"Weekly" Report for Two Weeks Ending January 2, 2001

The LIGO Executive Committee Agenda for Monday  January 8, 2001 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)
• Field Change Orders/Contingency Liens/Change Requests
5. WBS 2 LIGO Lab Operations
• Administration (Lindquist)
• Sites (Raab, Coles, Shoemaker, Sanders)
• Detector (Whitcomb, Coyne)
• Campus Research Facilities (Weinstein (40 Meter), Libbrecht (TNI), Zucker(LASTI))
• Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)
6. WBS 3 and 4  Advanced R&D and LIGO II (Sanders)

Special Items:

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights

Light in the "X" and "Y" Beam Tubes at Livingston.

Light in the "X" and "Y" Beam Tubes at Livingston (more)

LSC Issues (Weiss)

no report

LIGO I Construction/LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

WBS 1.2 LIGO Operations--Administration

LIGO Weekly Site Telecon (Lindquist)

The list of current actions revised to reflect open actions assigned through January 4, 2001 may be found at ACTION LIST.

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

• The State of Louisiana Property Management Branch (Mr. Thomas  Jordan) will take possession of the following GSA Items: Lathe (Monach), SN18855, $6,863.86 and Milling Machine (Heckert), SN3211/17. These items will be removed from the LIGO Livingston Observatory on January 4, 2001 at no cost to the project.
• Assisted the Seismic Isolation group (R. DeSalvo) with US Customs Clearance and delivery of TAMA-SAS 1x1x2 meter crate at the weight of 400kg from Italy to Caltech. This equipment will remain at Caltech until approximately January 31, after which I will arrange shipment to Japan (Seiji Kawamura), NAO Representative.
• Preparing a Standard Form 120 to the National Science Foundation to Surplus more unserviceable equipment from the LIGO Livingston Observatory.

>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. . .

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

• Review of the ASIS web page continues.  Due to the complexity of the ASIS web page, this continues to be a labor-intensive effort.   First level links have been reviewed, but many documents contain links which in turn need to be considered and carried over with any distilling of the documents.
• Prepared, packaged and shipped the contract and drawings for IFB EJ-319 to Brunt Construction for signatures.
• The table below summarizes statistically the various activities in the DCC during the year 2000.  It was quite busy but productive for the group.

 

CUMULATIVE 2000 STATISTICS  FOR THE DCC
	NEW DOCUMENTS		FAXES		PACKAGES		PHOTOS
	DATABASE	ELECTRONIC	SENT	REC'D	SENT	REC'D	PRES. PKGS
JANUARY	357	92	136	101	56	109	7
FEBRUARY	218	100	185	130	53	122	10
MARCH	784	811	238	150	72	139	9
APRIL	110	82	175	132	54	98	9
MAY	373	71	192	164	42	132	5
JUNE	108	93	153	152	57	127	4
JULY	151	69	130	143	52	123	17
AUGUST	562	86	114	91	37	86	8
SEPTEMBER	177	136	163	145	92	94	7
OCTOBER	305	149	153	162	94	161	9
NOVEMBER	206	240	187	178	59	206	9
DECEMBER	149	94	119	129	90	161	7
TOTALS	3,500	2,023	1,945	1,677	758	1,558	101

• Electronic documents continue to come in at a regular pace.  To help keep the process streamlined and timely for everyone:
• File naming should be based on the root part of the number plus the revision and without the Group ID.  Additionally, the file name should be in capitals, and the format extension in small letters.  Thus a document numbered as
• LIGO-G990025-00-D would have a file name of G990025-00.pdf
• All pertinent information needs to be on every document.  This includes:
• DCC number
• Author's name
• Date of document
• Title
• Duplicate submittals can be confusing as well as time consuming.  If you can't remember whether a document has been submitted to the DCC, you might check the docspublic directory to see if it resides there.  Or, feel free to give us a call so we may check for you.

prepared, packaged, and shipped contract and drawings for IFB EJ-319 to Brunt Construction for signatures.

distributed new Caltech 2001 directories including LHO and LLO.

progress continues on auditing of Hanford Facility drawings.

Press here to access the DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER WEB PAGE.

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

Press here for ACCOUNTS PAYABLE HISTORY DATA.

