Weekly Report for Week Ending June 2, 2005

Highlights	LSC	Administration	Hanford Observatory
Livingston Observatory	Detector	40 Meter	TNI
LASTI	Data Analysis	Adv. LIGO Development	Past Weekly Reports

The LIGO Executive Committee Agenda for Monday June 6, 2005 will be:

(Meeting time: 10:30 am Pacific Time)

Announcements
Comments on Weekly Report
LSC Issues (Saulson)
LIGO Lab Operations

Administration (Lindquist)
Sites (Raab, Zucker, Shoemaker)
Commissioning (Fritschel), Detector (Coyne)
Campus Research Facilities

40 Meter (Weinstein)
TN, ( Libbrecht)
LASTI (Shoemaker)

Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)

R&D and Advanced LIGO (Shoemaker)
CHANGE CONTROL BOARD/TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD SESSION AS NEEDED

There are no open Change Requests

Special Items:

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights

LSC Issues (Saulson)

No report

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Petrac)

LSC MOUs and Research Plans and Progress Reports

No report.

Non-LSC MOUs

No report.

SITE TELECONFERENCE (Lindquist)

No site teleconference was scheduled for Thursday, June 2, 2005.

The list of assigned actions updated through May 26, 2005 will be found Here.

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Chargois)

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

Nothing significant to report.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

No report.

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

packages: in - 15, out - 3
faxes: in - 19, out - 13
No special projects to report.

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

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

For ACCOUNTS PAYABLE HISTORY DATA Press Here.

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

Completed change order #1 to Purchase Order 1065466 to Technology Unlimited for the renewal of the maintenance agreeement for the Cannon document scanner through 5/31/06.
Completed change order #3 to the Amerion subcontract for the 3 month extension of internet service for LHO. Submitted the change to Larry Allaway at Amerion.
Placed the Sun Microsystems orders for the computer servers for the LIGO Hanford and Livingston Observatories.
Working on completing change order #38 to Northrop Grumman for routing.
Working on change order #3 to Ezus Lyon.
Changed the poetas on encumbered funds on computer maintenance charges, as requested.
Completed change order #26 to the Galli and Morelli subcontract to add funds to cover a pending invoice.

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

Nothing significant to report.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

Updating monthly financial reports [for the end of May].
Provided information for a sales tax audit.
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)

No report (sick leave).

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

Efforts are underway to increase the spending limits for site staff authorized to write convenience checks. The initial effort was too increase the limit from $7,500 per month to $30,000 per month, but both Caltech and Bank of America are reluctant to go that high. Agreement has been reached to increase the limit to $15,000 per month.
In the meantime, it is recommended that all vendors for the sites be encouraged to accept P-Cards. Caltech staff is willing to work with the vendors' merchant banks to set up credit card accounts.
Progress continues to be made on the RFQ for the LLO SEC, with the final document still scheduled for release in the middle of June.

SUPPORT (Baldon, Hiroto, Lloyd)

>Irene Baldon

No report (vacation).

>Julie Hiroto jhiroto@ligo.caltech.edu

Nothing signifiant to report.

>Dorothy Lloyd

No report (vacation).
Jim continued with data entry in the LIGO database and helping out in the DCC.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

LIGO must submit an Annual Report for Operations by August 1, 2005 and this annual report must be accompanied by a request for a two year extension (FY 2007 and FY 2008) as well as a justification for why Caltech/MIT should be continued in the role of management of LIGO. I have prepared and distributed a general outline and assignments. I have requested contributions by Friday, June 17, 2005. The outline and schedule were presented during the Executive Committee meting on Monday, May 23, 2005. I am now distributing a first iteration of a budget model for FY 2006, FY 2007, and FY 2008.

DCC Steering Committee (Lindquist)

We were given a demonstration by Xythos here at Caltech on Wednesday morning. Xythos comes to us a little late in the process but is of interest because their application is tailored for the educational and research environment.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

No open change requests.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

No special activities to report.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

Nothing significant to report this week.

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

Summary of Commissioning Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory (Landry)

Our top priority on commissioning remains H1; we have several (2) weeks to reach a binary inspiral range of ~10Mpc, or face the prospect of breaking the vacuum and swapping out a core optic. Highlights of the commissioning week are bulleted below.

