Weekly Report for Week Ending July 13, 2006

Past Weekly Reports

There will be no LIGO Executive Committee scheduled Monday, July 17, 2006 due to the LIGO Staffing Committee meeting scheduled that morning.  The next Executive Committee Meeting will be scheduled Monday, July 24, 2006.

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights

From D. Ingram:  We have learned that NSF's "Einstein's Messengers" DVD about LIGO has won a CINE Golden Eagle award.

LSC Issues (Saulson)

Discussions continue concerning the MOU with Virgo. The LIGO PAC (July 11, 12) gave useful advice.

Planning has stepped up for the MOU Review Panel meeting 8-9 August at MIT, and for the LSC meeting at LSU, 14-17 August.

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

  • No report.

SITE TELECONFERENCE (Lindquist)

  • A site teleconference was scheduled for Thursday, July 13, 2006.  The following were among the issues discussed:
  • Financial Reports – F. Kaufman is going to investigate the possibility of generating a version of the monthly report that we can give broader distribution to aid the account managers.  A version will be provided to the account managers to elicit their comments.
  • Livingston Science Education Center – work continues towards a September completion and a November Opening Ceremony.
  • Volunteers at the Sites – A process has been developed. 1) a release must be signed an sent to HR, 2) a criminal background check will be done, 3) the volunteer will sign a volunteer agreement form that will be provided, 4) the volunteer will be covered under the CIT umbrella insurance policy for medical treatment only.  E. Jasnow will prepare an email with additional detail.
  • There are currently no open action items.

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)

>From: Rod Luna <rluna@ligo.caltech.edu>

  • Assisted Riccardo De Salvo and Francesco Fidecaro in preparing a commercial Invoice for a Seismic Attenuation Tower.
  • Coordinated the disposal of two old monitors at the 40M lab.
  • Working with Property Services to reconcile Fabrication Accounts 1999-2003.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

  • No report.  [L. Turner and G. Stokes continue to provide FileHold with database information required to assure that the conversion is smooth and with accurate results.  The target of having all key documents in a database for the LSC meeting holds. –pel]

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

  • Continued to assist in the process of conversion of current data to the new document center database.
  • Processed a few submitted sets of drawings.
  • Scanning - Progress continues on scanning of contract closeout files.  Relocated 40+ boxes of scanned documentation to another unused cubicle in room 23 to accommodate new employee.
  • Activity:

Week Ending

07/13/2006

In

Out

Packages

32

9

Faxes

14

21

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Cronin, Brambila, Kaufman)

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

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

  • Completed change order #15 to Venturi Staffing and submitted to the vendor. Requested and received the renewal of the Certificate of Insurance.
  • Working on completing change order #3 to Ares Corp and submitting for routing.
  • Placed the order for the HVAC upgrade for the Hanford Observatory. Waiting for the Certificate of Insurance.
  • Placed the memory order for Hanford.
  • Completed change order #3 for Limerick and submitted it to the vendor.
  • Completed change order #9 for George Stokes and submitted it to the vendor.
  • Submitted documents requested to the auditors.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

  • Sent out all monthly reports for June.
  • Worked on calculation of potential adjustments to budgets for unfilled positions and positions filled but not budgeted as of the end of June 2006.
  • Attempted to close the LIGO.HSAS/1 NSFLIGO.FY02ON account which was created in error when we had requested the fabrication account for the HSAS system.  Notified that the account could not be closed without also closing the fabrication account LIGO.HSAS/1 NSFLIGO.FYO2CA, because the project section of the POETA's is the same.  Because both these accounts have to remain open, care should be taken to indicate the appropriate account number in preparing Purchase Requistions, Tech Mart Orders and P-card orders for the HSAS fabrication effort.
  • Financial reports can be found at: http://docuserv.ligo.caltech.edu/~fireport. (For passwords contact Florence)

SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Jasnow, Salone)

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

  • Covered below.