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

• Just got back today from vacation.  Going through my emails, mail and new requests and cleaning up loose ends.
• Have Triad c/o's 64 & 65 to process as invoices are pending payment.  Have a new consulting agreement for Kratochwill.   On Brunt, the poeta still needs to be set up.  I understand that it should be set up soon now by Sponsored Research.
• Received the credit of $535.00 from Xerox who had billed for items which should have been covered under the maintenance agreement.
• Have a several requests to remove open encumbrances, and still have other LIGO FY2001 transfers to be made once FY2000 payments have been made.
• Just a reminder, the California sales tax rate dropped .25 effective Jan 2001.

• Worked on Operations Reports for December for FY99, FY2000, and FP2001.
• Responded to requests from Federal Accounting for additional information related to setting up Fabrication Project for Livingston building.
• Continued working on transferring encumbrances to new fiscal period.

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

• Univ. of Florida: A draft proposal for the collaboration of the Institute of Applied Physics (IAP) was received and is in Project review.
• Invoices for August, September and October are being re-submitted to reflect the correct (off-site) burden.
• FDC: Proposal for FY'01 rate increases was received. LIGO's counter-offer was communicated to FDC.
• Open LIGO Sub-contracts: All open subcontracts for LIGO support activity will be extended through Nov. 31, 2001. Cognizant Engineers will be contacted for concurrences.

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

• The search continues for an effective security system for the safe operation of the laser.  At the same time, discussion continues regarding the amount of research which must be performed while the laser is on.

Advanced LIGO (Frey, Petrac)

Annual Report: Currently working the Annual Report.

The following Change Requests have been submitted:
 

Press for the latest Contingency Needs Projection.

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

• No report this week.

• No report this week (vacation).

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

• On December 27, the NSF approved the award of the contract for the new Livingston Staging Building to the Brunt Construction Company in the amount of $1,947,000.  The contract will be executed early next week, with the kickoff meeting scheduled for January 9 in Livingston.
• Presentations for the new Hanford Support Building were made by two architect/engineering firms on January 4.  They were Nils Finney Architects of Seattle, and SCM Consultants of Kennewick.  Both firms presented their qualifications to the review committee at Hanford, which felt that both firms were qualified.  One more firm will present its qualifications in California on January 24, following which a decision will be made.

• No report (see Operations Section above).

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

No report.

LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO) Operations (Raab).

General Items (F. Raab)

The last two weeks have had no commissioning activities, allowing us to address some items that have needed attention. Examples are updates to the general computing and CDS environments, rationalization of cable layouts in the control room, and modifications to the 2K PSL to increase output power. We believe all will be back in operating order by Monday, Jan. 8. We also expect to be ready for installation into chambers by Jan 15.
 

Computing (C. Patton)

The file and email servers were successfully upgraded last week.  Over the next few weeks I will be moving user accounts around to provide more disk space for everyone.  I will also be setting up the anonymous ftp and upgrading the web server.

LIGO Livingston Observatory (LLO) Operations (Coles).

Two very important milestones were attained at LLO this week. On January 3, we opened the X-arm beamtube for the first time, and found the projected laser beam striking the ETMx LOS just above the optic. The return beam at ITMx wasn't found quite so easily, but we did finally locate it and almost immediately noted resonance flashes recorded by the ETM transmission monitor. See the Jan 3 LLO i-log (http://www.ligo-la.caltech.edu/ilog/pub/ilog.cgi) for detailed notes and images of the beams striking the towers. Furthermore, on January 4 the gate valves on the Y-end station were opened and once again, without any adjustments to the optic biases, the beam was seen on the ETM-y AND the return beam spot could clearly be seen on ITM-y. These are two very significant milestones for LLO! Thanks to all of the LLO staff and visitors for their sustained efforts to make these achievements possible.

CDS: X-end station cabling installed for QPD-x, using DAQ channel for accel X to view sum of QPD-X. At the Y-end station, the calbling for QPD-y was installed and the quad cell was found to be bad, and was replaced with a working one by Jonathan Kern. Also, the clock driver in the crate was replaced. (Wooley, Fyffe)

Detector/Technical Support (Whitcomb, Coyne).

See also the daily electronic logs for the installation and commissioning activities:
Hanford Detector Log
Livingston Detector Log

1.1 LHO INSTALLATION & COMMISSIONING

1.2 LLO INSTALLATION & COMMISSIONING

Commissioning

Jan 3 we opened the x arm and found the beam within 30 microradians of the aligned position. The cavity was aligned and produced flashes. The beam size was measured crudely and it was determined and found not to be well mode matched. There is an indication that the ITMX reflecting surface has more scattering than the mirrors at Hanford.

