Weekly Report for Week Ending March 21, 2002

 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  March 25, 2002 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:

Weekly Report Highlights
 

LSC Issues (Weiss)

no report

LIGO I Construction/LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)


LIGO Operations--Administration


LIGO Weekly Site Telecon (Lindquist)
 

LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO) Operations (Raab)

-----------------
FACILITIES
-----------------
The construction of the new building is falling a little behind
schedule.The siding delivery will be two weeks late. We requested a new
schedule from the contractor to show how he is going to make up those two
weeks. Several minor Field work directives were issued, so far the total
contract price is a few $K less than the original contract, this small lead
will disappear shortly, we discovered that the HVAC needs more modification
than initial thought. This is necessary for the system to be compatible
with the local weather.
Received the first budgetary cost for the A/V system, $95K. This is
substantially higher than the LLO system, we are investigating the causes.
For dust and dirt control it makes a lot of sense to pave the road and the
parking lot as early as possible.
the cost on that work will be approximately $30K.

LIGO Livingston Observatory (LLO) Operations (Coles)

This week has been largely consumed by preparations, support, and participation in the LSC meeting, but some installation and commissioning activity is going on. The VPN and video server for the remote control room at Caltech were installed here this week. There was also some effort to reduce the overall electronic noise environment - new shielded cables were installed on the ASC rack (and they will be installed in the LSC on Friday), and new ASC control software is being installed and tested.

Detector/Technical Support (Whitcomb, Coyne)

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

1.1 LHO INSTALLATION & COMMISSIONING

2km Commissioning

Stan  reporting:
A likely candidate for the cause of the f^-3 noise below 1 kHz has been identified by Peter and Rana.  It appears that the ETMY controller has a nonlinearity that causes noise at a level that is consistent with the differential noise level.

Bill Kells has continued to measure the scattered light from the 2 km test masses.  Measurements of an ETM at two angles have found to be consistent with an omega^-2 angular dependence, and rough calibration would indicate a scatter level of approximately 40 ppm, although obviously with fairly large uncertainties.

Work continues on commissioning WFS 2-4.

4 km Commissioning

Stan reporting:
Continued work to set light levels and electronic gains on the various photodiode signals to achieve reliable locking.

1.2LLO INSTALLATION & COMMISSIONING

ASC

Rolf Bork
At LLO installing and testing new ASC software.

2.0 OtherEngineering and Scientific Activities

2.1 Design/Analysis/Fab

Seismic Retrofit Project

Dennis Coyne reporting
The team expects to release documentation for the Design Requirements and Conceptual Design Review next week. The review is now scheduled for Friday April 12th at 9:00 am PT.
Based on the success in suppressing the first two BSC stack resonances with the fine actuation system on the ETMy chamber at LLO (as reported last week), we have (1) shipped the prototype fine actuation system to LLO for a single arm cavity stack mode suppression test before the S1 run and (2) requested Hytec to procure, assemble, test and deliver two more fine actuation systems. These systems will be to be installed on the ITM chambers at LLO in July, immediately after the S1 run. The plan is to procure more PC/D-space controllers for stand-alone (independent of the Epics “supervisory” control system). The GS-13 geophones for this temporary implementation (through the S2 run) will be borrowed from the adv LIGO R&D SEI effort. Once the seismic retrofit occurs in early 2003 (after the S2 run) the geophones will be sent to LASTI for the SEI prototypes.
External Pre-Isolation
A machined spring with counter-winding helixes (double helixes at each end) will be machined next week in stainless steel for stiffness testing. Finite element analysis indicates that the stresses and symmetry of deflection are acceptable. Maraging 300 steel has been ordered for the LASTI prototype fabrication; Managed to find a vendor with the material in stock, so instead of the typical lead time of 6 to 8 weeks, we should have the material in about 1 week.
Tests on the initial counter-wound helical springs will be done by next week, after powder coating. (These springs are still potentially acceptable for the HAM chambers.)
Detailed drawings for the components of the spring/actuator assembly have been completed. The team is reviewing the drawings. In parallel, quotes have been requested. Samll parts have already been ordered. Completed parts are anticipated by late April.
Hydraulic External Pre-Isolation (HEPI)
New nozzles for the outflow ports in the hydraulic servo valve are expected from the shop next week.
The hydraulic bypass network was completed by the Sanford machine shop & installed into the new actuator on the Stanford test stand for characterization. The bypass network works just as predicted! With this success, we are now ready to pull together detailed drawings for fabrication of the LASTI prototype actuator assemblies. This will be a bolted, non-welded version. The production system will be a welded version which will be pursued in parallel with the LASTI prototype effort.
New commercial accumulator design appears not to be as good as the original, but further testing is needed.