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

  • Construction of the LLO Science Education Center remains on schedule for beneficial occupancy at the end of August, with opening ceremonies scheduled for November 13.
  • Bids for the fabrication, assembly, and installation of the kinetic facade for the LLO SEC are scheduled to be received on July 14.
  • The contract with Charter Communications to provide fiber optic communications for LLO is being held up because of Charter's requirement for a grant of easement onto the land.  Since Caltech does not own the land occupied by LIGO, we cannot grant the easement.  Caltech's position, as developed by Assistant General Counsel Peggy Luh, is that the service agreement already provides Charter with the authority to come onto the site.  This position has been communicated to Charter, and we're awaiting their response.
  • Caltech has received a purchase order from the NSF in the amount of $30,000 to provide graphic materials in support of their video about LIGO, "Einstein's Messenger."  Three graphics arts companies in the Tri-Cities area are being solicited to submit bids.
  • Cathy Funaro, of Accounts Payable, has been designated by the Director of Procurement Services, Tina Lowenthal, to be co-located at LIGO to handle the payment of invoices.  Cathy starts on July 24.
  • Agreement was reached with representatives of the Office of General Counsel and Human Resources regarding the processing of volunteers and docents at both observatories.
  • Interviews are being conducted by auditors of the NSF Office of Inspector General with various members of the LIGO staff regarding proper allocation of time charged.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

We are assembling the Annual Report for LIGO FY 2006 Operations.  Much of the content has been received from contributors, but there are still a few sections yet to be received.  This report is due to be submitted to the NSF by August 1, 2006.

The Large Facilities Projects Monthly Report for June 2006 has been sent to the NSF.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

  • There are no open change requests.
  • Change Request CR-060005, Increased Mechanical Fabrication Costs for the Prototype Seismic Attenuation System for the HAM Chamber (HAM-SAS), submitted by R. DeSalvo and D. Coyne, has been approved.  The LIGO Change Control Board met Monday, July 10, 2006 as part of the normally scheduled meeting of the Executive Committee.  The board recommended approval as indicated and the change request has been signed.  Minutes of the CCB meeting have been distributed (LIGO-M060098-00-P).  The original signed version of the document has been filed in the Document Control Center.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

  • The next Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled for Monday 7/17.  I am preparing a DRAFT agenda.
  • Prepared numerous appointment and reappointment memos for various Visitors, Post Docs, and Term Staff.

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 S5 Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory (compiled by M. Landry)

The last two weeks have yielded solid lock stretches and rapid relocking at LHO.  Conlog reports, for the last 14 days, duty cycles of 84.4% on H1 and a resounding 90.1% on H2, despite several shifts with high winds this week.  We of course benefitted from quiet conditions over the July 4 holiday weekend.  The outstanding problem running the IFOs remains glitching in the H1 PSL/ISS/PMC subsytems.  Progress was made this week in tracking this down to the PMC - and we expect to swap out both the PMC and the servo card in the next two weeks during one (extended) Tuesday maintenance downtime.

S5 highlights from the last two weeks of LHO elog are bulleted below:

  • we went over our 4h maintenance time on a difficult Tuesday, in which the 2k REFL photodiode was accidentally and lightly jostled and had to be replaced, and the PMC on the 4k had to be re-jumpered.  Both investigations are detailed in logs below.
  • a chilled water pump cycled off and on over a week ago, and is now being watched closely
  • calibrated templates for violin modes were added to the scimon checklist... this will allow us to track the amplitude of these lines between IFO epochs
  • current noise from bias modules is a limiting noise source for all IFOs; bias currents were obtained and compared
  • standard weekly updates: range and duty cycle from last week, and this week, plus IFO maintenance budget (current usage at LHO: 7h 45m on H1, 9h 45m on H2
  • scimons looking at various things, such as potential instrument lines
  • accelerometers on were added to oplevs to aid in injection studies (tap tests)
  • acoustic injection/beam spot tuning was performed on both IFOs

4K IFO

  • update on ISS glitching: it's likely the PMC... more on glitching here
  • really nice turnaround on TCS ITMY was made when we lost 15V supply and required new one
  • details were retroactively posted on the H1 ETMX shaking/charge up event, showing the optic alignment, showing pitch and yaw decaying back to (or near) original positions
  • despite the holiday weekend, we did have some seismic disturbances which impacted the range, including something seeming isolated at MX in the 3-30Hz band

2K IFO

DAQ, CDS

  • we lost a key directory with S5 reference spectra; it is not clear how they were erased, and backups were insufficiently new - backup mechanisms are being modified and improved
  • the Tuesday cds maintenance was summarized
  • wiki accounts are now available to the entire LSC

Outreach (D. Ingram)

We have learned that NSF's "Einstein's Messengers" DVD has won a CINE Golden Eagle award.