4K IFO

The power into the mode cleaner was increased to its highest to date, 6.8W. Locking the full interferometer and servoing the TCS by hand, a brief lock was achieved, on the order of 5m. A long lock stretch at a lower power (4.6W into the MC) was also achieved, in part with a TCS servo applied. Here the ASI_CORR servo sign flip noted in previous weeklies was again observed, but seems to depend on the IFO thermal history.
We have noted a decrease in H1 binary inspiral range, that we can't now account for. In our nominal low-noise configuration, we used to reach 8Mpc, now we're at 7Mpc.
WFS1 some times oscillates 6-7Hz and causes the IFO to unlock. WFS1 was ill-behaved and the gouy phase was suspected to be wrong, here, and here.
The new MMT2 hold sequencer monitors sensor position information for the optic and servos the pitch and yaw sliders to minimize alignment drift
new code expected LSC/ASC soon
S4 calibration studies indicated some dewhite channels were not like the others, leading to this dewhite repair

2K IFO

Early in the week, a noise curve (which includes a noise budget) showed progress at high frequencies, with 1.8W landing on the modecleaner. Later, a short lock was obtained with higher power into the mode cleaner (2-3W), plus TCS annulus heaing (200mW in X and 400mW in Y). The displacement noise at 2kHz, given the power we're at (3W into the MC), suggests we will beat the SRD at high frequency when we go to full power.
New ASC filters reduced a peak at 25Hz in DARM_CTRL, which was coherent with pitch and yaw signals in wavefront sensors
A noisy fast shutter on ISCT10 caused lockloss. The excess shutter noise was attributed to an errant BNC connection.
The new POY detector on ISCT10 was connected up and phases were set. The new REFL PD on ISCT7 was installed, too.
Bumpless filter code was installed, allowing for the loading of coefficients for filters that are not on, without inducing a transient in the filter module output
Coil driver transfer functions were made, then fit in matlab, and compensation filters constructed and loaded
resonant gain filters added to the DARM loop reduce exess noise at 30 and 35Hz.

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

No report

Initial LIGO Detector Science & Engineering (Coyne)

from Dennis Coyne

CDS

see also the CDS weekly meeting minutes in the commissioning archives

CDS Software

no report

CDS Hardware

Ben Abbott

Three PDs were shipped to Livingston, and are now acting as the spares for the AS port.

DMT

no report

PSL

PeterKing

The high power photodetector testing continues. No problems so far.

An attempt at circularising the output of an NPRO was not particularly successful. Whilst a large amount of the astigmatism was removed, the beam was still elliptic. Mechanical constraints did not allow the cylindrical lenses to be positioned any closer. The rest of the optical train is being set up.

ITM Replacement Preparation (ITM05)

Helena Armandula, Liyuan Zhang, Lee Cardenas

Absorption measurement for HR and AR sides have been completed:

http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~lzhang/4itm05/4itm05_hrabs_2.pdf

http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~lzhang/4itm05/4itm05_arabs_2.pdf

Started etching the AR side of ITM05. At this time the reflection on the AR coating went down from 2400 ppm to ~1800 ppm after intervals of 5, 10 and 20 minutes of "cooking". The surface is being scanned overnight to assess uniformity.

TCS Quiet Chiller

Ken Mailand

I have checked with the Sporlan Valve engineer regarding intermittent supply valve non-closure in the chiller circuit at LHO. Given our setup, everything seems to be well within the normal of the valve operating specifications., and he has no answer for us. Sporlan only suggests we check the valve electrical controller, and also check fluid for contaminate particles, on going.

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

Bob received an award for 35 years of service to Caltech. Congratulations, Bob!

IFO commissioning:

