Weekly Report for Week Ending November 10, 2005

The LIGO Executive Committee Agenda for Monday November 14, 2005 will be:

(Meeting time: 10:30 am Pacific Time)

1.      Announcements

2.      Comments on Weekly Report

3.      LSC Issues (Saulson)

4.      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)

5.      R&D and Advanced LIGO (Shoemaker)

6.      CHANGE CONTROL BOARD/TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD SESSION AS NEEDED

  • No open change requests

Special Announcements:

The NSF conducted a review of the LIGO Project, November 9 – 11, 2005.  Following are notes from the exit debriefing:

  • The panel indicated that they were impressed with progress made over the last two years.
  • The panel will report that the interferometers have been operated in coincidence for extended periods of time and that we have met the milestone of operating at the levels identified in the science requirements document, although LIGO should continue to improve sensitivity (balanced with running) especially at lower frequencies.
  • The panel will report that LIGO is ready for data archiving and processing, although the panel also noted that the data volume will grow during S5 and additional resources will be required.
  • The panel will report that the data analysis tools are working.  The panel also suggested that LIGO should become more active in astrophysics conferences to let that community know that interesting physics is being done.

Advanced LIGO

  • Test mass down selection has been done.
  • The panel no longer considers the coatings to be a “show stopper, “ although additional research and development is warranted.

LSC

  • The panel will report an active and effective program.

Two Year Extension

  • The budgeted amounts proposed seem reasonable and the panel will recommend that the request for a two year extension be approved by the NSF.  The panel also noted that there needs to be a strong coupling between Advanced LIGO funding and Operations.
  • The panel noted good things about the CIT and MIT commitment to LIGO, and they approved of the changes in organization involving the LSC.

Weekly Report Highlights

LSC Issues (Saulson)

No report.

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

LSC MOUs and Research Plans and Progress Reports

  • Nothing of significance to report.

Non-LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

  • No report this week.

SITE TELECONFERENCE (Lindquist)

No site teleconference was scheduled for Thursday, November 10, 2005 due to the NSF Review.

  • The list of assigned actions updated through November 3, 2005 (the last time that it was updated) 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>

  • Prepared notebooks and contents for NSF Review.  General DCC operations

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

Week Ending

November 10, 2005

In

Out

Packages

35

5

Faxes

22

16
  • Working on updating list of copy/fax machines on the maintenance agreement contract.  Also updating toner inventory for these machines.
  • Working on determining the number of 2006 personnel directories needed for the entire project including MIT, LHO, & LLO.
  • Update on Scanning Project - Progress continues on Larry Jones' boxes of files.  To date, we have 11 of the 16 boxes scanned.  We anticipate completion of these set of boxes possibly by the end of next week.

COST SCHEDULE CONTROL SYSTEMS (Cunningham, Brambila, Kaufman)

>From: "Cronin, Holly" <Holly.Cronin@caltech.edu>

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

  • The MIT change order was returned with approvals. It has been distributed.
  • Completed change orders #165 and 166 to Triad and submitted to the vendor.
  • In the process of completing the change order to Galli and Morelli.
  • Working on the change order to Support Services for approval.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Jasnow, Salone)

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

  • Nothing significant to report.

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

  • No report (vacation).

SUPPORT (Baldon, Hiroto, Lloyd)

>Irene Baldon

No report.

>Julie Hiroto

No report.

>Dorothy Lloyd

  • Nothing of significance to report.
  • Jim continued with data entry in the LIGO database and helping out in the DCC.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

  • No open change requests.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

  • The next Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled for Monday, November 28.  All files for the Staffing Committee are up-to-date and posted on the SC web page.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

No report.

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

Summary of Commissioning Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory (compiled by M. Landry)

At the outset of the S5 run, we decided to devote afternoons and evenings to work on the 4k, and early morning hours to science-mode running on a best effort basis on both machines.  After dealing with AS_I saturations in full power-up mode, the 4k was made to lock in excess of 10Mpc, mid-week.  Calibration data has been taken and some systematics are being sorted.  A partial suite of PEM injections was made on both instruments.  Periodically we have been beset by high microseism, on the order of 1um/s.