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

L1 in S5 (Frolov)

This week science data taking was mostly smooth with duty cycle close to 70% and binary inspiral range around 14 Mpc. There were two unplanned multi hour interruptions in the run.  The first one on Saturday night due to problems bringing the HEPI system up after an earthquake. The second one on Wednesday was a sudden unexplained lock loss followed by difficulties acquiring lock.  Interferometer locking was restored after changing lock acquisition parameters.  The root cause of the locking problems is still not understood and is being investigated.  Other issues included recurring cooling problems in the LDAS room and the failure of the vacuum system read back electronics at the Y end station.  Both issues were resolved and did not affect data taking or storage, nor the interferometer vacuum.

LLO Safety and Security (Riesen)

Installing  secondary containment trays in our chemical storage cabinets.  Relocating emergency exit signs in the staging building's hi-bay area.  Troubleshooting the side gate's intermittent "opening deactivation" sensor.  Sent off  torque wrenchs for their annual calibrations.  Taking inventory and inspecting clean room garb for abnormal wear and tear.  Replacing worn garb.

Ordered 3 ea. EV-7215 IR viewers.  2 have been turned in as unusable (dropped, broke).  Received laser table beam blocks needed for the HPLF and Optics Lab.  Completed safety orientation for Ashly Kimball. (site admin. temp.) Found no laser nor site safety concerns this reporting period.

Humongous Educational Kinetic Art Installation (Romie)

LIGO SEC Kinetic Art Project

Quotes are due tomorrow at 5pm. Answered a number of questions from contractors. Jonas from HPD is sending the drawings to me today.

LLO Outreach (Thacker)

Prepared two new activities for teachers and students; prepared and delivered children's program for 1st - 5th grade.  Mentored RETs; exhibit development, & comprehensive curriculum ties to activities are being developed.  Website educational materials are being prepared.  Developing new outreach posters for St. Parish Technology Conference in late July

L1 CDS (Bogue)

  • vacation
  • added 2308 filter modules to the daq.  This required a reduction in the amount of lookback on fb1.
  • swapped in a replacement server for delaronde, one of the dmt servers.
  • built an anonymous rsycn server for medm screens.
  • helped Joe G. with some LSC web stuff.

LIGO Computing and Network Security (Roddy)

  • Still working with Caltech & Charter Communications on the backup network connection.  There are some issues with Grants of Easement, etc.  Waiting to hear back from Charter at this time.
  • Network outage over the weekend for about 2 hours.  This was again somewhere in the Bell South circuit, not LLO or LSU.
  • Working on the LLO vulnerability assessment.
  • Ordered a temperature monitor for LDAS.  If LDAS chooses to use a different method, I will use it in the computer users room to monitor GC servers.  If LDAS chooses to use it, I will likely duplicate the same system in the CUR.
  • Attended a free VMware seminar in Baton Rouge.  The seminar had some useful information and possible future items useful to GC.
  • Worked with Dave on firewall changes to LHO's CDS NAT router.  Needs some further changes.

General computing and LDAS admin (Giardina)

  • security server activity logs automatic archival and posting to website had failed.  I was cron errors due to GID changes.  I manually ran the missing weeks, and fixed the cron problem.  All is well.
  • new GC and email accounts for 2 users
  • with Shannon(mostly Shannon), troubleshooting various network issues, switch swap, etc.
  • with Shannon(again mostly Shannon), mail server disk issues.
  • installed backup software on new hire PC, connected external drive
  • began creating rules for our spam filter, this will be an ongoing process
  • other usual user requests and support
    • ejected tapes for shipment to CIT, imported and labeled new
    • failed disks in T3-8 and T3-1, replaced with disks from spare units.  we are down to 8 spare disks.  I am going to check directly with disk vendor on warranty status.
    • numerous changes and additions to cluster_mon
    • with Bernie, racked the 3 new 3511s, connected power
    • replaced network cable for nodes 57 and 182
    • replaced power supply in nodes 114 and 121.  also one of our recent arrival nodes has a bad power supply.  I only have one spare and am waiting for more to arrive, as this is not yet a production node.
    • node31 has bad hda, and node35 continually freezes up.  need to replace hda in node31 and troubleshoot node35
    • found 3 "missing" tapes that the robot could not detect.  They were in the silo.  I re-injected them and robot now finds them.
    • verified the additional channels added to the frames would not consume all of /frames filesystem.  Lisa reduced look-back to help avoid this, and we should be OK.
    • L4 createRDS restart required due to reduced look-back of full frames.  Process was looking for a directory that had been removed.
    • L4 Publishing restart repeatedly failed.  Call to the expert(Ben) resolved.  Ben discovered LLO was running old versions of the publishing scripts.
    • need to swap network cable at our work area in the LDAS room
    • under high load yesterday, some nodes ( in a rush I neglected to write down which ones (BAD! BAD!) ) made / filesystem read only.  They would only respond to ping, local console was frozen with the disk errors on screen.  Rebooting brought them back to life.  I will keep a close eye on these, as we may experience higher disk failure rates due to the recent HVAC problems in the LDAS room

