

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>

Nothing significant to report.

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

The Invitation for Bid for the Livingston Staging Building will be released on Friday, September 15.  This IFB calls for a pre-bid conference/job walk on Thursday, September 28, and a bid opening on Thursday, October 19.

An Invitation for Bid has been prepared for the paving of the service roads at Hanford.  It is expected that this IFB will be released on Friday, September 15, with bids being opened on Friday, September 22.


LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO) Operations (Raab)


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

Commissioning is the front line task this week, but 4K staging continues.
 

PreStabilized Laser:
--------------------
(M. Guenther & R. Savage)
 

- Two half-wave plates and a polarizing beamsplitter cube were removed
from the optical path between the 10-W laser and the pre-modecleaner.
As a result, the PSL output power increased from 5.9 W to 6.6  W.
 

- T. Mahood and R. Graff installed an improved beam dump in the 2k PSL
pre-modecleaner rejected light beam.  A diverging lens expands the beam
so that the intensity is below the damage threshold of a "Black Hole"
beam dump from Blue Sky Research.  This has significantly reduced the
scattered light level in the IOO/PSL enclosure.
 

- T. Mahood, D. Ottaway, and R. Savage are working on optimizing the
optical layout for the WA 4k PSL.  It looks like a draft layout will be
ready by Sep 15 to submit to P. King, et al. for review.
 
 

Optics:
---------------------
(D. Cook)
 

The two ETM-4k Optics are balanced and are staged waiting for the new
OSEMs to arrive. We have the new Core Optic cleaning fixture and will test
it on the next optics to be processed. We will start the MMT3 Friday AM and
will follow on with the 2 ITM-4k optics which we now have in the lab. The COC
optic magnets/standoffs and other sub-assembles are completed and ready. I
will be submitting a drawing Friday for approval, that will adapt our COC
transport carriers to fit the new 15CM and 13CM saphire optics. We have
several ongoing COS tasks being readied for the 4k installation. Betsy is
ready to align the Faraday isolator in the new staging area using the ISC
calibration laser. I am going to electro-polish the new PAM screws to ease
the fit to their brackets. We are having galling problems when they get
assembled. We continue to update the 4k readiness documents to include the
IAS and COS requirements. These changes require in vacuum hardware
components to be designed, fabricated and baked.
 
 

Seismic Systems, etc.:
----------------------
G.Moreno, M.Guenther, C.Gray, & H.Radkins
 

Seismic Isolation
*Shipments of equipment and parts have been departing LHO in support of MITs LASTI SEI buildup.
*Installation is wrapping up and testing is proceeding on the 4k IFO SEI Coarse Actuation System.
*BSC seismic isolation transfer function measurement is nearing completion wanting just a noise measurement of the acquisition system.
 

ISC
*Equipment is in place waiting for a cool windless day to bring the survey control into the Yend VEA for core optics initial alignment.
*Optical Lever hardware for the 4k IFO is being reworked as required to match modifications done on the 2k      hardware.
 

Facility
*We are waiting for another big wind day to get a repeat data set on the warehouse seismic noise measurements
 
 

Controls:
---------
(D. Barker)
 

Making changes with Rolf to LSC and ISC Supervisor systems to support
commissioning work.
 

Continuing with redbook updates.
 

Wrote perl code to scan all CDS source code to determine where each
target's object code orginates. Put these data as XML into the target
directory (thePROJECT file).
Attached this information to the web page.
 

Supporting GDS ATM installation at Livingston.
 


LIGO Livingston Observatory (LLO) Operations (Coles)



 

OPTICS/COC/SEI INSTALLATION: This week's work has consisted principally of supporting Ken Mailand with the COS installation. Thanks again to Joe, Gary and Harry for coming in both days last weekend to help Ken. We're aligning the Optical Levers right now, and preparing for the final alignment of the BS, both ITMs and the RM when COS is completed. My expectation is to begin the process of buttoning up midweek next.
(Jonathan Kern)

CDS: This week we completed the fabrication of 1X9. We are ready to start testing on Tuesday when Jay arrives. Dave R. checked the IO suspension
outputs to the DAQ. There appears to be a small problem with MMT1 which we will address next week - everything else looks good. Doug is continuing with the PEM channel characterization. Chethan has starting working on the video system in the control room - and progressing nicely. We have also started to develop as-builts documentation. (Rus Wooley, Michael Fyffe, Doug Lormand, Cheithan Parameswaya)

PEM :Program to collect microseismic peak data is in running on delaronde. It is collecting average power between .1 and .2 Hz every 30min and creating a power spectrum every 12 hours. It is doing this for all nine seismic channels (3 channels on each of the three seismometer - X, Y and corner stations). Program has been checked with both software injected sine as well as signal generator injected sinewave into a DAQ channel. Thank you to Fitra Kahn and John Zweizig for their help. (Anthony Rizzi)

LLO COMPUTING SUPPORT (Shannon Roddy and Tom Evans):

GC: Monday we were having network problems. The T1 to LSU was down most of the day Monday and part of the day Tuesday. After troubleshooting the problem, we rebooted the router and the Excalibur hardware. This seemed to fix the problem. We added several disks and a tape drive for our Windows server. The drives are set up in a fault tolerant RAID 5 array and will be regularly backed up. Upgrading the memory for the black & white printers. Purchased 3 laptops for use around the site and for loaners when LLO staff travel. Dealt with some windows networking problems this week. Purchased several Windows 2000 Professional licenses for the guest PCs.