A few salient links from the elog this week include:

  • see the many H1 entries regarding the return to full locking, including summaries such as this one
  • last week it was found that 4k RFAM glitches were on the distribution, so that box was removed
  • the DARM unity gain has been set to 200Hz
  • 1Hz lines and subharmonics are still observed in the H1 control signal
  • the main modulation depth on the 2k IFO was reduced by 3dB

Outreach (D. Ingram)

On our Event Highlights page you will find news of Venga a Ver las Estrellas and Corey Gray's recent talk at the Treaty 7 Education Conference.  LHO's Local Educator Network met on 10/27 to give outreach consultation and advice.  LHO was represented at the 11/5 MESA student conference in Sunnyside, WA and at the Tri-Cities Visitor & Convention Bureau's annual meeting and trade show on 11/3.

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

There is still a fairly long IFO and CDS punch list but we're gaining on it.  Hardware configuration is frozen solid and the last code update is done. Planning to hit the ground running and join S5 Monday as scheduled.

The Louisiana housing situation remains problematic. We have had occasional "hits" with hotels by casting a very wide net, but it remains spotty and most will not guarantee reservations. LLO has very limited housing, and will try to accommodate specific requests in our trailer and rental room. Detector commissioning support will continue to take priority over scimons until there is nothing left broken.

Also, we cannot reserve "blocks" or tentative dates. Travelers should supply exact arrival and departure info; we'll do our best to help, but it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to insure you have a place to sleep.

Please email Bonnie and cc: Mike and Joe about housing or other logistics.

We have dropped the site speed limit to 10 mph to reduce momentum transfer from trucks taking the curves on two wheels. Please observe this speed limit and set a good example irrespective of your vehicle's mass.

Science Education Center construction has taken off with a vengeance, now that our contractor has located a supply of dirt that isn't earmarked for rebuilding New Orleans levies. Fill and compaction should finish this week; boring and concrete forms scheduled for next week (just in time for the run start).

L1 Interferometer (Frolov)

The laser arrived from the Caltech 40 meter lab on Monday. After the laser swap the available power into the interferometer was increased to 7 W. The interferometer optimization at the higher power is under way. The main commissioning effort at the moment is to reduce the noise from the back-scattering which is suspected to be one of the noise limiting sources.

Commissioning activities this week:

  • the contribution of the TCS laser intensity noise to the darm spectrum was measured. It was found that the margin for this noise is at least a factor of ten.  Other TCS work included installing the new annulus mask and replacing the RF drive cable.
  • the additional filtering of optical lever noise removed the TCS chiller line at 259 Hz from the spectrum.
  • investigation of the 45 Hz harmonics resolved in replacing the MMT3 optical lever. The lines have not been observed in the darm noise after the replacement.
  • the super polished REO mirrors were installed on dark port optical path as part of the back-scattering noise mitigation. In addition the beam dumping was revisited on all optical benches.
  • the beam splitter de-whitenning electronics was modified to eliminate the transient during switching to low noise mode
  • the dust cover for the anti-symmetric port optical path was installed
  • the RF preamplifier card was installed in one of the anti-symmetric port photo-detector chains. The power line harmonic at the 180 Hz was significantly reduced by re-distributing the electronics gain.
  • the glass window was removed from the ISS photo-detector and tested for transmitted light distortion.

Computing and Network Security (Roddy)

Shannon is at CIT supporting the NSF review

CDS Code Support (Khan)

Porting the piezojena interface software to VxWorks operating system environment. We have a vxWorks mv162 in the PSL area that has a serial port available, and I think it is easier to hookup the pzjena system to the vxWorks system than bringing in a Linux PC system to the PSL.

Also working on an EPICS serial port device driver interface for NewFocus pico motor controller. With this device driver  we can  specify only a database to interface with the pico motors.

Site Safety and Security (Riesen)

  • The traffic sign w/flasher has been installed at the site guard gate.
  • Ordered Janeen Romie's prescription laser eye ware.
  • Gave Lisa Szechter (out reach)  the site safety indoctrination.
  • Completed an in depth inventory of all clean room garb and cleaning material.  Ordered items in short supply.
  • The site security gates have been rescheduled to remain closed starting Monday 11-14-05 for the S-5 run.  The building's exterior doors will remain on the current schedule of 6am thru 6pm.
  • The site security gates (main and side) have been realigned and adjusted.  This should end the intermittent partial opening & closing problem.
  • The new LSS software has been delivered.  Installation is TBD.
  • I found no laser/site safety concerns this reporting period.