Data Analysis (Yakushin)

Storage/Condor/LDAS admin:

  • Condor was upgraded to version 6.7.20.
  • LSCdataFindServer was patched.
  • We had another two incidents with the east HVAC unit in the LDAS room: on Sat 07/01 and on Sat 07/8 (the previous one was on 06/27). All three incidents were identical: a blown fuse in the outside unit. As a result the indoor unit circulated hot air resulting in high temperature in the eastern part of the LDAS room. We believe that the cause for these failures was identified and fixed during the last repair: two of the control wires were swapped (it looked like they were shorted). The result of the first incident: T3-18 (part of /frames) went down later that night and required power cycling (the control room had to switch to using fb0 until it was fixed); some corrupted frame files were tracked down and removed afterwards. The result of the second incident: 3511-2 (part of /home) shut itself down due to the high temperature; after it was brought up, several corrupted files were found; also one of the T3 disks failed and was replaced. The result of the third incident: 3 failed T3 disks that had to be replaced. We are working to install temperature probes in the LDAS room so that operators can promptly notice any HVAC problems from the control room. It might be useful to have LDAS room temperature in the raw frames together with other PEM channels as is done at LHO (H0:PEM-LDAS_ROOM_TEMP0 and H0:PEM-LDAS_ROOM_TEMP1).
  • Two new 3511s (that will replace /frames T3s in couple weeks) and 1 JBOD for fb0 are upgraded to the new firmware and are currently tested.
  • The transfer of h(t) and new burst MDC frames from CIT to LLO continues (very painfully and slowly due to the huge mess with h(t) production and poor LLO's network).
  • The new burst MDC and h(t) frames are published to LDR at CIT.
  • Transferring GWN2 burst MDC frames from PSU to CIT. After 3776 (out of 4248) files were transferred, LDR is stuck (looks like a problem with publishing the frames at PSU).

Data analysis:

  • Published S5 production triggers on h(t) and DARM_ERR (version 2 calibration): http://ldas-jobs.ligo-la.caltech.edu/~igor/TRIGGERS/S5.
  • Working on publishing SG2 and SG3 simulations triggers.
  • The simulations on GA2, WNB2 and SG4 are still running.
  • All the above will be a part of the burst search paper on the first few months of S5 (from the beginning of S5 to April 03) as discussed during the last burst f2f meeting at MIT.
  • Working on online coherent waveburst infrastructure.

Mechanical and Optical Systems (Coyne)

See Advanced LIGO

Controls and Data Systems (Bork)

A draft of a technical note detailing the measurement result for the PCIX ADC modules has been completed. The note should be available for distribution next week. Additional, more detailed, tests are planned for next week and beyond. Preliminary results show that the input referred noise of the module is ~10uV/rtHz on a 40Vp-p input and a sample rate of 16384Hz. In comparison, the Pentek 6102 has an input noise of ~15uV/rtHz on a 10Vp-p input.

Anti-Alias, Anti-Image, and Timing Interface boards for HAM SAS, LASTI ISI, 40M DC detection and the LASTI Squeezing Experiment are being fabricated and tested.

We met with the 40m staff to get up to date on the Output Mode Cleaner controls. Rana has since provided an updated controls diagram, which we are still reviewing. Installation of OMC controls has been requested in the next few weeks, but we'll know better exactly where we are schedule wise next week.

We received the computer for the Ponderomotive experiment controls and are doing some initial testing. This is the first multi-core, multi AMD Opteron CPU system that we have tried the real-time Linux on. Once we got an update to Linux 2.6.16, it seems to work fine.