Rob has been working on improving the dither signal for MICH. Previously, we used DC signals from the DC test out tap of the LSC RFPD's, but these produce nasty ground loops. Ben installed boards from Rich Abbot wich tap the DC signals from the LSCPD interface board backplanes. Rob reports that the dither signals are now much cleaner. He was able to easily lock the dual-recycled michelson (DRMI) with the new dither signals, then switch to the double-demod (DDM) RF signal.
On Friday, Rob had an epiphany, which he quickly verified using Finesse: the MICH signal can be derived from REFL_Q (SP 33 MHz I) much more cleanly than from the dither, even when demod phases are not precisely tuned. He feels that we no longer need the dither signal. One can lock the DRMI using SP 33Q (REFL_Q) for MICH, SP 33I (REFL_I) for the PRC, and the POB DDM signal for SRM. Then all demod phases can be tuned up well, and control can be switched to DDM for all short degrees of freedom.
Rob finds that it is not completely necessary to tune up the demod phases every night; he has been able to easily aquire lock of the DRMI without re-tuning (except for the SRC signal at POB, which does require retuning every night).
Further, once all the demod phases are tuned up, Rob found that all 5 degrees of freedom can be brought into lock "at once": leave both arms unblocked, all servos on (SRC with PO DD, PRC with SP DD, and MICH with SP 33Q; XARM offset-locked with TRX, YARM offset locked with TRY). Wait ~ 2-3 minutes, all 5 degrees of freedom aquire lock. Then switch MICH from SP 33Q to AP DD. Turn on LF boosts for short DOFs. Then switch to DARM: = (TRX-TRY)/(TRX+TRY) with zero offset, and CARM = (1/sqrt(TRX) + 1/sqrtTRY) (offset, far from SP33I). At this point, everything is locked, but the arms are not at full resonance. Then reduce the CARM offset, watch REFLI rise. But, as arm resonance peak approaches, CARM begins to oscillate and lock is lost.
Rob and Rana can repeat this sequence many times per night, each time trying different CARM loop filter shapes, to try to minimize the oscillation as CARM zero offset is approached. Each night for the last few nights, they've gotten closer. The CARM OLTF UGF is around 200 Hz.
On Wednesday night, they got close enough to zero CARM offset to see what they think is the detuned RSE peak, moving from 5 kHz to the design value of 4 kHz as they approached zero offset. This is the first evidence we've seen for detuned RSE.
Monica is writing up he work on calibrating the LSC signals.
Virginio has written a document on Optical Cavity Time Constant Measurement with Two in Series Optical Resonators in order to be able to extract the ringdown time of the arm cavities when the mode cleaner cavity is "in the way". Using two different methods, he measures the YARM finesse to be 1344 and 1412 (spec is ~ 1200).

IFO modeling and DC detection development:

Monica has modified her e2e 40m simulation to take POX and POY signals from the 600 ppm AR coating of the ITMs.
Monica is learning about how to implement Rob's front-end LSC code into e2e as "plug and play", including all the front-end digital filtering.

Electronics, controls:

Rob finds that the LSC front end cpu can run close to the max of 61 microseconds in some configurations. He will need to change the structure of the LSC code to make it run faster.
Ben has commissioned the new DC signals from the LSC RFPDs that now come from the LSC PD interface board backplane. He is supplying DC signals (for dither and other LSC uses) from the AP, POB, SP, POX, and POY RFPDs. He did a survey of the whitened signals that were hooked up to the LSC Whitening boards to find out which connectors corresponded to which signals in DTT. He then looked at the same signal that was being split through two front panel channels, one coming from the RFPD DC SMA, and the other coming from the P2 Connector of the LSC PD Interface. The P2 signal seemed to be quite a bit noisier than the old signal. Later, he found out that these two channels of the Whitening board have different filtering, and could account for the difference seen. Tomorrow, he will do a test with both signals alternately through the same channel.
Rana installed Matt Evan's EZ / TDS Software so that Dan can use it for the suspension diagonalization. He plans to also update all the EZCA code.
Rana downloaded IFO configure scripts from Hanford, and has set up a PSL FSS Autolocker script. He plans to do the same for the PMC and the Mach-Zehnder. He's working on other autolocking and autoalignment scripts.
Steve has grounded all optical tables to the vacuum envelope via 1 Mohm resistors; because there are other path, he measures 0.3 Mohm to the vacuum envelope. The PSL and SP tables, however, are dead shorts.
In order to further isolate the optical tables (to minimize the chance of ground loops) Steve and Bob installed some beam tube insulators, and they plan to replace the table enclosure walls with plastic ones, being made in the shop.
Steve and Ben plan on disconnecting all the secondary grounds on the rack power kill switches; they were a mistake!
Dan was at LHO all last week, diagonalizing suspensions using Matt Evan's TDS tools. He plans to run coil balancing and output matrix diagonalization code on the 40m suspensions, next.
Bob ordered some electronics supplies (solder, solder wick and the like).

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

No report.

LASTI (Ottaway)

No report.