AdL SUS/SE Mechanical Engineering (Spjeld)

Quad SUS Installation Fixtures

  • completed assembly drawings for transport table and lift table - meeting with Calum and Ken Mailand on 8/11†to discuss†Ken's alternative design to airbearing, genie interface, etc.
  • currently looking over drawings from Ken on his new design for X-Y positioning table - attempting to upload models and drawings onto the vault again after instructions from Calum

LDAS/Condor and data analysis (Yakushin):

I was on vacation from Nov 1 to Nov 7, so not much to report

Storage/Condor/LDAS admin:

Nodes 87-94, that are on the same power strip (and circuit), went down yesterday night. Resetting the breaker on the power strip fixed the problem. Most likely it is time to replace the power strip.

Data analysis:

Working on S5 waveburst online scripts.

LDAS admin (Giardina)

  • replaced disks in nodes 111, 113, 139, 166 and 209
  • LDAS was shutdown for 4 or 5 hours on Wednesday due to transformer upgrade
  • troubleshooting errors with my cmonClient install,  tclglobus is the culprit.  can still connect via password auth.

Initial LIGO Detector Science & Engineering (Coyne)

CDS

see also the CDS weekly meeting minutes in the commissioning archives

CDS Software

Rolf Bork

Recieved a HEPI code change request from LLO. This change involves adding two more filter modules per chamber, which connect the STS-X/Y signals to RX/RY filters. This code change involves epics, all Hepi front ends, and renumbering of HEPI excitation channels (ran out of numbers as number of Hepi filter modules/chamber now > 100). The changes are complete and scheduled for installation at LLO Tuesday, 11/8.

CDS Hardware

Ben Abbott

Fast Shutter: Completed reliability tests. I have sent out all of the fast shutters to the sites with associated paperwork.  ISS PDs: Four of the five ISS PDs had been sent out to the sites last week.  The remaining one had a cracked photodiode, so I swapped it out for a good one that Todd found. The remaining ISS PD has been tested and shipped to Hanford.

DMT

No report.

40 Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

IFO commissioning

  • Mike Zucker called on Friday and said that LLO needed our Lightwave 10 watt MOPA laser, as their laser was dying. On Saturday morning, Osamu and Steve disconnected the laser and packed it up in an old crate we had lying around (the Lightwave box was nowhere to be found). Bob drove the box to Fedex, but they wouldn't take it, so Mike lined up UPS drivers to drive it all the way to LLO. It arrived on Monday morning and was immediately pressed into service. L1 was back to 10.5 Mpc by the end of Monday.
  • Rick Savage offered to send us the old H2 MOPA laser as a replacement. Hopefully they will be able to swap out the noisy NPRO for a newer-style 500 mW model.  He and Doug are checking it out and plan to ship it down to us by Thursday of next week, so we should have it the following Mon or Tues.  Thanks, Rick!
  • It will take some time to integrate the new laser into our PSL.  In our old laser, the phase-correcting Pockels cell was internal to the MOPA box. We will now install one external to the MOPA box, as they do at the sites. We will also take this opportunity to install a new pickoff mirror which will send more light to the ISS photodiodes.  We are debating whether to install the table-top FSS; probably we will (at long last).  We will NOT move the FSS pickoff (it will remain after the PMC but before the Mach-Zehnder).  Steve will clean out the cooling water lines.  We'll want to do a temperature scan to maximize the power.  We'll then do a beam scan, mode match into the PMC, and measure the beam power everywhere.
  • Osamu is working on the seismic noise paper with David Blair, and has begun writing the 40m lock acquisition and optical spring paper.
  • Monica and Dan began to take some single arm transfer functions as a first step towards a calibrated noise spectrum, but their work was interrupted when the laser was shipped out.
  • Rob is making major structural changes to the length sensing code in the front end cpu. He's getting input from Osamu on the changes he'd like to see. He's adding new features such as ramping of gains and other signals. He's including lots of comments and will prepare full documentation.