In the next few days we expect to open the y arm and determine its alignment.

#SEW# This is a tremendous achivement that should be savored by all who contributed.  And in late breaking news, I have just heard that the Y arm has been checked and was almost as close as the x-arm!  Congratulations to all!

ISC

2.0 Other Engineering and Scientific Activities

2.1 Design/Analysis/Fab

Optical Metrology

PSL

I have been trying to simulate the performance of a high-power photodiode with PSpice, without much luck so far.  The problem being that I haven't figured out how to incorporate the Spice model provided by the manufacturer of the op-amp used into the PSpice model.  When a "generic" op-amp is substituted the circuit seems to have the right characteristics that I intended.

The table for the LASTI PSL is being tracked down, since I was expecting it to be delivered just before Christmas to MIT.

For reasons not entirely obvious to me, the computer down in the PSL Lab no longer allows local console logins.  This problem seems to have originated since Christmas.  Lisa did fix the problem once before, why it has returned is not clear to me.  In addition there was a problem with the /etc/hosts file on luna because the IP address for scipe25 was incorrect, resulting in the input/output controller not being able to boot from luna.

Rick Karwoski, Paul Russell, Ben Abbott
The following is the status on the PSL Frequency Reference suite of boards:

ISC

Modulated OSEM Design

New OSEM Heads

Janeen Romie,
Betsy is preparing to do a second bake on a number of heads tomorrow or Friday at Hanford. I'm working on travelers and the process spec.
Progressive Technology is still trying to remove the metalization from some of the heads so they may be recoated. They are having mixed success. I am researching other methods. Progressive Technology reports that the second batch of alumina heads should be complete at the end of this month.

Digital Suspensions

DMT

2.2 Issues Concerns

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein).

• Steve Vass has suggested a major change to the layout of the 40m vacuum envelope. Previously, we planned to install the second side chamber (the "Output Optic Chamber OOC") on the north side of the beamsplitter chamber (the dark port side) to house the signal mirror. This was problematical, because it leaves no room between the OOC and the north wall of the building to pass through - we'd need to build a bridge to get by. Now, we plan to put the signal mirror in the beamsplitter chamber, and the dark port beam can be folded in any direction. Mike Smith will see if he can send the beam back in the direction of the PSL. Then, and we can put the OOC to the west of the input optic chamber (IOC), which houses two of the three input mode cleaner (IMC) mirrors, and put the output mode cleaner OMC (and associated optics) in the OOC. He will see if he can get ALL output beams out in that direction, so that they ALL go out to one huge table to the south of these chambers, next to all the electronics. (All output beams: bright port, dark port, three PRC pickoff beams, IMC transmitted, IMC reflected, OMC transmitted (DCGW signal), OMC reflected; for a total of NINE beams). Confused? Maybe a diagram will help. And here's a more detailed engineering drawing from Larry Jones.
• Mike Smith is working on the Autocad layout of the entire IFO, including optics, beams, vacuum envelope, building walls, etc. He's finished the layout of the new input mode cleaner. He will merge in Autocad drawings of the building walls, electrical panels, CDS racks, etc. He will see if he can rearrange the beams to accomadate the layout proposed above.
• Nine CDS racks have been delivered to the 40m lab. The floor (new tiles) will be cleaned and polished, and the racks put into place. They won't be bolted down until we have a "final" layout (see above).
• STACIS: the stacis active seismic isolation system has been on and in continuous operation for 3 weeks. There are two problems:
• As we noticed immediately after installation (and even before), transfer function spectra taken with geophones and natural ground motion show no evidence for passive isolation (which there should be). The folks at TMC finally admit that it doesn't look right. We will continue to investigate this.
• We have 12 isolators, each with 3 axes of control. Of these 36 loops, two appear to be malfunctioning. One (the first isolator we installed) is particularly bad: it rattles, the servo indicator oscillates, and the fault light is on. We will get TMC to diagnose and fix. TMC suggested that we might have too much horizontal load, and horizontal load drift, on the isolators. Larry Jones doesn't think so, but to make sure, he has unloaded and reloaded ALL isolators, taking care to minimize any horizontal load. That first isolator still looks sick.
• Details: web page, postscript, pdf.
• Report on building rehab, from Fred Asiri:
• The roofers are done, but they need for the roof to settle for 2 weeks before they come back for final inspection and patching, and replacing the ceiling tiles in the North Annex.
• Only a few items remain for the contractor: a little paint touch-up, some plumbing patching, door and pipe sealing, safety windows installed on several doors, smoke sensors installed, laser kill switch wiring.
• The second of two power conditioners is due to be shipped to us this week.
• After a year of work, the building rehab is just-about done!
• Many thanks to Fred Asiri, and we wish him all the best in his new job!
• Larry Jones reports that parts for the side chamber seismic stack, and for input mode cleaner vacuum envelope, are being cleaned, tested, and baked, at Allied and at Livingston (Rich Riesen and company). He expects all these pieces to be back at Caltech by the end of January.
• Larry has ordered a new 29" door with 10" port for the side chamber to accomadate the input mode cleaner. Should take 4-6 weeks. Steve has ordered all the other vacuum envelope hardware for the MC, and everything should be cleaned and baked, and ready for installation, by the end of February. Steve Vass will assemble the MC vacuum envelope and pump down and RGA test, before connecting it to the main IFO vacuum envelope.
• Vacuum controls (Ben Abbott and Dennis Ugolini): all wiring and other hardware for the vacuum control system is done. The full system can't be tested until (a) nitrogen lines for the pneumatic valve controls, removed for STACIS installation, are re-installed; (b) chamber annulus plumbing, dismantled for STACIS installation, is re-plumbed; (c) five ion pumps are regenerated and reinstalled with new gate valves. This should all happen in the next 2 months. Otherwise, the system is ready to go. Steve Vass will have Varian regenerate and refurbish the five (Varian-made) ion pumps.
• PSL (Rick Karwoski, Ben Abbott): all the boards for the H4K PSL are complete, they will now prepare updated documentation and begin to assemble pieces for the 40m and LASTI PSLs.