SEI Hydraulic Pump Station (Ken Mailand)

CONSTRUCTION: Most materials and Components have arrived for the assembly of the test pump station. Assembly has started, accumulators are still on hold from jeremy, a dimensional ref. part number is now known.

LAYOUT DRAWING: I have started a plan and elevation acad 2D layout drawing of the location of the components for assembly.

MANIFOLDS: Station servo noise filter manifold is finished. Test load design is nearly finished. designing the resistor internal components, [3 resistors], pressure sensors [4] are here.

LONG TUBE RUN: Support frame is finished. ref. Test taps at the 60 foot mark [shortest run] and 180 foot mark [Longest] set up starting 3-21

Electro-Magnetic External Pre-Isolator (MEPI)
Received actuator driver from the CDS group at MIT; awaiting shipment of the BEI linear electro-magnetic motor before bench testing begins.

Internal Stack Damping

Kapton paint, used to fix the windings in the voice coil, exceeded storage temperature limits during shipment to Italy where the assembly is being done. A new container is being ordered for direct shipment to Italy. We will lose some time due to this unfortunate event.
The simulated HAM stack (in the ‘synchrotron’ high bay lab) has been instrumented and resonances are being measured. The D-space system is being commissioned. Electronics for the LVDT and voice coils are expected soon.

Optics Fabrication and Testing

GariLynn Billingsley
MCFM01, 04 and 06, MCCM4K04, and 05 and MCCM2K03 have been coated at REO and are awaiting surface measurement.

MCFM10 has been polished and is at Caltech awaiting coating with the next batch of pieces that will go to REO (mostly 40 Meter optics)

PSL

Peter King
NPRO #393 was returned to Caltech as a 500 mW NPRO.

The slow loop PID code has been running for over a week now without any hang ups.  The performance seems to be okay, although it hasn't really been tweaked.  The fast actuator voltage is consistently under 100 mV, with occassional excursions over.

The frequency servo lock acquisition code was taken out for a test drive. The sequencer appears to function correctly if the pre-modecleaner is locked but has some problems in not stopping the automatic incrementing of the slow actuator if the pre-modecleaner happens to drop out of lock.

Rich Abbott, Flavio Nocera
Flavio is close to finishing the simulations of the ISS circuitry.

LSC/ASC/DSC

Rich Abbott
Received the tiny little replacement variable gain amplifier solutions for the MC servo, stuffed one and began test.  So far, we see that they indeed seem to vary gain in a predictable manner but have not done any noise comparison measurements.

Mohana is engaged in testing of the new variable timing boards interrupt capability.

Jay Heefner
With the exception of the cables from the 4116 DACs we have replaced all cables in the LVEA ASC system with shielded ribbons.The replacement is part of the rewiring necessary to incorporate the optical levers and 5 WFSs into the system. The system and the new software should be fully operational by the end of this week.

The designs for the pentek differential drivers and receivers has been on hold while Jay has been on travel. The designs will be restarted next week.

Advanced LIGO DAC

Jay Heefner
The PO for the development of the low noise DAC modules will be issued next week. The first prototypes should be available for test in 3-4 months.

EO Shutter Controller

Sander Liu
Received the high voltage power supplies ordered from Ultravolt. While testing one of the new unit, it seems to take less voltage to adjust the unit's high voltage output. If this proved out to be the case with the rest of the them, setting of the daughter board's threshold voltage will be reduced accordingly.

Antialiasing Filter Chassis

Sander Liu
We now have four completed circuit boards waiting for final assembly. Expect to complete this task in the next few weeks.

Microseismic and Tidal Correction

Jay Heefner
The Tidal and Microseismic summing modules and the slew rate limiters are at LLO and will be installed following the completion of the ASC system upgrade.

DMT

John Zweizig
This week I wrote a Makefile to build all available Monitor documentation and move int into a common directory. I also wrote a script that generates a web page with links to online documentation, Author, DCC documentation and a short description of each monitor in cvs.

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

no report

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Libbrecht)

We recently finished a first draft of a new TNI schedule and passed it
on to Thomas Frey. This new schedule anticipates installation of
sapphire in early August of this year and still includes approximately
three months of sapphire measurements before a report is presented to
the downselect committee. The new short-term goal is to obtain more
complete measurements of noise in fused-silica test masses. With that in
mind, we have begun installation and testing of a new set of notch
filters in the current setup.