IFO modeling

  • Monica continues to develop and debug her AdLIGO e2e simulation with the dual recycling cavity, with lots of help from Hiro. Looking to get results by end of week, do some validation checks, and then plan to look at the optical spring.

DC detection development

  • Ben has been designing the in-vac DC PD electronics. A prototype board run will be sent out tomorrow. He's also looking for appropriate DC PDs, working on the mechanical support for the PDs, and the satellite amplifier that will be needed just outside the vacuum chamber.
  • Mike Smith continues to acquire parts for the output mode matching telescope and output mode cleaner. An alignment target was designed and a purchase order let to ASCO.
  • Steve and Liyuan tested the new HR supermirror from Newport. The transmission was 600 ppm, at 0 and 5degrees incidence. now we have two low-transmittance mirrors for our output mode cleaner.

Electronics, controls

  • Our framebuilder RAID disk array filled up over the weekend (due to a large number of extra channels that were added to full and trend frames). Alex reconfigured to store only 40 hours of full frames instead of 48, and restarted it.
  • Meanwhile, our RAID disk array is dying, so we got a spare from John Zweizig, and also put in an order for a new array, with 3 times the capacity.
  • Dan is building a Rai Weiss low-noise preamp box to have around the lab.
  • Dan continues to work on suspension diagonalization. Much of this work can proceed without the laser. But the laser is needed for diagonalization of the mode cleaner suspended optics.
  • Steve is measuring the mechanical resonances of the PMC using his phonograph needle apparatus. Will have some results by next week.

Lab Infrastructure

  • Steve transferred the loads of the ITMY and ETMY stacks from STACIS to jackscrews. Go-no go gauge was used. Sensor voltages changed less than 100mV. Now all STACIS isolators are bypassed and seismic stacks are sitting directly on the floor.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

In the past few weeks, we have been trying to find out the reason our arm cavities have such poor visibility.  The best visibility we have been able to get in the past was 70 percent, and that was keeping our ultimate, shot-noise limited sensitivity at about 2 x 10-19 m/rtHz.  This noise floor was good enough for us to measure coating thermal noise below 10kHz, but it was more than an order of magnitude above where it should have been.

Careful measurements by Matt and Akira revealed that one of the lenses in the mode-matching optics, between the mode cleaner and the beamsplitter had its focal length mislabeled. This produced a final waist that was about three inches away from where it should have been, close enough for the beam to couple into the arm cavities at 70 percent visibility, but not close enough to do any better.

Matt and Akira have corrected the mode matching and verified it using a beam scanner.  Many thanks to Steve Vass for loaning us the 40-meter's beam scanner!

LASTI (Ottaway)

No report.

Data Analysis and Computing (Lazzarini)

Data Analysis Activities (Anderson)

(Chatterji)

I made a number of improvements to the "X" Pipeline coherent burst search code.  It now gracefully handles more than three detectors, it includes a Bayesian formulation of the problem proposed by M.  Tinto, and it thresholds on significance and write triggers.  The pipeline was then applied to both white noise data as well as S4 data (with H2 masquerading as V1) to produce a rich set of triggers for further study.  A preliminary study of the results confirms that the algorithm is working as expected.

I did some research on submitting jobs via globus and can now successfully run analysis jobs on the Pleiades cluster at Penn State.  I have also successfully used the Condor schedulers on the LIGO Laboratory clusters to manage the submission of globus jobs to the Pleiades cluster.  I am looking into a simple interface that can be used to launch X Pipeline and Q Pipeline analysis jobs at all LSC and LIGO Laboratory computing clusters.

I am working on getting an on-line version of the Q Pipeline running under the Onasys system for S5.

(Sutton)

I re-submitted the LIGO-TAMA bursts paper to PRD after revising in light of comments from the reviewer and the burst review committee.  It has since been accepted for publication.  I've derived the uncertainty principle(s) for the LIGO cheese (space of GWBs), and I'm editing the cheese paper.  I've also been testing and editing Maria Principe's Network Simulator files.  We'd like to get the simulator package functional and demonstrate it at GWDAW.

