Weekly Report for Week Ending November 18, 2004


 Exec. Comm. Agenda

Highlights

LSC

Administration

Hanford Observatory

Livingston Observatory

MIT

Caltech

Detector

40 Meter

TNI

LASTI

Data Analysis

Adv. LIGO Development

Past Weekly Reports


The LIGO Executive Committee for November 22, 2004 is cancelled because of the Staffing Committee meeting.


Special Announcements:

 


Weekly Report Highlights
 


LSC Issues (Saulson)


no report


LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)


STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Petrac)
(LSC Research Plans through February 2005 and Progress Reports through August 2004)

ACIGA

Caltech Experimental Gravvity-Physics Group (CEGG)

Cal State University of Dominguez Hills (CSUDH)

EGO

GEO 600 (GEO)

GEO-MOU for Data Analysis

Goddard

Hobart & William Smith (HWSLG)

Institute of Applied Physics (IAP)

Louisiana School of Math, Science, and Arts (LSMSA)

NAOC (Chinese National Academy of Sciences)

University of Oregon (UOERG)

Penn State (PSURG)

University of Rochester (URLG)

Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM)

Southern University and A&M College (SUBR)

Stanford University

University of Texas at Brownsville (UTBRG)

University of Wisconsin (UWMRG)

VIRGO



SITE TELECONFERENCE (Lindquist)

A site teleconference was held on Thursday, November 18, 2004 The following issues were among those discussed:

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Chargois)

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

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

>From: Linda Turner - turner@ligo.caltech.edu>

>From: Cleveland Mak <mak_c@ligo.caltech.edu>

COST SCHEDULE CONTROL SYSTEMS (Cunningham, Brambila, Kaufman, Salone)

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

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

>From: Gina Salone <gsalone@ligo.caltech.edu>

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

Financial reports can be found at: http://docuserv.ligo.caltech.edu/~fireport. (For passwords contact Florence)

SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Petrac, Jasnow)

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

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

SUPPORT (Baldon, Kammerling, Lloyd)

>Irene Baldon

>Sharon Kammerling

>Dorothy Lloyd


PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

Schedule of proposals and reports planned for the remainder of the calendar year.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

See http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~phil/ChangeBoard/CR040016.pdf

The request is in response to ASI's latest estimated contract cost increase. The Deputy Director has already directed the TEC Group to limit contract scope to completion of the BSC design drawings, as recommended in the request.

 

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

>From: Cindy Akutagawa <cindy@ligo.caltech.edu>


Quality/Safety (Tyler)

>From: Bill Tyler <tyler@ligo.caltech.edu>

Nothing significant to report.

 

.


LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO) and Interferometer Operations (Raab)


Summary of Commissioning Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory (Landry)

E11 got off to an ignominious start, with no 4k locking for the first day and a half of the run.  New front-end code installed late Thursday in the end stations appears to have fixed the problem however, and the machine has locked immediately at an inspiral range of 5Mpc.  The H2 IFO has been locked in science mode for 45% of the run so far, with a range of about 1Mpc.

Some commisioning and E11 highlights from the past week are:

4K IFO

2K IFO

DAQ


LIGO Livingston Observatory (LLO) and Interferometer Operations (Zucker)


no report this week.


Detector/Technical Support (Coyne)


CDS

see also the CDS weekly meeting minutes in the commissioning archives

CDS Software

no report

 

CDS Hardware

Jay Heefner reporting

Fiber Optic Timing Link (Sander)

==========================

- Sander reported that Paul had done the board layouts using Protel 98 and without using the design rules and net lists. He will redo the layout using DXP 2004 and the appropriate rules/tools.

 

TCS Chiller (Mohana)

==========================

- The board has been sent to PCB Express. 10 were ordered, 3 will be stuffed for LHO.

- The front panel design for the chassis is in the works.

 

AI Filters for Low Noise DACs (Todd)

=================================

- 12 are being built. Tests will begin next week.

 

40 Meter (Ben/Jay)

=================================

- The LSC aux2 crate is now installed. Database records are complete.

- Still need to change PD #'s and database record names to match the front end software.

- Laptop 3 has been converted to a linux based epics operator station.

- The PC104 CPU and I/O boards for the low cost EPICS IOC have been received. It will be tested as an IOC and cross connect replacement on the 40 Meter.