Data Analysis and Computing (Wallace for Lazzarini)

Simulation and Modeling (Bhawal)

E2E weekly Physics Meeting

Sany Yoshida presented more results on simulation of a suspended locally-controlled mirror experiencing violin modes.

WFS1 for H1

(Biplab)

Interacted with Keita and Rana who are working on H1 Wave Front Sensor(WFS). From the current measurements (by Joe) of the parameters of the optical path leading to WFS1, it seems the WFS1 is not at the optimum Gouy-phase position. In the days of Luca Matone ...I remember that it was set to the desired value of 90 deg to get maximum signal but something might have changed in between. Plots are posted in elog (June 2). This could be the spoiling factor for the recent problems observed especially in WFS1. Keita plans to correct it.

Out-Reach

(Biplab)

Assisted Sany Yoshida and his students in their simulation of Input Optics system.

Code development

(Hiro)

Still working on updating the modeler code for the advanced LIGO simulation, mainly to support multile time steps transparently and to implement the fast simulation of a dual recycling cavity.

The design of C++ based FFT program using tools developed for e2e is also in progress.

Alfi

(Bruce)

Completed new bundle content caching implementation. Includes cache updating due to user inputs. Now working to enhance the speed of these methods.

(Melody)

Currently working on the user interface for allowing the user to choose the display for nodes: graphic, node name, or a multiline description. Worked on allowing primitive nodes to be able to display an icon from a jpg or gif file. Worked on saving the display information into the box files. Continuing with modifying the parser to contain the node's descriptive labels.

Data Analysis Activities (Wallace for Lazzarini)

Charlton:

This week I've mainly been analysing S4 data, comparing strain calculated in the frequency domain (using the response function) with Xavi's time-domain h(t) data. The time-domain h(t) appears to be much better in S4 (compared to S3) but there are still differences with the frequency-domain strain. The band-limited RMS for the time-domn strain is about 3% smaller than that for the frequency-domain strain.
Made some fixes to code for the generating stochastic pipeline cache and DAG files.

Shawhan:

Prepared for LSC Meeting and Burst Group face-to-face meeting.
Reviewed pulsar analyses.
Final proofreading of S2 LIGO-only untriggered burst search paper.

LIGO Data Analysis System

Software Systems (Blackburn)

LDAS

Completed testing of the 1.6.0 release of LDAS at LHO by conducting a 4 day createRDS generation challenge. All tests passed flawlessly. The CVS repository for LDAS has now been reopened for software development towards the 1.7.0 release in support of "Astrowatch" testing in mid July.
Due to hardware failure on the LDAS-DEV system here at Caltech, we were unable to conduct any system and integration testing of our development code since last Friday. The hardware failure has been resolved and the component in question is being configured. We hope to be back up for software testing this weekend.
Added "lsof" path to resource files for the lightWeightAPI, metaDataAPI, and the eventMonitorAPI.
Fixed line wrapping and parsing of resource variable bug in the genericAPI that was impacting the display of data in the controlMonitorAPI's GUI.
Began making code changes for Solaris 10 (currently LDAS support Solaris 9, but the system administration group for LDAS would like to migrate to Solaris 10 soon).

TCLGLOBUS

Fixed XIO GSI test case. The problem is the conversion of the NULL pointer to a string "NULL" instead of true pointer at the SWIG layer. We put a conditional check to handle this case.
Found the problem why our previous asynchronous client/server test cases not working. The problem is we release the Tcl variable resources for read buffer too soon before making use of it for write buffer. Still making code changes to fix this issue.
Modified several test cases to have an option for testing memory leaks by adding extra resource variables.
Modified FTP client third party transfer test case to handle the case when the sever is not responding. The fix is to have a timeout condition.
Built and compiled TclGlobus against Fedora Core 3 using both threaded and non-threaded versions.
Extended configure.ac file to detect differences between Globus Toolkit 3.2.x and Globus 4.0.0. Then built TclGlobus against the threaded version of Globus Toolkit 4.0.0. This lead to the correction of a conceptual error in the TclGlobus dealing with the threaded versus non-threaded versions of the Globus build. It also required modification to the completion detection for several of the test programs so that they would function for both Globus 3.2.x and 4.0.0. Still need to conduct more testing against Globus 4.0.0 before declaring the port to this release a success, but its close now.