40-Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

IFO Commissioning

  • Rana, Sam and the students continue to work on locking the IFO in the full DRFPMI configuration. Jenne found and fixed a busted cable on AS166 RFPD, and now the signal is increased by a factor 50. This thing has been busted since January; its repair will surely facilitate lock acquisition efforts! After that, they locked all 5 degrees of freedom easily and brought the arm power up to ~ half-full, before noise sources stymied further progress. Under investigation.
  • Monica has diagonalized the mode cleaner WFSs and the system now works well. She is developing diagnostic tools for the control matrix.
  • Royal has calibrated the oplevs on all four test masses using the arm power variations as the mirror alignment is changed. She is studying the oplev servo noise and working to identify the sources of high-frequency noise (oplev laser, electronics). At low frequencies, there are indications that some of the damping servos are not working right. To be investigated.
  • Using her calibration of the test mass oplevs, Royal has measured the beam angular jitter in the interferometer, and extrapolated through the signal mirror and output mode matching telescope to predict the jitter that the output mode cleaner will see, and resultant transmitted power fluctuations. Rana used this information to specify the requirements for the alignment control and the output mode cleaner servo.
  • David and Osamu continue to develop the noise budget model. David added the model of the DRFPMI optical response to replace the simple Initial-LIGO-like cavity pole model. They remeasured the XARM noise spectrum with the dewhitening filters turned on; the noise floor at high frequencies was ~ 10^-17 m/rtHz, but with lots of lines.
  • David will begin measuring the analog transfer functions from the DAC, through the dewhitening filters, to the coil drivers. Then he'll tune the digital compensating filters and make sure that the switches do the right things. This could significantly improve the noise spectrum.

IFO Modeling

  • Monica continues to develop the AdVIRGO e2e package, starting with just one arm. It locks at low power, and she is learning how to deal with the radiation pressure as the power is turned up.
  • Osamu in continuing to work on modeling the alignment instability in AdLIGO, with e2e.
  • Jenne is beginning some calculations to estimate the effect of the Sidles-Sigg angular instability in the 40m mode cleaner, to see if we can measure it.

DC Detection and Vacuum Squeezing Development

  • Sam and Darcy are making final measurements on the DC readout beamline prior to disassembly for clean/bake. The OMC transmission is only 50%, which they traced to a ~0.5% clipping of the beam at the small (7 mm dia) curved PZT-mounted mirror. They are working on various methods to fix this, but it might require ungluing the mirror and replacing it with a spare. They have remeasured the OMC mirror transmissivities (input couplers are 1.54%), finesse (213), total round trip loss (5.8%!), and other parameters.
  • Darcy found that our first TT PZT stack developed a resonance at ~ 80 Hz, with a strong pitch-yaw coupling. Opening up the case, they found a loose glue joint. They sent the stack back to Piezo-Jena, and Rich is ordering a spare stack. This will surely delay our vacuum installation significantly. Fortunately, Darcy reports that the 2nd TT PZT stack is fine, no resonances below ~450 Hz.
  • Rich is taking the lead on assembling the controls for the DC readout. He and Ben are reviewing the wiring diagram and filling in the details. They walked through the 40m this morning to better visualize the placement of the electronics and cabling.
  • Rana, using data from Royal, gave Rich the specs for the tip-tilt PZT and OMC PZT drivers. Rich has a first cut of the driver board. As a backup, he is ordering the commercial drivers from Piezo-Jena.
  • Ben's QPD Whitening board is back from PCB Express. It looks fine, and parts are arriving today to put it together.
  • Ben has a little more machining to do on the DCPD mount to make a place for the resistors to be mounted, and to lower the possibility of capacitive coupling of the head to the base.
  • The DC PD seems a little noisy, so Ben has brought it back to the Wilson House for more testing.
  • Ben got more of the ceramic resistors that we plan on using for the in-vacuum photodiode, and gave a good sample to Bob for RGA testing. The larger sample should let us know whether they are really vacuum compatible.
  • Rolf has the computer and PCIX boards (ADC, DAC, RFM) for the controls, and he and Alex are working on assembling the system. Jay will provide the anti-aliasing, anti-image and IO chassis interface cards.
  • Rana and Sam have drawn up a block diagram of the controls software to be implemented by Rolf (OMC length control and tip-tilt alignment control servos using dithering). Rolf had no objections, but he notes that several new software functions need to be implemented.
  • Go installed the new PPKTP crystal for the OPO. He saw lots of second-harmonic-generated green light from it, indicating that it has a high chi2 nonlinearity. He replaced the old SHG with the swapped-out OPO, expecting it to be more stable; after mode-matching and alignment, he locked it stably for an hour, and saw green light at room temperature. He's preparing the in-vacuum parts (one fixed mirror and one movable mirror) for injecting the squeezed vacuum into the asymmetric port. He verified that these mirrors remain highly reflective even at incident angles far from 45degrees.