LDAS: Received the racks for the LDAS PCs. Will try to look at them next week and make sure that all of the parts came in. Stuart said that when they received them at Hanford there were misc. parts missing. Will possibly try to assemble them next week also so that when Gregg and Larry come in they will be ready.

CDS: Replaced one of the Ultra 10’s that was in the LVEA with a newly configured Ultra 10. The Ultra 10 that was in the LVEA was in need of some reconfiguration and upgrading per request of some of the people that were using it. We will look into this and return it into use.
 


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

Nergis Mavalvala, Rolf Bork, Stan Whitcomb, Matt Evans, David Shoemaker, Peter Fritschel, Bill Kells, Daniel Sigg

Frequency noise.

In preparation for attempting to lock the full interferometer, much work went into trying to reduce the frequency noise on the light sent to the interferometer. Several sources of frequency noise were attacked: With much help from Dave B and Rolf in making LSC code changes and getting the system to run stably, we had the pieces in place yesterday to make the first attempts at locking the full interferometer. No success yet with this ultimate goal, but lots of interesting things along the way; we are still in a state where there are many untested conjectures as to why it is not working, none of them worth writing about at this time. We are making some more code changes today to make the input matrix conventions used the lock acquisition code consistent with the rest of the code, and we are adding some additional test point channels which should give us better diagnostics.

Bill Kells
Installed and began exercising the latest e2e versions and Matt's Hanford 2k locking model.

PSL

Peter King
4 Thorlabs PDA-55 photodetectors were modified for use on the 4k PSL.  These photodetectors are used for monitoring the reference cavity and pre-modecleaner transmission and are used for the intensity stabilization.

Parts continue to trickle in for the LHO 4k PSL.

4K Digital Suspension Controls

Jay Heefner
Rack layout for the LHO 4K suspension system (digital) has begun and should be complete by 9/15. Installation of components should begin in early October.

Input Optics

David Ottaway, Betsy Weaver, Corey Gray, Dave Reitze
This week Corey, Betsy and myself  balanced and glued the final four input optics (ie MC2, SM1, MMT1 and MMT2). MC1 and MC3 were successfully vacuum baked. The final four mirrors will be vacuum baked with MMT3 sometime next week. Betsy is working on the updating of the SOS mirror assembly procedure. David O. and Dave R. are looking at redesigning the mode matching lens system for the MC mode matching for the new 4K table layout.

Note by D. Coyne: There is a proposed layout simplification for the 4K PSL/IO table that David Ottaway, Rick Savage et. al. are working on, for review by a large group including both observatories.

Core Optics Support (COS)

Mike Smith
Faraday Isolator: 4k Faraday Isolator is in process of being assembled.
HAM2/3 Beam Dump: A beam dump assembly is in process of being fabricated; delivery to CIT is  expected 9/18.

4km Installation Readiness

Report by Larry Jones

(John Worden, Kyle Ryan, Mark Lubinski)
The leaks at the mode cleaner flange of WHAM 2 and at Spool WBE-3B have both been confirmed repaired and the vertex has been repumped.

(Betsy Weaver, Doug Cook)
The ETMy optic was taken out of the oven and rehung; both ETM units are now wrapped, staged, and ready for OSEMs. Working on cleaning fixtures.

(Ken Mason)
Completed monument locations for the LHO corner station optics installation. Autocollimator orientations and theodolite positions are being worked on.

(Hugh Radkins)
Working on setting up Y end station survey monuments.

(Hugh Radkins, Mark Guenther, Gerado Moreno)
Performing CAS checkouts on BSC 3. Found and repaired a missing coil ground return on the multiplexer relays in the 4 channel rack.

Note by D. Coyne: The LHO 4km interferometer installation is delayed until the QC problems with the new OSEM (sensor/actuator) heads have been resolved and production re-started. It is currently anticipated that a sufficient quantity of OSEMs to enable installation  will not be available until mid-Nov.

1.2 LLO INSTALLATION & COMMISSIONING

Installation

Jonathan Kern, et. al. (report by D. Coyne)
The COC alignment has been completed in the corner station and COS alignment is well underway. Next week the IO alignment will be done, while the vacuum system will begin to be closed up. The LSC electronics will be installed next week by Russ and Jay.

Commissioning

Peter Saulson
No conventional commissioning took place last week at LLO, due to ongoing installation activities.
Now that the DAQ system is working more reliably, we have resumed work on our PEM Audit. The work is being led by Doug Lormand, assisted by new computer person Chethan Parameswariah and on a part-time basis by Laura Schlecht (LSU math senior and LLO part-time secretary.) The checkout of the signal integrity of all of the DAQ channels has been completed, and all channels passed. The next activity is to complete the characterization of the two instruments that had been studied by the UT Brownsville students this summer, tiltmeters and accelerometers. The main outstanding issue is to characterize the statistics of those signals. Doug is designing a comb of octave-wide band pass filters, and will start generating histograms through that filter set shortly.