• 9 racks were delivered to the lab.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Libbrecht).

No report this week.

LASTI (Zucker).

LASTI (Jay Heefner)

• Two VME crates for the DAQ system were received and forwarded to MIT.
• 5 racks have been shipped from the vendor and should arrive at MIT by next week.

Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)

Simulation and Modeling (Yamamoto)

> physics simulaion (B.Bhawal, H.Yamamoto)

The seismic noise study continued. High pass filters are used to whiten the seismic noise and we confirmed the correct spectrum below 100 Hz was generated within a short simulation time (100 sec), We compared this to the case with no high pass filter which took va ery long (5000 sec) to calculate correct psd at high frequency.

To pinpoint the effect of the numerical accuracy limit ( double precision has an accuracy of 15 digits, but the simulation involves many number manipulations, it looks like 10 to 11 digits is the effective dynamic range covered ), Hiro wrote a program with a digital filter
and psd to be compiled with double precision and quadruple preciosion accuracy.

Biplab will focus on the study of the effect of the optics misalignment on the lock acquisition.

> simulation engine parallelization (T.Dangelis)

algorithm/implementation to produce a one-execNode 'tick list' was written and incorporated into the program after partitioning.

algorithm/implementation for finding the 'ideal-arrival-time', a topology metric, was  written, along with a not-yet-working version of a 'node-to-node distance' metric.

> GUI (E.Maros, B.Sears)

Improving alfi, the GUI frontend of e2e. Ed is implementing copy and paste. A new release is expected next monday, which will be based on a new version of xwWindow. Bruce is implementing a new inferace for setting parameter.

LIGO Data Analysis System

Software Systems (Blackburn)

LDAS is busy preparing a new release of the software in support of the MDC activities expected to cover the bulk of January and February. The MPI Group from UWM will begin arriving the middle of next week as we setup and prepare for the MPI Mock Data Challenge to begin the following Monday morning. Activities associated with the Database Mock Data Challenge will also begin to ramp up during the next couple of weeks.

The mpiAPI and the wrapperAPI are presently considered to be in very good shape for this MDC. An LDAS user command is also available for starting jobs on the BEOWULF. This command has been lightly tested and looks to have all the necessary functionality needed for the MDC. One issue that has come up is the inability to completely control the host(node) assignment list used in MPI jobs using LAM. These hasn't been looked at in great details so there may be a simple configuration option to manage this at compile time or run time. The good news however is that we have finally run a parallel LDAS wrapperAPI job on all 16(17) nodes of our new LDAS
development Beowulf system to completion.