 

LSC PD Redesign (Ben)

=================================

- Design to PCB Pro. 35 have been ordered and are due back in one week.

 

ISS (Flavio)

==================================

- Two units for LHO are being tested.

- The test plan is being updated.

 

AdL SEI (Jay)

==================================

- We will modify coil drivers to the low noise design and investigate oscillations seen at ETF.

 

EE Shop (Todd)

==================================

- One more Bull's Eye PD completed and shipped to LLO. The total fab'd and shipped to both sites is 5. We have one more here as a spare.

- 5 ASC QPD Whitening Boards, Rev B2 are ready to ship. Todd will find out how many go to each site at today's CDS meeting.

- Fixing two GPS clock drivers returned from LASTI.

DMT

no report.

TCS

Dennis Coyne reporting

Phil Willems, Dave Ottaway, Cheryl Vorvick, et. al. presented the results of the TCS controller and quiet chiller prototype testing. Emphasis was on interfaces and reliability. Further testing is needed to establish why the laser intensity stability isn't as good as required when the AOM is powered as well. May need a higher flow rate.

TCS Quiet Chiller

Ken Mailand

I’m working on 5 laser chiller assemblies to supply the LHO and LLO sites.
Expediting one unit for shipment to LHO 11-24, to be there when Phil Willems
arrives 11-29.
 
The results of the accelerated corrosion test in using the Chloramine-T & water mixture used for the PSL laser and TCS laser, and also the LHO site house chiller fluid, and the CIT system chiller fluid with Brass, Aluminum, plated steel and Copper as the test metals; indicated the LHO house chiller fluid is the most stable.
 
I called TAAM the RIO pump maker and described the no start problem, their tech. person said he had no knowledge of that kind of problem on any of the other units, he asked everyone there the same question; also they did not offer any other suggestions explaining how a ‘no start’ could occur. He said if it was over heated it may have distorted the plastic shaft or bearing holders, making it unreliable to start now.
The other pumps we have as examples use a similar construction internally and show no apparent design improvement over the RIO.
They said that sending them the unit would do no good once it has been subject to the overheat condition.

PSL

PeterKing

Jay and I put the low-frequency intensity stabilisation servo state code its paces.  I would summarise the state code performance as being okay but not satisfactory.  The state code appeared to be doing the correct things with just the proportional term.  The integral gain was smaller than I had expected but did not appear to be well-behaved.  There were periods when the loop would wander off for some non-apparent reason.  All the above led to a few code additions.

 

The pre-modecleaner that was on loan to Stanford checked out okay and is locked to the laser.  Visual inspection of the packing material did not exactly inspire any confidence.

AS Port Astigmatic Beam

Mike Smith

T040204-00 was submitted to the DCC

Optical Contamination Cavities

Lee Cardenas, Liyuan Zhang

no report


 


 

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)



Thermal Noise Interferometer (Libbrecht)


We are continuing to make progress on the automated lock acquisition system for the TNI. With some human intervention, we have achieved duty cycles in excess of 80%. This is good enough to do preliminary non-Gaussian noise measurements, and the next step is to implement the data acquisition and analysis system.

Last week the film crew was here, and we opened the chamber both for filming and to perform some much-needed, but not high priority, maintenance: optimizing the mode-cleaner OSEM heads, improving the visibility of the arm cavities, etc.

Helena has shipped one of our sets of fused-silica mirrors off to be recoated with the newly-developed, lower-noise dielectric coatings. When these are ready, we will be able to compare the noise in these new coatings with that of a regular silica-tantala coating.


LASTI (Ottaway)


LASTI Weekly (Allen,Coyne, LaLiberty, Mason, Mittleman, McInnes, Ottaway, Ruet, Sarin, Savage, Shoemaker)

LASTI Planning
A meeting was held to make plans for how to deal with the delay in the BSC Seismic system delivery. Ken Mason is designing a rigid spacer that will interface the Quad Controls prototype to the HEPI system. This will enable us to take delivery of the controls prototype in May '05. We will the be able to install the system with a "cartidge installation" technique. We will then be able to study the controls dynamics of the quad controls protoype. These tests will be similar to the MC triple tests that Laurent has undertaken. With this plan we will remove the Initial LIGO BSC stack by Christmas.