Input  Optics

Dave Reitze
PSL/IO table: We replaced the adjustable mirror mount for the last corner mirror before the PSL/IO handoff with an unadjustable mount. This changed the beam path from the handoff to the EOM chain. Accordingly, we relocated the irises, mode matching lenses (the mode matching lenses to the EOM), Brewster polarizers and the EOMs.

After the relocation of the optics, we realigned the EOMs. The alignment of the EOM was done by the following procedure. We first measured the depolarization of the EOM by feeding the light transmitted through the EOM to a photodetector through a cross-polarized polarizer. The power transmitted through the polarizer and detected by the photodetector (Pt) is the power in the wrong polarization. Monitoring the photodetector's output, we minimized Pt by adjusting the pitch, yaw and azimuthal angle (i.e., the orientation of the crystal axis around the beam path) of EOM. The power rejected by the polarizer (Pr)  is the power in the right polarization. We measured Pr with a power meter, and evaluated the depolarization by calculating Pt0/Pr0, where Pt0 is the minimum Pt obtained by the above mentioned anglular adjustment of the EOM and Pr0 is
the value of Pr measured when pt=pt0. We repeated this procedure for all three EOMs, one by one. The depolarization of the three EOMs have been measured to be 9e-6. This is a factor of two higher than the polarization purity of the PSL beam (measured with the same polarizer setup without placing the EOM) of 4.7e-6.

After this alignment, we measured the RFAM of the resonant EOM (24.49 MHz) by driving it at 13 dBm (corresponding to the spec modulation depth of 0.5). At a low optical power to EOMs (~0.3 mW), RFAM has been measured to be in a range of 9e-6 to 1.5e-6 over three days.

Note by D. Coyne: The requirement is RFAM < 1e-3 (section 10.2.1.3 of T980009-01)

More PSL beam drift data has been put in the in the e-log.

LSC

Jay Heefner
Jay will be at LLO next week to install and test the slow controls for the LSC.

DAQ Timing

Szabi Marka, Joe Kovalik
We are measuring the absolute timing delay between the GPS clock and time stamp (full chain) using the ramp output of the LIGO timing module.

Core Optics Support (COS)

Ken Mailand, Lee Cardenas, Gary Traylor, Mike Smith

PSL

Peter King
An as-built layout drawing of the PSL is largely complete, with the exception of the beam tubes.  Joe Kovalik is checking the drawing.

GDS

Szabi Marka, JohnZweizig
We installed and configured the new Fore ATM card in the LLO DMT. We discovered some bugs and had much trouble with the (faulty) distribution software (see eLog for solution details). The DMT is accessible now from the GC, CDS and LDAS net.

LIGO-TriNet seismic stations

Szabi Marka
We received the Quanterra Dataloggers. They must be tested and configured.

2.0 Other Engineering and Scientific Activities

2.1 Design/Analysis/Fab

Optical Metrology

GariLynn Billingsley, Helena Armandula
We have completed measurements of RM01 and RM03.  Neither of the two RMs are within spec, we have no other coated spares. It is not clear to me which RM would be best to use for the WA4K installation. We have moved on to measurement of BS03, the final optic for Hanford, we await a decision on which RM to send.

Note by D. Coyne & S. Whitcomb: Bill Kells has been requested to review the data. We will hold a Material or Technical Review Board meeting to make a decision on the disposition of the RM01 and RM03.

We looked at averages from the various data sets late last week and discovered that the radius of curvature of RM03 is out of spec. It reads ~ 14.40Km The spec
is 14.9Km -0.15 +0.75. The Radius for RM03 is short by -0.50Km, roughly -0.35Km out of spec.

Over the weekend and early this week we measured RM01, it is reading 15.8Km, 0.90Km long and 0.15Km out of spec.

You may recall that one other RM was out, 0.13Km long. In sag that equates to less than 1 nm difference, and so that optic (the LA4K RM) is arguably within range
of the spec given our calibration uncertainty of 2-5nm.

Other data of interest: the RMs were polished long (change from 9.9K to 14.9K based on the assumption of 5 ppm/cm absorption in the ITMs and a 10 watt laser.

ITMs at Hanford, slated for the WA4K:
Optic absorption (ppm/cm) ROC (14.18, +0.14, -1.0 km required)
4ITM06 2 13.60
4ITM07  4 14.24

Yes, there is something strange going on with the RMs. These were the first optics we summarized in late '98. The Lab temperature wasn't stable at that time, nor
did we have a great calibration, there is 2.8 nm difference in sag between the cal file we use now and the one we were using in '98. The old one was flatter, giving us
slightly (~.5Km) shorter ROC results. Another variable is that the system was not in good thermal equilibrium (change ~ 1 degree C/day) during the early days and
for the RM02 measurement. Fortunately, the RM02 measurement falls well within the spec. Thermal stability was better for RM04, and has been the most stable for
the RM01 and RM03 measurements (<0.1 degree C/day).