LASTI (Zucker)

no report

Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)

Simulation and Modeling (Bhawal)
No report received
LIGO Data Analysis System

Software Systems (Blackburn)

FrameCPP: Two problems were identified and fixed in the frameCPP
frame C++ I/O library. There was a bug in the "get compression"
routines which caused the encoding of data to occasionally be
incorrectly accessed. There was also a but in the "get byte order"
routines which had a similar risk of incorrectly determining the
data encoding. In addition, all the exception specifications
were removed from the frameCPP library to correct a core dump
problem associated with supporting multiple frame versions.

FrameAPI: The inconsistent behavior of exposed C++ routines to
the TCL layer for concatenating data sets read from frames has
now been fixed. New accessors were added to the frameAPI to
handle the new metadata found in the version 5 frame spec. The
associated exception specifications for the frameAPI were also
removed. A new translation routine was added to the frameAPI
to handle conversion of FrADC data objects into FrProc data
objects. This was needed to handle legacy code for resampling
which will be changed in the next release of LDAS. An issue
with properly identifying the start time of a resampled data
set as represented in and ILWD object were fixed. Another
collection of changes were made to the frameAPI to support
the productions of reduced data sets.

DataConditionAPI: The string class in the standard (template)
library bundled with GCC was discovered to be the source of
most of the multi-thread issues in the dataConditionAPI. The
source code for this class was modified to remove this instability
and was demonstrated to greatly improve the situation. In addition,
the boolean vector class was identified to be a source of similar
multi-thread instabilities. This code base has not yet been
modified in an attempt to correct this issue. Several other
issues associated with the ingestion of metadata from the
database into the database were also discovered this week. An
extensive suite of tests were performed and the matrix of test
results were used to identify and fix all these issues. The
use of intermediate() in the dataConditionAPI has been
replaced with output(). A problem in the TCL layer with an
algorithm option with only one action was identified and
fixed.

MetaDataAPI: Several reliability issues/inconsistencies in the
handling of metadata movers used in dataPipeline jobs were
traced to this API. New variables and changes to several macros
were required to remove this problem. No performance degradation
was seem when database tests on new code were performed.

DataBase Tables: Two new database tables were added to LDAS in
support of the search codes. These will store summary information
for each search code. Documentation on these new tables has been
added to the LDAS webpages. The new table names are "search_summary"
and "search_summaryvars". The event candidate tables (e.g. sngl_inspiral)
were modified to include "channel" name column.

ControlMonitorAPI: Finished changes requested by Greg Mendell
to support the operators while monitoring the performance of
the tapeControl script. Added support for viewing new job
directory tree structure needed to avoid having too many
files in one subdirectory.

MpiAPI: the new behavior of the "-dynlib" user option to
automatically look in the /lal directory when no library
directory path is specified has now been documented.

managerAPI: Began writing new code to have managerAPI handle
all remote URL requests.

Hardware Systems (Anderson)
No report received
Data Analysis Activities (Lazzarini)
Scientific activites (Shawhan)

* Tested new versions of the VIRGO Frame library.
* Released new versions of some LIGOTOOLS packages.
* Prepared for LSC meeting.

General Computing (Wallace)
MIT:
Nothing to report.

Livingston:
Busy with the LSC. Did get the VRVS working and used it during the
conference.

Hanford:
(Christine)
- Finished setting up the last of the 9 new PCs.  One of the original 9
new PCs had a hardware problem and is being sent back for replacement.
Two more new PCs are on order.
-  Continued helping users copy files from their old PC to their new
one.  Continued teaching users how to use Win2k OS.
- Working on getting the CD for AutoCAD from Caltech ITS as part of
their site license.   Also, working on getting VPN client software for
Win2k from Caltech ITS.
- Renewed maintenance contracts on several software packages.

CIT:

(Mike)
-Worked with Larry and Lisa swapping out forerunner switches with new edge
switches; then swapping fibers over to GIGE backbone.
-Loaded two PC's with General Computing software for sub basement for
Dennis Coyne.
-Troubleshooting a webserver that is hosting the project science website.
-The replacement server has not shown up yet, once it does I well reload it
for a new webserver and transfer projectscience.org over right away.
-Started working on loading a laptop to add to the loaner pool.
-Assisted Larry and Shannon setup videoconference.

(Veronica)
- LIGO website: posted various updates on Elba GWADW, LSC March Meeting,
MOUs, student programs. Working with Ryan on the LIGO Policies and
Procedures pages: Worked with Rita on the how-to of the
DCC electronic
document submittals.
- CaJAGWR: videotaped the talk by Lazzarini; compressed and posted the
video.
- Met with Bruce Sears to discuss what needs ti be done on the GNATS
database.
- Working on the webpages for the Advanced Suspension group.