MC Controls Triple 
Laurent has discovered that when LASTI is pumped down the buckling of the floor is sufficient to take all of the OSEMS on the bottom mass out of range and one of the OSEMS on the intermediate mass. A tilt motion of 0.6 mRad was observed. Further investigations on this are proceeding.

LASTI PSL
The table top FSS was installed successfully and the wiring was made to conform to be the same as the Livingston Data Base. Jon is currently updating the wiring diagrams.


Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)


 Simulation and Modeling (Bhawal)
Weekly Physics Meeting
-----------------------------
Biplab gave a talk on "Mode-decomposition of phasecamera images" Viewgraphs may be downloaded from:
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~bbhawal/Talk/E2E_041118.pdf
We had a good discussion among Luca, Keita, Mike Smith, Hiro and Biplab on the above topic and related issues of astigmatism etc. After that Hiro presented e2e simulation results for locking of the interferometer using dark port signal either before or after the Output Mode-Cleaner under various thermal states of the interferometer. Hiro's viewgraphs may be downloaded from:
http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~e2e/ME2ET/Minutes04/041118/OMCeffect.pdf

Commissioning related:
----------------------------------------------------
(Biplab) Phasecamera image analysis: The variation of beam widths in X- and Y- directions (i.e. astigmatism) in fitted data for these dark port images under various Thermal compensation states were analyzed and presented in the weekly e2e meeting.

(Hiro) Output Mode Cleaner (OMC) effect:
 The effect of OMC was studied using SimLIGO. The offset of locked points, one using all fields from the dark port and one using only TEM00 mode, showed difference of 0.5e-12 meter, due to higher order modes. The contrast defect, carrier leaking to the dark port, is stable and mostly due to the difference of the eigenstates of two arms. The beam size is different by 0.7%, which makes the total carrier leak to the dark port to be 1% of the SB 00 mode. This higher order mode of CR together with SBs due to small mode mismatch due to imperfect thermal compensation can contribute to ASQ signal. FFT was used to confirm this result.

E2E simulation for 40m interferometer
----------------------------------------------
(Monica) The verification of the lock acquisition for the Mach-Zehnder in the 40m/advLIGO e2e model has been done. The investigastion of the error signals have been started (no noise is added and each mirror is swept with a ramp). One PSD simulation (the dark port demodulated at 166MHz) is running to cover the range 10Hz-10kHz, it will take some days to be completed.

FFT study
-----------------
(Biplab) Earlier it was observed that the ETM phasemaps are responsible for almost 20% drop in recycling gain (arm gain, however, remains almost constant). Verified analytically that indeed with increasing loss in ETM that is what happens. Next investigated with a simple FFT model how exactly the loss could happen due to aberration in ETMs but the calculated scattering loss due to aberration on each reflection turns out to be lower than what the analytical derivation demands to quantitatively explain the large drop in recycling gain.

Code development and maintenance
--------------------------------------
(Melody)  Modifying the E2E scripts to move the scripts install-sh, missing, mkinstalldirs, and depcomp in the (platform dependent) build directories.

Alfi
----------
(Hiro) The bundler natively supported by alfi has been tested for real cases. Some problems and missing features for practical use were found. Hiro reported this to Bruce and discussed about the solution.

(Melody) Checked in all the code modifications for the simpler view for FUNC_X variables.

Data Analysis Activities (Lazzarini)

Brown;
Reviewed inspiral talk abstracts for GWDAW and prepared MACHO code for review.
Set up inspiral code to run online under Condor for E11 using Mike's calibration data and Patrick's sensemon coefficients.
Modified the DMT monitor John wrote (with help from Patrick S.) so it can display results of inspiral search in the control room at LHO.
Set up installation and documentation for Glue (Grid LSC User Environment) package.

Creighton:
Participated in F2F code review of pulsar Hough transform search code, and further debugging sessions.

Shawhan:
* Reworked the results section of the S2 untriggered burst search paper, following the discussions at the LSC Meeting and afterward
* Spent a number of hours learning about and reviewing the Hough transform pulsar search
* Set up and debugged automatic science-mode segment list generation for the E11 run
* Fixed a conlogger problem at LLO that was caused by a disk-full condition, and helped people at LHO adjust the conlogger configuration for the E11 run
* Made a few improvements to the 'segments' package in LIGOtools; for one thing, segwizard will be able to see the E11 segment lists once they are posted
* Trying to reproduce the quarter-Hz comb of lines in AS_Q spectra that has been reported by Vladimir Dergachev and others.