(Shawhan)

  • Completed a major reorganization of LIGOtools software packages.
  • Assembled a technical document describing the S4 LIGO-only untriggered burst search, with contributions from several other people.
  • Worked on organizing reviewing of burst analyses in preparation for the LSC Meeting and GWDAW.
  • Attended a workshop, "Probing the distant universe with gravitational waves", at East Tennessee State University.
  • Diagnosed hardware signal injection problems observed during the first several days of the S5 run (with Vuk Mandic).

(Yakushin)

  • Working on S5 waveburst online scripts.

(Mendell)

  • S5 SFT generation from uncalibrated DARM_ERR is running under onasys at LHO.  This will switch to calibrated SFTs generated from h(t), as that becomes available.
  • Review of the StackSlide code continues, and some results for the LSC meeting next week will be generated, though the LSC clusters are heavily loaded right now.

Simulation and Modeling (Bhawal)

Simulation of 40m Advanced interferometer

(Monica) Debugging of the e2e 40m package with the dual_sum module is done. Validation of this new package with Twiddle results will be performed soon. In the meanwhile, the simulated 40m IFO has been locked at the operating point: no offset appears for the IFO central part while DARM and CARM have some offset. The optical spring effect will be verified under this condition.

Modeler

(Melody) Worked on properly handling an interrupt signal (CTRL-C) when the shared object (libe2e.so) is being created.

Alfi

(Bruce)

  • Completed new more user friendly parser error handling (related to PR 476).
  • Implementing new data object to track changes in bundler I/O names in inherited bundlers (PR 511).

(Melody) Testing the newest release of JGo (5.14) on the Mac. Working on PR 296 - easier access to settings.

LDAS Software Systems (Blackburn)

LDAS:

  • Started work to enhance the performance of the diskcacheAPI (pr2753). After doing a code read, one area has been identified as a potential candidate.
  • Currently a test program is being developed to measure the performance of the diskcacheAPI so modifications to the code base may be verified to achieve performance goals.
  • Upgraded the MIT compute facility to the latest version of LDAS (1.8.0) and installed a newer version of DB2 as well. MIT is now up and running.
  • Put in new package cmonGlobusChannel to support tclglobus channels associated with PR 2951.
  • Put in fixes for PR 2281 - start ddd/gdb from server side. Fixed PR2950 - cmonClient fails to authenicate when running as user ldas.
  • Removed code to check ::DEBUG_DEFUNCT_JOB_REAPER resource var but always log when cleaning defunctjob as a blue ball in the frameAPI.
  • Testing: Monitoring LDAS-Dev disk usage while run loops script tests suite to try and understand the source of disk space leaks.

TCLGLOBUS:

  • Completed and tested blocking XIO read/write implementation of Tcl channel.  Will work with Mary to test this XIO channel within LDAS.
  • Completed 15 out of 77 Globus FTP control functions and the functions are to be used to write GridFTP client/server program from scratch.

GRIPHYN/IVDGL/OSG:

Prepared a presentation to the NSF review committee the Grid computing activities of LIGO and the LSC focusing on the current involvement with the Open Science Grid.

Began upgrading the LIGO/Caltech OSG Integration Testbed Cluster from its current configuation of Fedora Core 3 and OSG 0.2.1 to Fedora Core 4 and the recently announced OSG 0.3.0. There is an option of installing this OSG release with or without Web Services. We will be installing and testing the version without Web Services. So far 5 nodes of the 8 have been upgraded to FC4.

Super Computing 2005 began this week. LIGO is submitting jobs to the OSG production sites that support our VO, but we are finding that we fall into the queue and are not seeing a lot of jobs actually running. This has been reported by other VOs to the various OSG lists managing the SC05 demos. The LIGO jobs are only test jobs on playground data since issues with Pegasis and the transfer of data remained unresolved at the start of the SC05 and make running the much larger DAGs on science data very difficult give the network bandwidth and disk space issues at OSG sites available to LIGO.