As part of our normal procedures for getting a software release out the door, we have begun daily and nightly builds of LDAS and associated tests of the various components. This pre-release is showing better data socket communication rates of ILWD data objects between hosts, but has identified a 50% slow down in the performance of our database. There is a possibility that this 50% slowdown is due to a misunderstanding of the exact date that we changed the database hardware on the development system from a Sun 450 to a Sun Ultra10. A follow-up test is being performed today on a different LDAS system with a Sun 450 for the dataserver to verify if a problem actually exists.

The new UDT data class in the dataConditionAPI has brought with it the expected increase in open problem reports. However, this week we were able to make some headway into resolving several bugs and closing out a significant number of reports. The group also decided to take inventory of the software components that are being moved over to the new UDT model and use this as a baseline to track progress towards a complete transformation of the data-ConditionAPI over to the UDT model.

The LDAS development, test and Livingston databases are now using the updated IBM DB2 7.1 server. This server has shown about a 10% increase in performance over the DB2 6.2 server we were previously using on our Sun servers. To support this new version of DB2, new tables were generated on the three systems.

The documentation of LDAS is also being overhauled in preparation for this new release. Several APIs were not able to generate web-based documentation using our new PERCEPS document generator. These have for the most part been fixed. However, in one particularly difficult case, we have introduced an ingnore command to avoid segments of C++ code that corrupt documentation
files.

Hardware Systems (Anderson)

• The upgrade of DB2 is going smoothly (only LHO remains).
• Competitive quotes for the LDAS tape silo have been obtained.
• The LDAS AIT-2 robot has been delivered to LLO.

MIT:

• New systems administrator/programmer hired, Keith Bayer, to start 12 February.

• (Tom E.) We are continuing to work on upgrading our web and e-mail server. Both functions are currently performed by the same machine, and we are putting them on separate machines to improve both performance and reliability.
• (Larry) Albert has received confirmation from the Abilene group that Livingston will be a sponsored site going through the existing LAnet.

• (Christine P.) The file and e-mail servers were successfully upgraded last week.  Over the next few weeks I will be moving user accounts around to provide more disk space for everyone. I will also be setting up the anonymous ftp and upgrading the web server.
• (Larry) Albert has received confirmation from the Abilene group that Hanford will be a sponsored site going through the existing ESnet.

• (Sam) Swapped in the replacement scanner. Answered various user questions. Worked on this years inventory. Started back to school.
• (Lisa) Working on the new modem pool. The replacement equipment has finally arrived.
• (Barbara) Worked a few costbook and web issues. Presently, trying to resolve some data mirroring issues.
• (Suresh) Completed monthly full backups of LIGO servers. After observing some of the servers had network connection problem, I did recabling of servers in computer room in holidays. Installed and mounted a FORE 2810 ethernet switch in network closet in computer room. At least one server is connected there.
• (Larry)

-Worked on monthly backups.
-Ordered a few more computers and delivered a new laptop. Presently, the only laptops we are supporting are the Dell and IBM with configurations that LINUX supports.
-Worked with Suresh on installing a paper sorter for DCC's new printer.
-Modified a few scripts to work on other servers.
-Working on getting the SDRC license updated for the rest of the year.

LIGO II/Advanced R&D (Sanders)

LIGO II Coatings (Helena Armandula)

Received a reply to a coating inquiry that was sent to Laser Zentrum Hannover about the company's interest and ability to provide LIGO II coatings.  They expressed interest to work with LIGO.  At this time they do not have the techniques required to meet our specs.  However, they said that with development work, they'll meet our requirements and schedule.  They quoted the LIGO work based on available facilities ? ? and the quote is very reasonable.  Some further investigation will be required to assess their capabilities.

Optics (Garilynn Billingsley)

We now have a homogeneity phase map of the first 25 x 10 cm sapphire substrate measured at Caltech.  The measurement shows the central 150 mm of the first 250 mm sample. Peak to valley inhomogeneity is in the 400 nm range, rms is on the order of 50 nm.  Uncertainty is ~5nm due to turbulence. More Detail

LIGO II PSL (Peter King)

Apparently the quote given to me for the pump laser diodes was not the "best" deal that Coherent could do. Just how good a deal they would be prepared to do was not indicated to me but I was told there was room to negotiate on the quotation that they provided.

(Bill Kells)

Got R. Beausoleil to revise MELODY [again] to fix nominal inconsistancies.

Performed Rayleigh scatter measurements on Sapphire substrates.

Seismic Attenuation (Riccardo DeSalvo)

No report.

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