Summary of Radii of curvature (ROC, km) for uncoated and coated  RMs, measured at CSIRO and CIT:
Optic CSIRO-uncoated CIT-coated Dsag(nm)
RM01 15120 15680 6.6
RM02 14980 15050 0.9
RM03 15390 14400 -12.6
RM04 15000 15780 9.3

The ROC measurement uncertainty has not been addressed rigorously at Caltech as of yet. In the interest of comparisons though, I include the following.
Measurement of COC-A001, a pathfinder piece polished by HDOS:
Measured By: ROC (km) sag (nm)
HDOS 6.097 ±.046 461 ±3.5
CIT 6.08 462
CSIRO 6.06 ±.07 464 ±5.3

PSL

Peter King
The IOC in the PSL Lab was altered to boot from luna, since kater is about to be taken away.  No problems were encountered with booting from luna.  However now the MEDM operator screens can no longer resolve the signal channels, making operation of the PSL in Lauritsen a little difficult.  Operating MEDM from kater works still.  This problem will have to be fixed if kater is to be removed.

Modulated OSEM Design

Jay Heefner, Rich Abbott, Rai Weiss, Ben Abbott (reported by Dennis Coyne)
AC OSEM testing continues. It does appears as though the PD gain is dependent on the light power it sees. If this is the case, we will have a very hard time achieving reasonable rejection of the IFO scattered light. There is some evidence of this phenomenon in the literature for silicon PDs, i.e. quantum efficiency modulated by light level at a 3e-3 to 3e-2 relative intensity level. LIGO measurements seem to indicate more device nonlinearity. Further investigation is underway, including a test for the same effect on the new OSEM PDs. Ben Abbott has proposed an alternative circuit concept which is being pursued (measure the scattered light level by modulating the LED off and sampling in the off period).

New OSEM Heads

Janeen Romie
Surmet reported this afternoon that they will start the heat treatment process on friday and will finish the trial run of silver plating at the beginning of next week. I have finished the alumina head drawing should this trial not work. Surmet is confident that this process should result in satisfactory plating.

Suspension Control Electronics

Jay Heefner

Suspension Diagonalization

Mark Barton
I made a new draft of the suspension controller tuning procedure, T000003-A. (Note that this link will not work until the document is transferred into the electronic DCC.) The software has been refined for ease of use. Unfortunately, the procedure for tuning the output matrix using the sensors as a reference doesn't work very well. When applied to FMy at LHO, the residual cross-coupling from position to pitch and yaw as measured with
optical levers was equivalent to about a 10% perturbation to the output gains in both directions. When applied to MC3, again at LHO, the residual was around 5%.

The larger perturbation for the large optic might well be the effect of the PAMs, which are calculated to produce a few percent change in the pendulum mode restoring forces. However, the perturbation for the small optic is a mystery. The most likely possibility is an an error in the input matrix tuning procedure software, but I haven't been able to identify anything wrong yet. Other less plausible possibilities include (i) physical asymmetry of the optics (ii) differences between the input gain values programmed into the controller and the physically implemented values (I checked this for one optic and got very good agreement, but conceivably FMy and MC3 are wrong) and (iii) optical lever problems. I'm planning another trip, probably to LLO, to do some more investigation.

Data Monitoring Tool

John Zweizig
This week I continued to write the make files to build and compile a distribution kit for the new version of the DMT software. The problem I ran into last week was resolved after working with Alex to find a way that the LDAS software builds could be set up to work for external dmt users as well as for LDAS. This distribution kit was placed temporarily on hold while I am at Livingston where I am working with Szabi on getting the configuration of the LLO DMT machine (delaronde) to look as much as possible like those at LHO. To this end, we have installed an ATM interface and driver software and set the network configuration to connect to the GC, CDS and LDAS networks. This took a little longer than expected because we found we needed a new version of the driver software for the model of the ATM card we received. With the ATM networking set up we are continuing to set up delaronde.

Photon Calibrator

Matt Smith
Finishing up the enclosures for the photon calibrator.  I could not find a vendor to machine the enclosures so I am doing it myself.  I should finish it by then end of this week.  The mounting piers are still at the vendor and  should also be finished by next week.

AA Filter

Sander Liu
In the process of building one more LEMO antialiasing filter chassis for the DAQ Digital Signal Processor.

MC LSC Electronics

Mohana Mageswaran
Designing & simulated the revised MC Servo-controls. Needed to change the Elliptic filter topology since the earlier one had higher gain.

2.2 Issues Concerns

OSEM PD nonlinearity

The PD in the current OSEM design is found to have a significant nonlinearity in gain with light level. This may severely limit the efficacy of a modulated OSEM approach to attenuate the effect of scattered light on the local damping controls. see above

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)




Thermal Noise Interferometer (Libbrecht)


After some revisions and some very good advice from Rich Abbot and Jay
Heefner, we have finalized the design for our satellite amplifiers (which
allow our old-style OSEM controllers to talk to our new sensor/actuator
heads.)  We constructed a prototype driver for one head on a breadboard,
and it seems to work nicely.  The next step is to lay out a circuit board
design and begin manufacturing the real thing.  This week we have also been
working on the new control electronics for our suspended mode cleaner, and
on the photo-thermal noise experiment.