Sutton:
Most of my time has been spent on the LIGO-TAMA bursts analysis.  Over the past week I created a rough set of GWDAW slides with the final coincidence numbers and submitted them to the bursts review committee for approval.  We've since discussed LIGO-TAMA at two review telecons; no problems thus far, but the committee wants a few more days to study what's been done before making a recommendation to the executive committee.  I also gave the this week's CaJAGWR seminar on the LIGO-TAMA analysis.

In other research, I met with Phil Willems to plan a TFClusters analysis of a few hours of post-S3 L1 data from a period when Phil et al were performing hardware injections to test for Barkhausen noise. The objective is to see if Barkhausen noise can be observed in the bursts search.  Also, I've done a small amount of helping out with E11, mainly by doing checks on the calibrations used for H1, and H2 by DMT monitors.

Weinstein:
- Review of Inspiral results (S2BNS, S2 MACHO) for GWDAW.

Lazzarini:
Worked on an interpretation of spectral analysis of X^2 for stochastic background searches.
See http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/docs/T/T040217-02.pdf
Also building a script to stitch together our O[~10^5] minute-integrated cross-correlation spectra into a frequency-time map over all of S3.

LIGO Data Analysis System

Software Systems (Blackburn)
LDAS Software:

Released LDAS version 1.3.0 on Monday. This release has many new features for creating RDS frames of various length and structure. These have been successfully used to date in the E11 engineering run (as reported by Greg Mendell). Several minor oversights in the new documentation for these RDS features were discovered on Tuesday and a patch for the documentation was pushed out to the sites. On Friday prior to the release an issue was discovered with one of the many permutations available for generating the RDS frames. This corner case was not critical to the engineering run and will be fixed for the next LDAS release.

Since the prerelease had been pushed onto LDAS-TEST and LDAS-LHO prior to the release date, only LDAS-LLO, LDAS-MIT and LDAS-CIT needed to have resource file changes prior to Monday's release. System testing of the official 1.3.0 release code Friday afternoon and over the weekend showed no issues with the LDAS test suites, giving the green light to Monday's release.

Completed SWIG wrapping of 2 asynchronous XIO read/write vector functions, globus_xio_register_readv() & globus_xio_register_writev().

We have a new software engioneer on board this week: Naveen Palavalli. His expertise is in Grid Computing and he will be working with us on issues related to Grid related data analysis and the Tcl/Globus ITR effort. Naveen was successful in navigating the instructions for using the new LSC DataGrid client tools for getting a LIGO certificate using the command line instead of a web browser. He has fed back his experiences with this procedure to Scott Koranda.

TCL/Globus ITR Task:

Completed asynchronous XIO client/server Tcl script.

Debugging globus_xio_register_write() & globus_xio_register_writev(). The issue is the information about "nbytes" from the last read callback doesn't get passed correctly to the last write callback. The cause of this issue is still under investigation.

Testing Tcl test case to exercise 3 more XIO server functions.
Those functions are:
   a. globus_xio_server_create()
   b. globus_xio_server_close()
   c. globus_xio_server_accept()

Globus XIO Status Report (latest).
   a. A total of 31 functions:
   b. 4 XIO control functions are left to be exercised with Tcl test cases.
      globus_xio_attr_cntl(), globus_xio_server_cntl(),
      globus_xio_data_descriptor_cntl(), globus_xio_handle_cntl().
   c. 27 functions are completed, SWIG wrapped with Tcl test cases.

Added CVS accounts for Vladimir Dergachev, Keith Riles and Tim Bodiya under the GDS repository.

Open Science Grid:

Exchanged emails with Ruth Pordes addressing a reorganization of the documentation for the OSG activities. Recommended an additional document be included that discussed relationship of OSG to other Grid Projects.

Was asked to participate in the OSG Deployment Group as the LIGO VO representive. The group is seeking representation from each VO and LIGO was until now unrepresented.

Hardware Systems (Anderson)
Caltech
-------
(Dan Kozak)
* Discovered that the 3510s are invisible via direct connection if they're in point to point mode.  Tested running in loop mode with a shared SAM-QFS filesystem, one connection direct the other via the switch to verify that this would work for the backup framebuilders.  It worked fine over a weekend, so we're declaring it a success.
* Replaced bad disk in 3510.
* Exported and shipped postS3 tapes from both observatories.
* Consolidated tapes at LLO--got back lots of space lost when (I guess) tapes were labeled while archiving was running.
* Got LDR transfers working here at CIT for E11 data.