GRID/OSG

Discussed the possibility of developing a "virtual machine" software installation environment for OSG know as the "Edge Services Activity" at the OSG Council telecon this week. This would be a very useful mechanism for LIGO to move LIGO software onto an OSG Grid Cluster without having to go to the effort of migrating important LIGO software into the VDT or OSG cache. This mechanism is being evaluated by several of the high energy experiments as well. Further discussion will be needed before this is turned into an official OSG activity, but it looks very promising.
Handed off several key points to our collaborators (ISI) to be presented at the OSG applications meeting this week. This will outline our successes with Grid Computing for the binary inspiral search coded on grids and our plans to migrate to Grid3/OSG with these applications.

Hardware Systems (Ehrens for Anderson)

Nothing to report

General Computing (Wallace)

MIT:

(Keith)

Configuring new webserver

scsi bus troubles seem to have cleared up

configuring print spooler

configuring web server

will not try to use this box as test case for LDAP as it was taking too long to work out all the details

Adding urops to gc
Still working on ldap (as time permits)

currently have a hybrid system with both Sun native

ldap and opensource ldap modules required for sun

machines. linux boxes simply use opensource ldap

libraries (that come preinstalled).

Moving Dell GX260 desktop into Queue lab to replace old pc

Livingston:

(Shannon)

Changed out the failed hard drive on the ilog server over the weekend. Had some problems with the OS picking up the new drive and adding it to the RAID. The solution is to NOT use the Solaris Management Console and only use the command line for restoring a mirrored drive in RAID 0.
Working again with bell south to find our fiber problem. They shot the fibers with an OTDR on Wednesday and claim everything is OK. The router has stopped passing packets again a couple of times and I am not sure if we have more than one problem right now. I have stopped seeing receive errors on the connection which were present for the last couple of weeks and into Monday, but it has gone down a couple of times. Rebooting the router this morning seemed to bring the connection back up. It is still somewhat of a mystery and I will have to do some more troubleshooting. Made some additional changes to the firewall last night also.
LSU notified me yesterday that they will have some planned downtime in the next 30-60 days to do some router/switch upgrades. Depending on how they do this we may see downtime on the order of minutes, or as much as an hour or two. They will notify us well in advance.

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
Setup two more Sun Blade 1500s in the Computer Users room.
Lots of purchases for other projects and for GC.
Contacted PocketiNet for a quote on our backup network.

CIT:

(Mike)

Loaner Pool: Reloaded another laptop for the loaner pool, and turned this into Ed Chargois for loaning purposes.
Calum Torrie: Reloaded his laptop due to many OS, and software issues. This was a Win2000 load that I reloaded to XP, plus installed many engineering packages, and transferred users data over as well.
Solid Works/Pdmworks: Installing and updating our Solid Works users to the current version of pdmworks which is 2005 SP.3.1. This took up a lot of time this week. First upgrading the pdmworks server and then installing the new client on the users.
Janeen Romie: I had problems installing the pdmworks client on her laptop. This required a complete re-install of Solid Works. I also had to clean up the registry and clean up many directories that were associated with Solid Works.
Spent a lot of time on the mail servers due to the clamd process not running. The mail server most definitely has a problem.
The usual maintenance on the spam filters.
NTSRV's: Ran end of month ghost backups on pherkab, antares, pc72, pictor, m91, and amaldi.
DCC: work on a database issue with the public search feature not working. After trouble shooting this issue it turned out to be a drive mapping that somehow was disable.
Much other user support that included issues with email, printing, and software.

(Veronica)

Finished AdvLIGO website updates.
Updated the roster database.
Updated the LSC June Meeting website.

I was out of office on sick leave most of the week.

(Larry)

This has been a busy week with purchases. Resolved a couple of issues with the Pcard group. Still have a number of items to reconcile. Ordered a number of computers and other items for different people on the project. Received the SUN, Dell and ASA orders. Now getting the machines ready for distribution. Ordered and received a number of misc. items. Most of the items have been distributed.
Spent time reviewing a couple of the vendors that the DCC has been looking at. Also, attended a couple of the demos of the vendors.
Spent time working on special backups and finished up the regular monthly backups of the user accounts. Still have the server backups to wrap up. Discovered another bad disk and presently working on getting it replaced.
Still working a number of different issues going on with the air-conditioning upgrade to the building. The fiber installation in the sub-basement is now taking place. Still no word on augmenting the air in the computer room.
Assisted a number of users with different problems. Configuration issues mainly. Installed G77 on a server with SUSE as the OS. The multiple CPU boxes are being used more. After this summer we should be able to see if we need to purchase any more the GC area.
E-mail has been taking up a lot of time this past week and appears that it will be the main project for the next week or two. The spam filter and anti-virus programs are not working properly. They die at random times and there are no error messages or other processes indicating any problems. Presently, we are monitoring the processes and having them restart automatically. This is just a temporary work around to give us time to get a solution to the problem.