LASTI (Zucker)



LASTI weekly report (Shoemaker, Kruzel, Mason, Smith, MacInnis, Zucker)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Management & planning:
        Reviewed and revised the LASTI schedule; it is now in a state to be
        immortalized in Primavera

Data & diagnostics infrastructure;
         DHS worked on the DAQ/GDS design with Daniel and Rolf

Interferometer:
        Coordinated PSL configuration and physical footprint
        with Peter King.  Moving large AutoCad files around.

SEI installation:
        Floor drilling for SEI supports is going slowly due to the stainless
        steel rebar in portions of
        our floor (placed by prior tenants, a magnet lab). The diamond core
        drill takes over an hour to chew through each SST bar we are
        unlucky enough to hit (PSI had the same problem
        anchoring the chambers).  Matt and Ed are trying various workarounds
        (tungsten carbide? plastique?) to speed
        things up.

        Removing the VCT tiles in the areas to be grouted is also proving
        slower than anticipated. The flooring's adhesion has evidently
        increased since PSI anchored the chambers last year.

Cleanrooms:
        We had an unexpected windfall when CSR shipped out the HETE satellite last week;
        their fully-equipped 12'x16' (HAM-size) class 100 assembly
        cleanroom is now available to LIGO free of
        charge (CSR needs the floorspace now for the HETE data/operations center).
        We signed up a rigger to move it to the LASTI high bay next week.  The rigger
        will also move the current PSI HAM cleanroom over to the left arm.  This
        leaves only a BSC cleanroom for us to procure; this is being custom-designed in
        collaboration with  Larry Jones to support the planned
        "cartridge" SEI/SUS installation test.


Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)



GHS note: The formatting of the Data report below is difficult to read. That is the way it arrived.

Simulation and Modeling (Yamamoto)

     A software package to simulate the
     Hanford 2K IFO with length degree
     of
     freedom has been released. This
     included the LSC code developed by
     Matt.
     In this release, parameters of the
     detectors, like arm lengths, can be
     defined
     in a macro database file. This makes it
     much easier to change settings,
     especially
     important for those who are not
     familiar with the simulation
     environment.
     A LIGO note has been written - still
     preliminary - to explain how to use
     the
     software, "Han2k - End User's
     Guide".

     The latest End to End software
     package, simulation programs and
     GUI alfi, has
     been installed at Hanford, being built
     at Hanford from the source codes.

     The effect of the misalignment on the
     stability of the Lock Acquisition of the

     full Hanford 2k IFO was done by
     Biplab, based on the Han2k package
     mentioned
     above. The angular fluctuation
     spectrum used is a simple model by
     Luca inspired
     by the measurement at the Hanford
     2K one arm run. Instability was
     observed
     when the magnitude is above some
     value. Biplab is working to summarize
     his
     result.
 

Simulation work plan
 

     Biplab, Luca and Hiro got together to
     discuss the works of the near future.

     Biplab will keep working to perfect
     the primary noise sources of the full
     LIGO in-lock state simulation, i.e., the
     seismic, thermal and shotnoise. He has

     made e2e modules to simulate the
     HAM and BSC stacks based on the
     parametrization done by Ed Daw. He
     is gathering mechanical parameters
     to generate more realistic noise curves
     for the three IFOs.

     Luca is going to work on the
     modification of Han2k to implement
     WFS/ASC,
     together with Hiro. Hiro will
     implement the 3D suspended mass
     which is
     actuated by 4 forces. Luca will first
     test the ASC matrix to compare the
     model
     and the design. He then will
     implement the WFS and control
     systems.

     Hiro is going to implement a simple
     thermal lensing so that the e2e
     simulation
     with the actual mirror curvatures
     (14.9k RM) does realistic simulation.
 

Alfi
 

     Ed has almost completed the update
     of the graphics rendering of alfi,
     which will realize more robust
     graphics front-end and more leaner
     code implementation.
     Bruce is working on the internal data
     management to make sure that the
     update of the disk files are done
     correctly.
 

Profiling
 

     Ottavio D'Angelis has arrived to work
     with the e2e simulation group.
     First task is to analyze the profiling of
     the e2e simulation code.
     With the help of Ed, he built static
     code of simulation programs with
     proper tags in it for the profiling.

     Han2k was used as a test case, which
     uses scalar fields and is composed
     of1000 modules. Nothing surprising
     was found so far, as opposed to the
     last case one year ago. He is going to
     see the details.

     He will soon analyzae a modified
     version of Han2k provided by Biplab
     which
     uses multi mode fields. The simulation
     pf multi mode fields will slow down
     the run by factor of over one order of
     magniture.

     He is using gnu prof, but has found
     that SUN workshop profiler has
     useful
     features which are not available in gnu
     prof. He will use SUN prof when
     necessary.
 