PSL

  • The PMC transmission was oscillating ~5% diurnally and drifting low by 5-15% over the last couple of days. Matt touched up the alignment of the input beam and brought it up ~15%.

Electronics, Controls, Computers

  • Jenne has built a ~4 MHz notch filter and low-pass filter for the mode cleaner servo, in an effort to reduce high frequency noise that Rana believes is due to the beat between the IFO control sideband at 33 MHz and the mode cleaner control sideband at 29 MHz. She and Rana will implement it soon.
  • Bob is ready to install new RF distribution panels at the RF rack and the LSC rack, in the near future. It will take a couple of days and be somewhat disruptive.
  • Jenne has completed a mount for an AM laser to be used for PD testing. She measured the RF response of all the LSC RF photodiodes on the sensing tables, and all seem to have reasonable response functions. She's fixing an unwanted notch in the AM laser setup at 4 MHz and will retest all the RF photodiodes again. She'll also compare her AM laser test setup with the one at Wilson House.
  • The RF lines from our optical spectrum analyzers at the AP and SP drift about. To see if this was due to thermal drifts, David installed thermal insulation (foam jackets) and temperature sensors on the OSAs and sent them in to the DAQ system. If necessary, he'll set up heaters and thermal stabilization servos. Work in progress.
  • Rana has identified a code bug in the filter modules which causes the front-end cpus to run much slower when the gain is set to zero. Setting it to 1e-6 fixes the problem. rolf has been alerted.
  • Vuk copied over IFOtest from LLO to the 40m, and got it working. It performs automated checks of the various gains, switches, filter modules etc.

Lab Infrastructure

  • Steve replaced the failed RGA with a spare, baked out by Bob, and is in the process of calibrating it. It seems to give sensible results.
  • Steve arranged for a "doggy door" installed between the IFO hall and the clean room in Bob's lab, to facilitate the running of cables (and small parts) between the two rooms. The overpressure in Bob's clean room keeps a steady flow of clean air into the IFO hall.
  • Steve reports a large spike in the particle counts on July 4th.
  • Sally Sharaf, visiting from Rochester to work with Go on vacuum squeezing, received lab safety training from Steve, and an entrance eye exam.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

Report for W/E 7/6/2006:

All of the linearalized models we can come up with for thermal self locking give integer power laws in the frequency response, and Royal saw a non-integer-power-law response last summer.  Something interesting is going on here, but we haven't yet determined if it is a physical effect or some systematic error in the measurement.

Report for W/E 7/13/2006:

The ring dampers are finished, and we are in the process of installing them.

The new laser has a much better beam profile than the last one, and Mike is in the process of installing it in the photo thermal experiment.

LASTI (Ottaway)

No report.

Data Analysis (Lazzarini)

Blackburn:

Worked with Sanjit Mitra (visiting student from IUCAA)  to install FTOOLS Software (trip down memory lane for me) on his workstation to allow for easy extraction of WMAP datasets stored in FITS Tables for use in stochastic analysis efforts.

Brown;

  • Continued to work on a couple of Tapir projects: LIGO-EMRI analysis and LISA SMBH analysis.
  • Helped Lisa get the S4 ringdown pipeline working.
  • Continued to work with SURF student Alex to discuss his project.
  • Got production numerical relativity runs set up and running.  Working on integrating them into Condor on our cluster.
  • Did some maintenance for the online BNS search to fixed problems caused by the recent cluster downtimes.
  • Help David with some issues he was having with the inspiral DAX.
  • DASWG stuff: Released Glue version 1.7, dealt with some issues with the segment database (helped Keith with segment insertion and fixed a replication issue) and checked new calibration frame specification.
  • Wrote talk for and attended PAC meeting.

Chatterji:

  • Presented status of LIGO/Virgo joint data analysis to PAC meeting.
  • Continued preparation for low threshold Q Pipeline search of early S5 data.
  • Continued working with Rubab Khan (SURF student) to develop a clustering extension to the Q Pipeline.  We have completed the infrastructure for evaluating the performance of different algorithms, and a first version of a density based clustering algorithm.