LDAS System Administration (Anderson)

Caltech

(Dan Kozak)

  • Started S5 at LHO (got archiving/LDR running).
  • Had STK replace tape drive 57 at CIT (was failing, but not being marked down).
  • Repacked more (L0.2) tapes at LHO.
  • Did more work on the "eject tapes at the sites" script.
  • Ejected A4/S5 tapes at LHO and had them shipped.
  • Imported them and started to verify them at CIT (ongoing).
  • Fine tuned archiving at LHO (spent a _lot_ of time on this one, but I think it's working well now).
  • Verified that /archive/home was going to tape at LHO/LLO/CIT.
  • Updated the lag plot for S5 (still a few tweaks I want to do to make it easier to modify/maintain).
  • Helped with LLO shutdown (mostly wrote up stop/start routines).
  • Did samfsck on CIT export-dev and recovered lots of disk space.

(Phil Ehrens)

  • Modified the security model on the apache/svn installation on dziban to allow admins to edit pages on the wiki on that server using  only a password while maintaining full certificate auth protocol for svn.
  • Tested apache/svn and Tcl-Globus with all certs located in /etc/grid-security and with the trusted ca bundle linked into /etc/grid-security. Tcl-Globus will need modification to support this model, which remedies a security issue raised by the current implementation.
  • Began rewriting gpstime.tcl module of LDAS genericAPI to be make it more robust through new leapsecond transitions.
  • Issued various service certs and added users to the grid resource files.
  • Disposed of 9 PC and Sun computers that were past useful life or broken.
  • Set up conference room for NFS review.

(Erik Espinoza)

  • Configured Areca RAID Controller w/ FC4.
  • Investigating NFS Issues w/ latest testing kernel.
  • Examined pricing for Opteron 175 Configuration.
  • Tested 3ware 9500 RAID rebuilding via web interface.
  • Tested 3ware 9550 RAID, crashed upon removal of the disk.
  • Spoke with Appro about RAID + IPMI possibility.
  • Investigated IPMI issues with support@supermicro.com.
  • Tested new USB sticks for booting compatibility.

(Stuart Anderson)

  • Testing cluster evaluation units.
  • Helped with MIT LDAS/OS upgrade.
  • Monitoring dataflow S5 status.
  • NSF review.

MIT

(Keith Bayer)

  • finished FC4 and Solaris 10 upgrade.
  • LDAS is now running.
  • LDR is now running.
  • Trouble with condor is being looked into.
  • 280R hardware trouble dealt with motherboard and graphics card replaced.

(Junwei Cao)

  • LDR configuration for S5 data transfer to MIT.
  • Setup S5 data transfer monitoring at MIT (e.g. emails, websites, cron jobs, ...)

Livingston

(Igor Yakushin)

  • Nodes 87-94, that are on the same power strip (and circuit), went down yesterday night. Resetting the breaker on the power strip fixed the problem.  Most likely it is time to replace the power strip.

(Dwayne Giardina)

  • Replaced disks in nodes 111, 113, 139, 166 and 209.
  • LDAS was shutdown for 4 or 5 hours on Wednesday due to transformer upgrade.
  • Troubleshooting errors with my cmonClient install, tclglobus is the culprit, can still connect via password auth.

Hanford

(Greg Mendell)

  • S5 RDS generation has been running flawlessly since the start of the run, modulo a few minor changes in the Level 1 RDS channel lists.  The current list (with downsample factors in the second row) is posted here:

http://ldas.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/ldas_outgoing/createrds/dsorun/contrib/createrds/S5_L1/adcdecimate_H-RDS_R_L1-S5.txt

  • S4 Level 4 RDS frames were generated at CIT during the past week.  These are now available for use.

(Ben Johnson)

  • L0 and /frames publishing now up and running at LLO. The SEGNUM channel is still not in the LLO frames (as of 11:20 PST Nov 10).  LLO is waiting for Dave Barker to return from CIT to reconcile the LLO/LHO channels.
  • The createRDS configuration parameters were tweaked at LHO to leave the A4 data out of segment calculations. This has reduced the segment calculation part of creatRDS from 5-7 minues to 5-7 seconds.  Also reducing the load on gateway significantly (though createRDS was niced +19), and reducing RDS creation latency by ~5 minutes.
  • Continuing to work with LHO cluster users with Condor/onasys/node misconfigutation issues.
  • Several gaps in fb1 data have appeared this week, due to fb1 reboots. Fortunately, the gaps were filled in from fb0 data.

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Systems, Management

No report this week, except that the NSF review went very well indeed.  Thanks to all who helped, at the moment and over the year(s), to make it happen.