Meeting in October

     Hiro wants to have an e2e meeting to
     have people at Caltech interested in
     e2e
     to discuss the future collaboration. He
     contacted several people trying to
     organize one sometime in the
     beginning or middle of October.

Documents

     Biplab is working to revise the draft
     of the e2e paper, which is till very
     preliminary.
     Hiro is preparing a memo for the
     LIGO II proposal.

LIGO Data Analysis System

  • Software Systems (Blackburn)

  • Documentation on the LDAS build procedure continue to be developed this
    week. An attempt by the new dataConditionAPI member from University of
    Florida indentified several new problems with the instructions. These
    are expected to be incorporated by Friday of this week. In addition to
    these build tests have identified several "better" ways to configure
    the build scripts and improve their portability.

    The threaded ILWD socket transmission tests continue to be a problem. It
    was demonstrated that these tests are strickly isolated to Linux hardware
    and more specificly, only to SMP linux platforms. There is also a general
    set of correlations between this failure and the strange failures of some
    tests of the dataConditionAPI to suspect that they are related. A new
    release of the glibc library which included a pthread fix was released
    this week, but test late this week show no improvements in the problem
    when using this library. At this time it seems to be most closely related
    to running on Linux SMP platforms, an area which the Linux kernel group
    has identified as needed improvements for the next big kernel release.

    The LDAS system now has enough functionality in the controlMonitorAPI
    to monitor and detect low disk space and other database errors and to
    notify LDAS operators via email when these database conditions occur.

    Peter Shawhan has continued to work on the database MDC this week. His
    MDC Plan document is being distributed and he has notified the members
    of the LSC ASIS and Detector Characterization working groups of the
    plan while at the same time made a request for volunteers and participants
    to support the MDC activities outlined in the plan document.

    The limited URI support that existed in LDAS for pushing output data
    products has now been extended to support anonymous FTP of data to
    remote sites such as LSC home institutions. It will next be extended
    to support http_puts to remote web servers giving the LDAS system full
    URI support for the input and output protocol command line options.

    The wrapperAPI now only needs two more command line options needed to
    fully support the command line parameter set outlined in the version
    12 release of the baseline requirements and implementation. Performance
    tests using the flat binary inspiral search library from UWM show that
    the last communication option { -communicateOutput } implementation
    has decreased the communication costs by 10s to 100s over the already
    impressive 150x improvements mentioned several weeks ago. These can be
    used to make communications cost almost measureless on large clusters
    of nodes as the example using 1000 templates below illustrates
    [time spent in communications{time spent in filters}seconds]:

       nodeDutyCycle       commOutput=ALWAYS     commOutput=ONCE
           10               [0.359{150.2}s]      [0.005{151.8}s]
           100              [0.355{148.1}s]      [0.041{152.5}s]

    A new release of MPICH (1.2.1) was finally compiled this week after
    plenty of email exchanges with the developers to report bugs in the code
    and the build procedures. Unfortunately, the claims that the problems
    with exception handling found in the previous release was premature. We
    still see the same exception handling problems and have reported this,
    along with our recommendations on how to solve it after investigating
    the failures in their code, to the development team.

    Over the weekend Alan Wiseman and Patrick Brady from the UWM group
    visited Caltech specifically to meet with Kent Blackburn and Albert
    Lazzarini to discuss changes to the wrapperAPI. The meeting lasted 10
    hours. Minutes from the meeting are available from the mpi group
    website (this will be made available under the LDAS webpages soon).
    The meeting resulted in several significant changes to the design
    and philosophy of the wrapperAPI. However, most components will only
    see minor iterations. Chief among the significant changes in the
    removal of the indexing schema. This adds flexibility to the design
    of search algorithms while at the same time demands greater overall
    responsibility of the shared objects which will need to be verified
    more closely during MDCs. In addition, the requirement that code
    must be parallel in its nature was relaxed and a less deterministic
    mechanism for slave communications with the wrapperAPI put into
    place. This meeting was very useful to all in attendance to sort
    out reasons and motivations for choices on both the wrapperAPI and
    the dynamic shared object sides of development.

  • Hardware Systems (Anderson)

  • A tcl script has been written to
    backup data IFO frame data 24/7
    during
    the upcoming engineering runs using
    an AIT 2 tape robot/library. The
    script
    is currently being tested and has
    the following features:

    1) Maintains a log with all commands
    issued, diagnostics (such at data
    flow rates) and a library of tape
    locations.
    2) Emails the operator when magazine
    become full written to, when errors
    occur, and when falling behind the
    framebuilder.
    3) Operator can configure number of
    times to retry command, time to wait
    before retrying,
    and time to pause after completing a
    command.  (Allows the script to run
    continuously while an operator
    changes magazines.)
    4) Prints and emails info in the
    unlikely event a crash occurs to
    allow
    an operator to quickly restart the
    script.
     

    The electrical work for the Caltech
    archive LDAS machine room has
    been completed.

    The final order for a 16 node
    development beowulf cluster has been
    placed.

    A test between a Foundry Networks
    Gigabit Ethernet switch, a CISCO
    switch
    and two LDAS Sun E450 servers was
    successfully completed.