Dupuis:

  • prepared and gave a talk on pulsar searches at the PAC meeting
  • continued S5 pulsar search investigations

Mandic:

  • I made a first-pass at the S5 H1L1 all-sky stochastic analysis. The analysis was done with ~1-sec time-shift (i.e. blind), and it yields the theoretical sigma of 1.7e-5 for the flat spectrum, which is 2.5x better than S4, but still not as sensitive as the BBN bound. The analysis revealed 4 correlated lines (48.0 Hz, 180 Hz, and two simulated pulsars), but is otherwise very clean.
  • I updated the S4 all-sky stochastic paper, to include the BBN bound in the study of cosmic strings. The paper should be submited for another round of LSC review next monday.
  • I continue to work with Xavi S. on the implications of the S4 stochastic result on the cosmic strings models. We are planing to explore a larger group of cosmic strings models (to include large-loop models), including modifications to the calculation of the stochastic GW background. We are also looking at other experimental bounds.
  • With my SURF student M. Lukic, we continue to look at the time-shift approach to analysis of H1H2 data.

Mendell:

I am continuing work on the S4 PowerFlux, StackSlide, and Hough S4 paper. This week I have been running jobs to follow-up outliers, and producing plots of these. Between now and the LSC meeting the goal is to have a close to final draft of this paper, which I think is doable.

Shawhan:

  • Investigaged Data Viewer issue at LHO.
  • Rebuilt pulsar simulation code for hardware injections with a later date for validity of leap second information.
  • Reviewed S3/S4 time-domain known pulsar search paper draft.
  • Worked with Chris Pointon on antenna response calculations.
  • Set up new home page for the Burst Group.
  • Debugged SeqInsert problem at LLO.

Grid research (Blackburn)

TCLGLOBUS

The issues that were holding back the release of TclGlobus 1.3.0 have been resolved. The problem was with firewall settings on a server being used to test one flaver of Fedora Core Operating System. Switching to a different server with this OS which didn't have the firewall restriction resolved the failures. The plan is to have the release later next week.

GRID COMPUTING AND OSG

  • Resolved all dependency issues for installing the Grid Job Submission Client on a desktop as a standard unix users. Previously there were components that could only be made to work if they were install as "root" - making for a rather non-friendly client tool.
  • Working on a short list of open problem reports for the Grid Job Submission Client in preparation for the first public demonstration at next week's joint LIGO/VDS developer's meeting to be held here at Caltech. These PRs are needed to enhance the experience in using this tool during the demonstration.
  • Began organizing the face-to-face meeting here at Caltech with the VDS software developer's from ISI for next week. Plan to focus on issues experienced with running LIGO workflows on the OSG, but will also address issue associated with running DAX/DAG translations via Pegasus on the LIGO Data Grid.
  • Met via Telecom with Pegasus/ISI engineers, GADU VO work flow engineer, Illy Narsky (OSG App Coordinator) and Kent Blackburn on work flow engineering issues on OSG.
  • Worked with Kent Blackburn, removed three segments of gravity wave files that caused the HIPE analysis to fail due to missing data. Re- running the HIPE analysis without the problematic segments succeeded.
  • Attempting to create a HIPE analysis for the full S5 data set using Java 1.5 based gencdag uses all the available memory (600 MB) on the submit host. Further analysis of the memory requirements is underway and may require support from the VDS developers.
  • Worked with Michael Samidi and Kent Blackburn, to fix Problem Report bugs for supporting  HIPE analysis in the LIGO Work Flow Planner.
  • Successfully ran a substantial subset of the S5 data with HIPE on the STAR_BNL OSG production site and on the LIGO-CIT-ITB test bed site.
  • Attended an OSGStorage Technical Group meeting, OSG Council and OSG Integration Test Bed meeting telecoms.

Laboratory Computing (Anderson)

LDAS Software Systems (Maros)

*** Note add by Anderson: Thursday night testing was the first stable running of the LDAS development software in 3 Months after major infrastructure changes--Congratulations Ed and Mary!

To help with the timeout issues in several of the APIs, a new extension to Tcl was written called setTIDCallback. This allows for a new model of programming at the Tcl layer where the application can register a callback on a C++ thread that is invoked when the state of the thread is changed. It has been shown to be more reliable than TCL's trace variable semantics. It has been incorporated into the metadataAPI, frameAPI, ligolwAPI, and eventmonAPI.

Communication errors between the manager and metadataAPI have been observed. It appears as if the manager has sent the API a request which the receiving API never receives or perhaps just never processes. This issue remains under investigation.

System testing was done using 1.8.235. There were minor patches that needed to be applied to fix some of the errors being reported. The LSync test still does not match up with the diskcache's cache.