E-mail statistics May 26 -June 1, 05

Accepted messages 13,929

Virus messages 996

False Positives 162

Rejected messages 16,274

Total Messages 30,203

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Systems and Management

from Dennis Coyne

Systems

See also:

AL Systems web page

AL Systems email archives

Records Of Decision or Agreement (RODA)

See also the RODA status web page

nothing new

Requirements

nothing new

Interface Issues

See the "Interfaces" section of the AL Systems web page

Justin Greenhalgh, Janeen Romie and Dennis Coyne have been collecting interface requirements & data for the SUS review in June.

Vacuum Compatibility

Residual Gas Assay (RGA)

Meetings & Reviews

Future near term planned meetings & reviews:

Date	Subsystem	Review or Meeting Title
6/?	SUS	Requirements & Interface Update (enable SUS/UK final design efforts in parallel with SUS/US completion of the quad controls prototype and preliminary design)
end of June?	ISC	40m DC readout experiment plan review
7/11	SYS	Systems Issues Summit Meeting PASTE PF's agenda here
?	AOS	AOS: Scattered Light Control Design Requirements Review (DRR)
?	COC	?

From: Jay Heefner jay@ligo.caltech.edu

AdL CDS

The prototype AD7679 ADC to FPDP board is operational. The FPDP interface appears capable of handling the full 570Ksps for the ADC. Noise measurements are in progress, but there appears to be a "hidden feature" in the BUSY bit used by the ADC that is interfering with the acquisition. Jay has a call in to Analog Devices.

Seismic Isolation

From: Ken Mason kmason@ligo.mit.edu

No report this week

From: "Joseph A. Giaime" jgiaime@ligo.phys.lsu.edu

For three days during the week of July 11 - 15, Peter Fritschel is planning a meeting at Caltech to discuss updates to the Adv LIGO design. The topic most relevant to this group is: Reassessment of HAM seismic isolation requirements: the HAM platform vibration requirements were set to be the same as for the BSC, for simplicity/commonality, but it seems likely that the HAM platform does not need to be as quiet as the BSC in some bands; what do we really need, and what are the implications for the SEI design?

Follow up actions from Review:

Let's proceed as though the plan will be followed. Here are the tasks that need immediate attention in order not to slip our schedule:

Performance modeling of 2-stage system (BTL), leading to choice of stage 0-1 spring stiffness and approximate blade geometry.
definition of ASI job, followed by interaction with Ed Jasnow to produce amendment/change order to contract. (KM & JG)
Produce overall LASTI BSC SEI mechanical procurement plan (produced by KM & OS, reviewed by DC, sent to Jasnow for bid spec preparation.)

Jay will soon get 8 boards for GS-13 refit.

LLO HEPI work:

Work on HAMs continues: IIR high-pass and blended loops performance looks OK in y direction. X direction blending does not help except frequencies above a few hertz, and not much.
Brian O'Reilly and Rich Mittleman will put their heads together to decide where exactly the twist-coupling cross term will connnect in the HAM HEPI diagram. Then Brian will discuss the needed code changes with Rolf.

LASTI investigation of the 10+ Hz HEPI noise shoulder

Rich thinks that the 10 Hz feature is something like a flagpole mode of the BSC vacuum tank. He is not yet sure how the coupling occurs (probably through the floor). The floor near the piers is instrumented and he is working the problem.
Dennis has some references on how to model flexing of concrete floor patches, and will provide these to Ken Mason.

Adv LIGO SEI electronics

Jay needs to get with Ken to verify that the wiring harness fits up through the platform design.
Single ADE fine displacement sensor still exhibits the 24 Hz peak; Jay has discussed this with ADE, and has returned the four sensors in the first fine set of four to them for service.

From: Jay Heefner <jay@ligo.caltech.edu> .