    A major CACR HPSS upgrade has been
    completed. However, user accounts
    are being reworked for a more
    integrated system of account
    management
    between all of the CACR resources.
    It is anticipated that HPSS ftp
    accounts used to access the LIGO
    archive will be available in a few
    days.

    A ~2TB Fibre Channel RAID system
    from DotHill has been received for
    evaluation.

  • Data Analysis Activities
  • Benoit Mours has created a charming educational outreach www page that was prompted by a request from Marcia Bartusiak for "The Sound of LIGO". It is available off the "NEW" items list at the top of the LIGO Home page. Suggestions for improvement are always welcome (though they may not get implemented due to workload -- volunteers are always welcome, too).

    Philip Charlton:
    * Other activities: I've spent a little time this week on some
    work with
    Bernard Whiting, we are starting to convert some data analysis
    code to fit
    the LAL standard so that we can submit it to Jolien.
    I've also written some code for reading frame data and
    processing it with
    Tom/Jeff's FCT code. At the moment I'm using 40m frame files to
    test it.
     
     

    General Computing

    MIT:
    Received the Dell computer which is
    to be attached to the projector.
    Julien has started working on the
    SUN 450.
    Jennifer worked with Larry on
    getting a number of files
    transferred to DCC.
    The procedure for MIT to send files
    needs to have some minor changes to
    accommodate the s/w being used.

    Livingston:
    -The T1 to LSU was down most of the
    day Monday and part of the day
    Tuesday.
    After troubleshooting the problem,
    we rebooted the router and the
    Excalibur
    hardware.  This seemed to fix the
    problem.
    -We added several disks and a tape
    drive for our Windows server.
    -The drives are set up in a fault
    tolerant RAID 5 array and will be
    regularly
    backed up.  Upgrading the memory for
    the black & white printers.
    -Purchased 3 laptops for use around
    the site and for loaners when LLO
    staff
    travel.
    - Dealt with some windows networking
    problems this week.
    -Purchased several Windows 2000
    Professional licenses for the guest
    PCs.
    Received the site license disk for
    Office 2000 from CIT and will be
    installing
    it on various machines.
    -Larry has been talking with
    Bellsouth and will be meeting with
    them at the end
    of the month. The main discussion
    will the present fiber installation
    and
    connection costs for more bandwidth.

    Hanford:
    (Christine)
    Working on FY end purchases of:
    more PCs for new hires and upgrades
    to
    older computers; more disk space for
    user accounts, e-mail and to setup
    an anonymous ftp location; a tape
    drive for fortress, the LSC
    "sandbox"
    machine; upgrading all PCs to MS
    Office 2000 Pro and Adobe Acrobat
    4.0;
    and upgrading Sun compilers to
    latest version.

    CIT:

    (Lisa)
    -resolved a scp from blue.ligo-wa to
    luna.caltech.edu problem.  This
    should help
    simplify the transfer of files from
    Hanford to here.
    -Did some Cadence community service
    work.  The IC portion of cadence is
    now
    available if anyone wants to use it.
    However, it seems that to be useful
    IC
    requires the presence of a Design
    Kit with libraries from the
    manufacturer of
    the hardware.
    -Resolved with the telephone office
    that we can have a couple of ISDN
    BRI lines
    added to our modem pool when we are
    ready to upgrade.
    -Currently working with Peter King
    to resolve issues with the epics
    software.
    It turns out that it does not
    broadcast across subnets.  This
    makes it difficult
    to fully transition off of kater
    onto luna.  We have a couple of
    options that we
    can try out to get around it.
    -Got the daily & weekly backups back
    in order.  The tape robot on
    Rastaban (and
    Rastaban, too) are old and getting a
    little glitchy.  Along with this we
    are now
    getting successful daily/weekly
    backups of ldas-sw as well.
    -Verified that both our Matlab and
    our Mathematica installations are
    compatible
    on solaris 2.8.
    -Transportation came and picked up a
    big load of surplus equipment out of
    Wilson
    House.
    -The usual round of PC support.  The
    only big problem was Ben Abbott's PC
    couldn't find its OS.  Sam fixed
    that up for him.

    (Sam)
    -Burn Cd's, Imaged a number of PC.
    -Built a number of computers
    -Worked on purchasing a number of
    items for video and PC work.
    -Documentation and working on web
    page building.
    physical therapy (every day)

    (Suresh)
    -Assisted Stuart Andersion for doing
    some network connectivity tests in
    synchrotron lab. This included two
    Sun 450s and two Gigabit switches
    between
    them.
    -Downloaded two evaluation copies of
    network sniffer packages from
    Network
    Associate web-site and analyzing
    their performance as network traffic
    monitoring
    tool.
     (a) Sniffer Basic. It runs on
    Windows 95/98 and provides basic
    monitoring and
    decode analysis capabilities.
     (b)  Sniffer Pro Lan. It runs on
    Windows NT platform. It is designed
    for full
    expert analysis of network packets.
      I am still investigating for
    Sniffer packages that have some
    built-in security
    features.
    -Working on to surplus some
    unneeded, malfunctioning HP printers
    and PC
    hardwares.
    -Installed Solaris 8, required patch
    clusters and softwares on one Ultra
    30
    and one Ultra 10 systems.