Seismic Isolation

From: Ken Mason <kmason@ligo.mit.edu>

 

Assembly

Status

Top Assembly Components
20007970-A

Stage 0 Assembly
2000795-A

Stage 1 Assembly
20007825-A

Stage 2 Assembly
20007825-A 

Purchase order placed with Arland Tool for all large parts. All material has been recieved. Project currently in Engineering for CNC programming. Amendment made to purchase order to change mounting holes on optics table from 2 x 2 to 1 x 1 hole pattern.




Purchase order placed with Limerick Machine for the end milled plates and remaining Top Assy, Stage 0,1, and 2 Componants.
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]-->

Stage 0-1 Spring Assembly
20007878-A

Stage 1-2 Spring Assembly
20007890

Fabrication drawings are complete. Drawings must now be checked.

RFQ for blades and rod flexures complete. Quotes due 11/22.

RFQ for remaining spring assembly parts complete. Quote due 11/22.

GS-13 Pod Assembly
20007810-A

L-4C Pod Assembly
20007820-A

STS-2 Pod assembly
20007941-A

Geophones, seismometers and lockers are in house.

Purchase order placed with Norcal for vacuum housings.

RFQ complete for machined components. Quotes due 11/16

Design of harnesses completed. RFQ required for internal pod harnesses.

Stage 0-1 Kinematic Lock
20007941-1-A

Stage 1-2 Kinematic Lock
20007941-2-A


Tooling design complete.

Purchase order placed with Limerick Machine for kinematic Lock Assemblies.

Stage 0-1  Actuator Assy.'s
20007966-A
20007967-A

Stage 1-2
Actuator Assy.'s
20007968-A
20007969-A


Tooling design complete.

Purchase order placed with Limerick Machine for actuator mounts and tooling.

Stage 0-1 Standoff Pin

Stage 0-2 Alignment
Tower and Washer

Stage 2 Keel Plate Alignment Tower

Blade Pre-Load Tooling

Blade Calibration Fixture Modifications

LASTI Test Stand and Spreader Bar

Solidworks part files exist for the standoff pin and alignment towers. They will require a dimensioned drawing and checking prior to soliciting bids.

The blade pre-load tooling and calibration fixture tooling will require redesign following the redesign of the blade springs by ASI.








Purchase order for test stand issued to Southern Enterprises. Joe Hanson will be visiting Southern Enterprises on 11/11 to pre-assemble and inspect the test stand. Delivery to MIT by 11/18.

From: Joe Giaime

Agenda for the weekly SEI telecom

Friday, Nov 11, 2pm Eastern, 1pm Central, 11am Pacific time

Announcements

  • Dump truck deliveries and soil compaction underway at LLO for the new Science Education Center.  High-disturbance HEPI tests underway.
  • Science run 5 begins Monday at LLO.

Comments on the NSF review (Dennis, Carol, David, Brian?)

  • NSF review close-out report seemed very positive.  They anticipate we may need more compute cycles for data analysis.  They declared that LIGO is at design sensitivity.  They recommended that initial LIGO improvements can be considered and balanced against Adv LIGO work.  In particular, they pointed out that the sub-100 Hz noise might be improved.  No specific recommendations on the seismic subsystem.

Special presentation by Shyang

  • see slides in previous log entry.   (Or get the slides from the DCC after they are transfered: LIGO-G050588-00-L)
  • In the initial HEPI incarnation, there is still a lot of vibration at the 1.2 and 2.1 Hz BSC stack modes.  Shyang has put resonant gain features in the geophone path and resonant notches in the displacement sensor path for the x and y modal servos for the BSC tanks, thereby reducing test mass motion by a factor of about 4, which is quite impressive.

pressing issues in the labs?

-MIT

-Stanford (computer)

  • Rich has been playing with the FIR model simulink program.
  • We failed to discuss Rich's log entry, so we should so so next Friday.
  • The ETF dSpace host computer is broken.  Data recovery underway.  dSpace 'experiment' files OK.

Suspension

From: Janeen Romie romie_j@ligo.caltech.edu

Nothing significant to report.