(Al Wilson)
* Preinstalled 200g disk drives in the cluster.

(Stuart Anderson)
* Coordinating activities associated with frame data storage and distribution duringE11.
* Isolated network switch problem and awaiting replacement part from vendor.
* Scheduled final removal of all old HPSS equipment (tape drives and tapes) from the LIGO tape silo at Caltech.
* Continued testing of Fedora Core 3.

MIT
---
(Keith Bayer)
* Installing 2nd harddrive into cluster today (with help from the data analysis group).
* Brought pcraid#7 online.
* Reviewed LDR with Junwei Cao in prep for E11.
* Investigated dataserver RAM errors.

Hanford
-------
(Greg Mendell)
* Data archiving and reduction of E11 data started at 08:00 PST Wed Nov 17, 2004, and will continue until 00:00:00 PST Wed Nov 24, 2004. Web monitoring of data archiving to tape is available here:
  
http://ldas.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/ldas_outgoing/archiver/Status_Pages/ main.html.
  Raw (full-frame), Level 1 RDS, and Level 3 RDS data is available from
  fortress within an hour of real-time under these directories:
  /samraw/E11/L0/LHO /samrds/E11/L1/LHO /samrds/E11/L3/LHO.  Note that 
new
  LDAS options for generating RDS frames are being used to set the 
number
  of frames per file, the number of seconds per frame, and the existance
  of frame checksums. The E11 Level 1 RDS frames contain 1 frame per 
file
  with 64 seconds of data per frame, and the E11 Level 3 RDS frames
  contain 1 frame per file and 256 s per frame. All RDS frames have 
frame
  checksums as well as file checksums. Web monitoring of the data
  reduction is available here:
  http://ldas-jobs.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/dsorun/cgi-bin/index.cgi.
  For those wanting the lastest createrds.tcl and createrdsGUI.tcl 
driver
  scripts that use the new LDAS options, these are available from here:
  CVS Root =
  :pserver:gmendell@gravity.phys.uwm.edu:2402/usr/local/cvs/lscsoft and
  CVS Repository = dsorun/contrib/createrds/scripts. The LIGOtools LDAS
  job and dataflow packages, and an LDAS password are required.

(Ben Johnson)
* Shipped 47 tapes to Caltech on Nov. 18.
* Received 90 blank 9940B tapes from disc-o-tape on Nov. 18.
* Currently putting data on the cluster via a Disk2Disk copy script. Publishing into ldas-gridmon's LDR with a new, and hopefully improved, publishing script. Also publishing E11 data from gateway.
* There was a DAQ problem with fb1 late Nov. 17 - early Nov. 18 for about 2 hours. Data from fb0 ok (supposedly). Putting fb0's data under /samraw/E11_from_fb0 (not part of an archiver set), until a decision is made.

General Computing (Wallace)
MIT:
(Keith)
-Helped troubleshoot thinkpad problems
-Prepared new wireless router for NW22

Livingston:
(Shannon)
-Current bandwidth usage can be seen at
http://teche.ligo-la.caltech.edu/mrtg/LLO-Router/130.39.245.1_1.html
Archived bandwidth usage can be seen at
http://teche.ligo-la.caltech.edu/mrtg/archive/ under the dated folder
for the week of interest.
-Installed SuSE 9.2 on an AMD 64 workstation.  Working on a couple of monitor issues with this.
-Working with Solsoft tech support to figure out the best way to roll out the software to multiple locations.  There are several options on how to do this.  One would be 4 separate projects, but this could mean some duplication of efforts.  Another would be one large project with delegated authority over certain devices.  Solsoft does not support this model yet, but they are working on it.
-Working with the local Sun rep on some software & patch management questions.
-Working on a permanent implementation of some IDS and netflow machines. I have had temporary installations of both in the past.  I have purchased a couple of machines to dedicate to these tasks.  The IDS is extremely CPU intensive, so I will have to keep an eye on whether or not it can handle the load of our network connection.
-Keeping an eye on the Cisco 3550.  It seems that it is maxing out the CPU at around 16 mbit.  This is not acceptable, and I am going to have to find a solution soon.  If I have to replace it, this will certainly mean a significant period of downtime...  perhaps 8 hours or so on the WAN connection.  You can see the bandwidth chart at the link above and compare with the CPU load at this location:
http://teche/mrtg/LLO-Router/130.39.245.1_cpu.html