AdL SEI

Four of the capacitive positon sensors have been returned to ADE. Jay will call them later in the week to find out if they have any data on the source of the 24Hz noise bump.
Meanwhile, 4 more sensors and amplifiers are being assembled in the test rig.

Suspension

From: Janeen Romie romie_j@ligo.caltech.edu

Advanced LIGO Suspensions

Working on the Universal SUS DRD. Placing POs for some of the final suspension parts. Following up with the two campus machine shops for parts.

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

No report this week

From: Ken mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu

Finished a cost outline for Adv. LIGO parts cleaning, in house vs. vendor. Large bake oven to be placed in the 40m Lab is on schedule for delivery next week. Mike Gerfen is adding some hole and tap features to the two test plates to make them identical as possible for the FTIR test.

Core Optics

No report

Advanced LIGO SUS

The installation of the new Class 100 cleanroom in the Synchrotron lab will start next Wednesday and is expected to be finished and certified by Friday.

Pre-Stabilized Laser

From: Peter King pking@ligo.caltech.edu

AdvLIGO PSL

A problem was noticed with the 500 mA photodetector in that the observed responsivity of the diode is somewhat less than the expected 0.75 A/W. Cleaning the protective window did help a little but I think that scatter from the window might be part of the problem.

In the lasers working group monthly telecom LZH reported that further tests were conducted on the high power laser. The ring laser configuration was restored and injection locked, ie the AdvLIGO configuration. A good beam profile was measured before 2 fibres were burned. The fibre bundle was inspected; the remaining 8 fibres were okay. Problems with mechanical stress on the fibre connector caused one fibre to be damaged. In the case of the other fibre, back reflections from the high power laser caused the epoxy holding the Teflon holder to heat up. Both fibres were successfully re-cleaved and put back into service.

In addition progress was made on a rod amplifier design that might be part of an Initial LIGO laser upgrade. 34 W of power was achieved in a single-pass configuration with 3 NdYV04 rods pumped with three 30-W diodes.

At the AEI experiments continue on the power stabilization. Improvements were made to the DC voltage reference used in the experiment.

A pre-modecleaner cavity was used in the high finesse mode for both the in and out-of-loop photodetectors. The setup is housed to provide some acoustic shielding, with the option of going into vacuum if need be.

Auxiliary Optics

From: Michael Smith smith@ligo.caltech.edu

No report this week

Other Laboratory R&D

From: Riccardo DeSalvo desalvo@ligo.caltech.edu

Juri

I wrote a Mathematica notebook to implement the calculations for coating thermoelastic noise in the finite mirror case using two different approaches for the calculation of the dissipated energy which is used in the Levin approach to thermal noise calculations. Now I’m checking the compatibility of these two methods and the limit of infinite test mass using Gaussian beam; after I will calculate the noise reduction using Flat top beam.

Chiara

I took some preliminary measurements of the resonant frequencies of the horizontal attenuation system mounted in the Synchrotron, changing the loads from 600 Kg to 1460 Kg. I made a fit of the data which shows an expected zero frequency around 1600 Kg. Now I’m adding load little by little in order to have enough data in the low frequency region near zero. Moreover I’m taking classes in the Machine Shop to learn how to use many instruments for the productions of mechanical parts.

Marco (01Jun)

We are still working on gaussian beam data: tried different models to fit tri-dimensional profiles but no relevant results. Phil ordered another folder mirror to avoid ghost beam overlap with the main profile.

I’m studying a different approach to the beam analysis through image filtering and smoothing techniques: work in progress.

For additional information about this report, contact Stan Whitcomb or Phil Lindquist

Cavity (Location)	Material/Item	Start	End	Comments
Cavity #1 (OTF Lab, Bridge)	new set of 70ppm REO mirrors	NA	NA	174 mW laser power, compares well with 180mW with previous ATF mirrors. Cavity is ready for samples
Cavity #2 (OTF Lab, Lauritsen)	NA	NA	NA	cavity is close to being ready for samples; completion on hold for other priority work
Cavity #3 (OTF Lab, Lauritsen)	Glenair Micro-D connectors (qty=20)	3/2	~6/3	Cavity is locked and we are taking measurements for absorption and ring down every day. test will be completed this week
Queue	OSEM emitter & photodiode	~6/6	~9/6	In vacuum testing currently
Queue	Stepper Motor	TBD	TBD	RGA outgassing vs temperature taken, ready for cavity