From: Ken Mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu

I have finished a preliminary SUS installation plate style fixture layout for Calum, this is an alternate to the air bearing and can be used either with the chamber lazy susan setup, or the genie lift.  We talked with Oddvar re. the air bearing design, and the plate style fixture, at that time he thought plate style had all the required movements.  The plate fixture matches the air bearing assembly in the way it attaches to the rest of the assembly.  I’m working on a vertex BSC layout for Mike Smith that will show stay clear areas inside for the beam path.

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

AdL SUS and SEI controls

  • The Anti-Image and Anti-Alias boards needed for the quad controls have been stuffed and are being assembled into chassis for test. They should be ready by next week.
  • The Myrinet nic cards, switch and fibers needed for LASTI have been ordered and are due by 12/1.
  • Racks and power supplies for LASTI are being shipped from LLO.
  • Jay and Alex will be at MIT next week to discuss equipment locations, installation plans and to assess what additional upgrades to the LASTI infrastructure may be needed.
  • Wiring diagrams for the LASTI quad controls are complete.
  • Wiring diagrams for the ISI controls are 80% complete.
  • Initial discussions with Riccardo regarding the SAS controls requirements have begun. A rough cut block diagram of the required software has been generated and will be iterated over the next few weeks.

Core Optics

No report this week.

Pre-Stabilized Laser

From: Peter King pking@ligo.caltech.edu

I had the chance to work with and see the high power laser at LZH for the first time.  Despite some last minute preparatory work by Maik and Lutz to get more laser power, the laser only delivered around 100-110 W.  The mode content was analysed using the diagnostic breadboard that includes a pre-modecleaner.  Some problems with the output beam were due to a large corona that was present on the beam.  Although not viewable with the CCD camera-based beam analysis hardware, comparision with the pre-modecleaner visibility revealed that a large portion of the output power in the beam was in the corona.  This was later traced to some damage on one of the resonator mirrors and is also due to a possibly damaged rod.  The cleanliness implications are obvious.  Some problems were present with the injection-locked slave laser's PZT which meant that the NPRO seed laser was locked to the slave laser, rather than the nominal operating condition.  The slow thermal drift experienced by the laser was compensated for by feedback to the slow actuator.

The free-running noise of the high power laser was recorded, along with transfer functions of the diode current for the various diode boxes to the output power.  In addition the transfer function of the diode current to a single high power.

Auxiliary Optics

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

I designed stay clear models of the ITMx and ITMy SUS, a BS SUS, PO mirror BS SUS, and PO mirror ITMx SUS in Solid Works. I have inserted STEP files of these CAD objects into the ZEMAX layout of the ADLIGO vertex. ZEMAX cannot trace rays with more than several of these CAD objects inserted. I am working with ZEMAX support to determine the cause of the problem.

Other Laboratory R&D

From: Riccardo DeSalvo <desalvo@ligo.caltech.edu>

Juri

I worked on the model of anisotropic dielectric coating. Improved the Matlab code for the eigenmodes of optical cavities with general shape mirror. I’m working on several issues related on some papers I will write in the next months about thermal noise and optical coating.

Chiara

I repeated the measurement of the transfer function of the system from 0.5Hz to100Hz with more points in each range of frequency to have a better definition of the function.  I also exted the range of mesurement up to 150Hz.

Yumei

Just read and learn something about ANSYS.

Valerio

I finally managed, with the help of V. Sannibale, to obtain a completely working model of the HAM-SAS inverted pendulum leg with SimMechanics. The model includes almost all the components of the real IP: the leg, the flex joint, the counterweight bell and the counterweight. One important improvement is that the Simulink GUI is used only to build the model and all the linearization is now done with a Matlab script. In this way we can easily obtain families of characteristic functions, like transfer function or load curves, varying the parameters of our model. In particular we have studied the system for different values of the Load and of the mass of counterweight and we have obtained results in complete agreement with the expected behavior. We have also built a working model for the complete HAM-SAS horizontal attenuation stage: this system is composed by the Optical Table, 4 IP legs, the sensors and the actuators. We are beginning to study this model in a closed loop configuration adding the expected noises coming from the sensors and actuators electronics. At the same time we are still in contact with Mathworks to understand the origin of our initial simulation problems.

For additional information about this report, contact S. Whitcomb or P. Lindquist