Hanford:
(Christine)
- Network usage can be seen at
http://www.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/~christin/mrtg/ 198.129.208.1_198.129.78.122.html
- Still trying to get the elog mirror cron job working again.  For now the files are being copied twice daily.
- Continuing security hardening and scanning of the sun computers.
- Worked on a laptop that had a corrupted definition file for Norton Antivirus.  After removing and reinstalling the Norton software, the final solution was to install the latest version of Liveupdate from the Symantec web page.
- Other misc. user support.

CIT:
(Mike)
-Irene Baldon: Swapped out a defected printer, with a new HP LaserJet printer, and I surplus her old one.
-Notebook Loaner Pool: Finished up reloading a notebook and turned it into Ed Chargois. I have started reloading another one.
-Ed Chargois: I finished up loading an updated PC to swap out Ed C. His old PC is having some hardware issues. He is swapped out.
-Cindy Akutagawa: Reloadingher PC from win 2000 to XP. There are many spyware/adware apps running on this computer that would take many hours to clean up. We have decided to reload this workstation. I am almost done with this build, with the help of Veronica.
-Millikan: Continued working on PC workstations for Stuart.
-NTSRVs: (M79) Installed an SATA controller card in order to install 400GB SATA hard drives. I swap out one disk and have two more to go. This is to replace the current disks which are 160GB drives that are maxed out. This is going to take some time getting this data moved over to new 400GB drives.
(Pherkab) I had to reload this server due to a hardware failure. I loaded our backup rack mount server with server 2000, GC software, and installed additional web services.
-This weekI ghosted: Sharon Kammerling, Cindy Akutagawa, Irene Baldon, loaner notebook and NTSRV-Pherkab.
(llpdmworks) Users were having a problem connecting to the vault and once connected they could not access certain files. I ended up having to reboot this server. I created additional users accounts.
-Other misc. user support that included updating OS patches, installing additional software, printing issues, and taking care of a few networking problems.

(Lisa)
- Did hardware diagnostics on a blade2000.
- Upgraded the spam software on becrux.  I spent most of the week working on the the spam filters.  I zeroed out the bayesian filter and have been retraining it. I am still reading the documentation for this new version to see if I can get better filtering.
- Continuing to work with Sharon on webpages.
- Worked with Larry to come up with a plan to update the backup server.

Mail Stats 11/11 - 11/17/04
Messages Accepted:      21945
Spam Rejected:          8833
Viruses Rejected:       1078
False Positives:        84
Total Mail Thru:        31856

(Veronica)
- LIGO:  Updates/upkeep.  Working with Mike on building machines for LDAS and GC and on Win server maintenance. Updates to the PAC website. Prepared high-resolution images for a publisher per a request from Caltech Media Relations office.
- LSC: Posted the talks from the last meeting.  Updates/upkeep.
- CaJAGWR: Taped and compressed the video of the last talk. Website updates.

(Larry)
-It has been a interesting week. A great deal of time was spent on office issues. Including getting the ceilings cleaned out and the air-conditioning repaired. The smoke alarms do work in the building. There was a small incident in a lab and the building (West Bridge) did smell like smoke for a day or two but nothing serious and no problems in the LIGO area of the building.
-Continual work in the area of purchasing and reconciliation. The Matlab contracts have been renewed and the license for a new toolbox just arrived. Purchased a couple more PC's for different users and we should be receiving the printer for DCC within the next week.
-Assisted the DCC with a couple of issues. Mostly document retrieval and conversion.
-Finally, got the internal wireless working on my laptop under both Linux and Windows. There were multiple issues. A number of drivers under windows had to be updated and the correct version of Winroute needs to be running when using the MS OS. The firmware upgrade from Orinoco appears to work better than the one from Dell, which helped in getting it to work properly under Linux.
-Assisting Lisa with the e-mail filtering. After this last round of upgrading the software we are looking into some other possibilities to where the admin group doesn't have to spend so much time dealing with the spam issue.
-Helped a couple of new users with their accounts and setup. Cleaned out a couple of old accounts and locked a few more accounts of people that have left the project.


Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)


Seismic Isolation

From: Larry Jones <ljones@ligo.caltech.edu>
 
Advanced LIGO Seismic Structure

SEI Structure:

ASI has provided an estimate of the cost and schedule for performing the completion of the BSC structure design. Costs should be lower than that presented in the latest Change Request submitted. Completion is expected by the end of February, 2005. This date is driven by the availability of Richard Fleischner, ASI's best designer; we agree that he should be the person completing the design. A draft rewrite of the contract is being modified after discussion with ASI, including a detailed description of the content of the design package. We are asking for all stress calculations, plans and notes that are in understandable form in addition to the design models, analysis models and drawing files. We are asking for no additional time to be spent formalizing the calculations, plans and notes.

Actuators:

PSI is proceeding with rework of one each of the two sizes of actuators; this will require removal of the coil from the bobbin and rewinding, as well as repotting the terminations. Tra-Con's Tra-Bond epoxy will be used for potting, instead of the Ceramabond 835M that failed the hi-pot test. In addition, Teflon wraps will be used to insulate the soldered joints, where no insulation was added before. Hi-pot testing will take place prior to potting, after potting, and after the cure of the potting material to track the timing of any failure. Once this is shown to be successful, the 10 remaining actuators will be reworked. Barring problems, they expect to ship to us by the end of the year.

Displacement Sensors:

ADE is proceeding with fabricating and testing the 14 displacement sensors for the BSC prototype structure. They have provided a quote for two calibration blocks.

Accu-Glass is proceeding with fabricating and testing the 3 feedthrough flanges for the BSC chamber at LASTI, with 16 feedthrough fittings each.


Seismometers:

Nothing new.

Galling/Dusting Test:

Nothing new.

Suspension

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


Working with Mike Perreur-Lloyd, Ian Wilmut and Calum on quad design, specifically the tablecloth for the top mass. Started on the tablecloth Product Design Specification.
 

Core Optics

 

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

Adv. LIGO - Coating Development
CSIRO
Received thin coated samples from CSIRO.
Two substrates were coated without ion assist; one of them was superpolished, the other commercially polished.
The second run was deposited with sub-stoichiometric oxygen content.

 

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

As the topic of Ligo I TM HR scattering heats up (with respect to its LIGO II implications), I have been participating in the renewed investigation of this. Particularly, Liyuan and I have been further puzzling out his data, and ploting new measurements. Both are underway. Although his initial scatter scan results clearly indicate an irreducible (under cleaning) popullation of scatter points, these cannot be interpreted as giving aggregate beam scatter as high as we observe at LHO (ie the ~70 ppm per mirror loss). This is EVEN if the calibration of the scatter scans is adjusted to bring the background up to what we expect from super polish micro-roughness. Even the uncleaned scan fro 2kITM04 has been examined and cannot approach the site loss.

Auxiliary Optics

 

From: Michael Smith <smith@ligo.caltech.edu>

I am in the process of "scrubbing" the AOS cost book with a fine, bristle brush. I found several changes which I will discuss with Thomas Frey.

Laser


From: Peter King <pking@ligo.caltech.edu>

 
 A small telecon was held to discuss the writing of the conceptual design document with Benno presenting the current thinking with an aim to finishing the document around mid-January.  One thing that bears thinking is the need for a cleanroom environment around the 200-W laser; a lesson recently learned at LZH where a dust particle was burnt onto an optic and caused distortion of the beam shape.

Other Laboratory R&D

From: Juri Agresti <jagresti@ligo.caltech.edu>


Marco (17nov)

I completed the servo circuit assembling after several tests about noise induction on the output signal and gain performances. At this moment, however, there is no frequency filtering system.

Phil Willems and I tried to achieve a first lock on the cavity but we have seen interference at 122 Hz.

 I’m taking data from the creep experiment at the temperature of 900 C.

 

 

Juri (17nov)

Thermal noise evaluations for mesa-beam profile are completed and the comparison with Gaussian beam profile shows an improved sensitivity of about a factor 1.5 for Sapphire and 1.8 for Fused Silica (without the contribution of thermoelastic noise for the coating). A next development could be changing the diffraction losses constraints from 1ppm to 5-10 ppm. I’m writing my short pre-thesis and taking measurements for the creep experiment.


 

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