(Lisa)
-Assisted in the network switch-over for the LIGO CIT network.
-Assisted Gary on setting up SUN box for his PDA sync.
-Rebuilt a couple of SUN boxes. Worked on getting a 160GB disk system installed
on a Blade 100 but appears will have to go to a 120GB disk drive.
-Worked a couple of backup issues.
-Worked on various documentation and updates for the wireless.
-Worked on patch installations and so far working well. Will be making changes
on a few more SUN boxes so they too will have automated patch upgrade
capability.

(Larry)
-Worked on the switch-over from the FORE ATM backbone to the Foundry GigE
backbone. For the most part things went well. There were a few minor problems
but nothing that was a show stopper. There will be some tweaking and changes for
the next few weeks now that we have freed up a number of fibers. Also, the FORE
equipment is getting prepared to be shipped to the Observatories. Everything
should be ready for shipping in another week.
-Worked a number of procurements. The matching grant orders should be in by the
first of next week.
-Worked with Shannon and others on getting the LSC meetings going on the VRVS.
The quality has improved a great deal over the past few days. A number of people
have been able to use the system. Tom Prince used it to give his presentation to
the group, from Caltech. Also, helped with a few other logistical items at the
LSC.
-Worked a couple of PC installs and fixes. Working on SUN server s/w upgrades.

LIGO II/Advanced R&D (Sanders)

From Peter King:
 

AdLIGO PSL
        A question was asked by Andreas Weidner if a Pentium target could
be used to run EPICS, since the price of a vxWorks development system for a
Pentium target is considerably cheaper than for a Motorola or Baja4700E.
After getting clarification from Rolf, they will be getting a Motorola
licence.

From Rich Abbott:
Sent off the high current voice coil driver and associated BEI actuator (eventually) to MIT.  We are eagerly awaiting any feedback from them.

Parts are coming in to build 12 more voice coil drivers along with a chassis that will be used to house 6 modules.
 

From: ctorrie <ctorrie@ligo.caltech.edu>
Suspensions

Janeen and I discussed in detail the status of the design for the LIGO Mode cleaner suspension.
As a result we have been working on drawings and assemblies for the wire jigs and the detailed layout of components of the suspension. Russell Jones in Glasgow has been helping us with designs, drawings and supplying parts, including some GEO magnets.

Both Norna and Rich are giving talks relating to the QUAD at MIT at the LSC meeting and I provided pictures, results for the MATLAB model and an animated assembly of the LIGO Mode Cleaner suspension, using E-drawings.

Janeen and I have been working closely with Russell in Glasgow on the coil former design and its components. We should have a prototype of the new head in the next week or so.

Attended a meeting to discuss amoung other things computer packages eg. COSMOS etc.. I reported on the excellent demo I attended for COSMOS and the problems I have been finding with ALGOR.
Janeen and I have an action of supplying several problems to the various suppliers for analysis.

Started some work in the lab in advance of the SURF students arriving and attended another workshop class.
 

From: Janeen Romie <jromie2001@yahoo.com>

40m Suspensions
Todd will be sending the MC osems to LHO for cleaning
and baking tomorrow afternoon. Helena and I assembled
the mechanical parts under the flow hood in the So.
Annex and checked that all parts were there along with
other supplies. She and I will start work on Monday.
Betsy has confirmed that she'll be at Caltech on
Tuesday afternoon, April 2nd. The counterbored,
silver-plated screws for safety stops were cleaned and
baked last week; they were the last mechanical parts
to be baked.

AdLIGO Suspensions
Coordinating with Calum on what mechanical parts still
need to be designed for the controls prototype mode
cleaner suspension. Had a telecon with Harry Ward and
Norna Robertson on the controls prototype
sensor/actuators. It was agreed that Caltech will
supply the LEDs and photodiodes (LIGO I vintage) along
with the circuit boards upon which they mount. The
head/former has already been design to accomodate the
boards. I have the circuit board drawings ready and
will go out for quote today. I submited a PO on Monday
for the maraging steel sheet stock for the RM and ETM
controls prototypes. There is a 6-7 week lead time for
the material
 

From: Helena Armandula <ahelena@ligo.caltech.edu>
Advanced LIGO Coating Development

Received from Stanford the absorption losses on the mirrors coated by MLD with different coating materials.
Measurements are by the Photo Thermal Common-Path Interferometry technique.
They use a thin film coated fused silica ND filter as a primary standard and a Ta2O5/SiO2 coated mirror which had been previously measured by JMM as a secondary standard.
Below is the table that lists the baseline optical loss values, and the chart which shows the correlation with annealing temperature. The lowest loss values found (for Nb2O5/SiO2 annealed at 400°C) appear to be well less than 1 ppm. However, these values are still considered "preliminary". Additional studies are planned.
 

 MLD_coating_loss_chart1.xls
 

 MLD_Coating_Loss_Table1.xls

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