    (Larry)
    -Worked a number of purchasing
    issues. There are a number of items
    on order
    including networking equipment,
    PC's, projectors, Mac upgrades and
    software.
    SUN has committed to sending a demo
    copy of Solstice Backup suite to be
    tested
    before purchasing it.
    -Presently, working with the CIT
    electronics shop people on getting
    the fiber
    termination's moved from the phone
    closet to the computer room while
    they are
    installing the new fibers to
    Syncrotron.
    -Worked on a few of the new
    installations and debugging a few
    items.
    The SUN PC board works but a few
    more items need to be worked out so
    that more
    s/w can be loaded on. More memory
    will be needed for a few of the
    machines.
    -Larry Wallace organized a teleconference with Steve Corbato and Laurie Burns from the Inet2/Abilene consortium. Lazzarini and wallace participated in the teleconference. The purpose was to better understand what will be involved in going to OC3 at both sites. Since Caltech, MIT and LSU are already consortium members, all thatis needed for LIGO to gain access to Abilene is for Caltech to designate us as a sponsored activity. Caltech representation in Inet2/Abilene is through ITS. Lazzarini has recieved materials and will discuss with Barry how to proceed. We learned that the going rate for OC3 in the Seattle area for comparable distance runs to the Livingston-Baton Rouge run is ~4X-5X CHEAPER. It is a question of how many carriers are in the market. In Louisiana, the business is apparently cornered by BellSouth. We are presently requesting quotes from them. In the northwest, Corbato confirmed that our approach through ITS at Battelle (John McCoy) is the appropriate way to proceed. He volunteered to get involved at any point of negotiations if we hit a snag.

    -Resolved a number of system issues
    that were all pretty minor.

    (Barbara)
    - Finished first iteration of the
    database and web forms for LDAS
    equipment
    inventory.  There are add, edit,
    delete, search, and display forms.
    So
    far, no response from user.
    - Resumed work on Roster database.
    Created web forms to search for a
    staff
    member by name and location.
    Working to create the roster web
    page out of
    the database.
    - Made a number of quick web site
    changes to LIGO and LDAS sites.


    LIGO II/Advanced R&D (Sanders)


    LIGO II PSL
    Peter King
    I have been working on the costings for hardware, pretty much all
    the opto-mechanical quotable items have been quoted.  I will look up how
    the costing risk factors are formulated in the Cost Book, so that I can
    work out some costing stuff in a spreadsheet.
     

    LIGO-II SUS
    Janeen Rmoie
    Working on Advanced LIGO costs and the WBS dictionary.
     

    LIGO-II Interferometer Simulation
    Bill Kells
    Have completed a first round of comparison of MELODY and FFT runs.
    For elementary set-ups they agree, after the usual amount of
    insignificant
    bugs and misunderstandings between notations and conventions were
    resolved.
    Have begun an upward spiral of more complex set-ups which show some
    interesting
    results.
     

    LIGO-II Sapphire COC
    Bill Kells, Jordan Camp
    Collaborated with Jordan on interpreting m-cut sapphire coated mirror
    cavity birefringence.
     

    LIGO-II AOS
    Mike Smith
    A preliminary draft of the AOS Reference Design is in process.

    From: Virginio Sannibale <vsanni@ligo.caltech.edu>

    Riccardo:
    brain-storming in Japan.
     

    Akiteru:
    improved considerably the IP attenuation with the new counter design.
    Plateau in transfer function after the ip mode at 60mHz
    at about -65dB. 40dB of attenuation @ 1Hz. Bringing to
    lower frequency the ip (20mHz)  mode we can get a good passive
    attenuation of the microseimic peak.
    Next step is  to bring down to 20-30mHz the IP mode.
     

    Virginio:
    Continuing the work started with Giovanni lo Surdo and Ruggero Stanga
    on the inertial damping on the complete LIGO-SAS chain (The Virgo
    accelerometers need to be sent back with in 3weeks.)
    Diagonalization process terminated successfully with a surprisingly
    better result compared to the previous set-up ( the systems now is
    much more complex).
    The digital control software is performing better after very few
    modifications.
    Next step will be to blend the 6 sensors to create a set o 3 virtual
    sensors and also try to separate control loops one for the accelerometers
    and one for the position sensors.
     

    Francesco:
    Back to Italy.
    Oven and LVDTs. Data taking of temperature and LVDT data has been going on
    for three days. Correlations with room temperature are there. Next step
    would be to thermostabilize at least the analog LVDT readout board. First
    investigation on how to combine temperature and LVDT read out programs.
     

    Acoustic emission. Data taking has been going on for the whole week on a
    very high loaded maraging blade spring. The blade has been flipped up side
    down so that applied stress and dislocation velocity change sign.
     

    Further load was applied during the weekend, requiring to shorten the
    suspension rope. Events with high energy above 100 kHz has been recorded are there,
    investigation is going on to confirm identification as creep events
     


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