The LDAS-TEST system is currently being used to isolate when a problem with the createRDS commands was introduced. The current working theory is that it may be the result of a change to the tool set used to build the software. Both the upgrade of GCC to 4.0.3 and the removal of STLport are under investigation.

LDAS System Administration (Anderson)

Caltech

(Dan Kozak)

  • Restored some deleted files for Diego.
  • Helped Larry Wallace with the setup of his new 3511 RAID unit.
  • Helped Igor with filesystem problems associate with the HVAC going out and the RAID boxes shutting down due to the temperature.
  • Copied some L0 frames back to LLO from CIT (the copy 1 tape at LLO had a bad spot on it and the files were unreadable).
  • Worked on figuring out why the nightly metadata dumps of /home (CIT) aren't finishing in a timely fashion.  So far we've found ~10M superflous files, we'll see if the dump performance improves when they are all removed.
  • Helped Igor set up the new 3511 JBOD at LLO.
  • With Dwayne's help, located some "missing" tapes at LLO.
  • Doing testing to determine optimal stripe size for new 3511 based /frames at LLO (ongoing).

(Phil Ehrens)

  • Upgraded Sunopteron to Solaris 10 upgrade 2. Using the upgrade path worked smoothly on this machine.
  • Attempted to upgrade ldas-suntest3 to Solaris 10 upgrade 2 via the upgrade path. After chewing on the first cd for nearly 2 hours, the upgrade failed with a message that c0t0d0s0 could not be successfully upgraded.
  • Added test to log_mon to detect absence of condor_master process on cluster nodes.
  • Made log_mon watchdog cron script log_mon_mon.tcl robust against multiple restarts due to log_mon parsing of VERY large logfiles.
  • Updated and added MANY sysadmin wiki documents.
  • Created script for backing up critical files, network configuration and partition information that works without modification for both Linux and SunOS.
  • Added usage path to grid user addition script that causes it to only synchronise cluster node user information by cloning the /usr1 directory info, passwd and group files from ldas-grid.
  • Investigated cause of loss of printing capability on a number of Millikan 6th floor machines. It seems that anyone who attempted to print during kuma's downtime wound up with a mangled printer configuration. This is properly fixed by re-enabling printers by hand via 'ssh root@$host 'lynx localhost:631'. Alternately, the file /etc/cups/printers.conf can be edited to set the 'State' of affected printers to 'Idle' and then restarting cups, at which point running 'lpq' should show no queued docs if things worked.

(Erik Espinoza)

  • Ran tests with LC_ALL="C" on frog, including ring code from Duncan.
  • Looked for possible side effects for tweaking i18n settings globally.
  • Found and reported restart bug in log_mon, caused log_mon to keep restarting.
  • Assisted Michael Samidi & Kent Blackburn on finding Condor dependencies (including list of compat rpms).
  • Restarted print spool for Ed Maros on ngc101.
  • Rebuilt ligoconf rpm for GC Desktop (removed /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ldas.conf).
  • Configured ldas-jobs@CIT web server for web indexing.
  • Disabled SELinux on ldas-pcdev2@CIT.
  • Fixed local copy of lscsoft repo.
  • Installed PostgreSQL @ LLO, LHO, & MIT.
  • Assisted in Condor 6.7.20 @ LLO & LHO.
  • Tested Quill @ LHO, LLO, & MIT.
  • Looked into legacy openssl lib mismatch.
  • Contacted ASA (again) about heatsink brackets.
  • Restored node321, node322, and node324 into working order.

(Stuart Anderson)

  • Upgraded Condor to 6.7.20 at LHO and LLO.
  • Synchronizing copies of S5 h(t) frames between CIT and LHO/LLO.
  • Finished removing the old /ldcg/lib setting in ld.so.conf on all the production clusters.

Livingston

(Igor Yakushin)

  • Condor was upgraded to version 6.7.20.
  • LSCdataFindServer was patched.
  • We had another two incidents with the east HVAC unit in the LDAS room: on Sat 07/01 and on Sat 07/8 (the previous one was on 06/27). All three incidents were identical: a blown fuse in the outside unit. As a result the indoor unit circulated hot air resulting in high temperature in the eastern part of the LDAS room. We believe that the cause for these failures was identified and fixed during the last repair: two of the control wires were swapped (it looked like they were shorted). The result of the first incident: T3-18 (part of /frames) went down later that night and required power cycling (the control room had to switch to using fb0 until it was fixed); some corrupted frame files were tracked down and removed afterwards. The result of the second incident: 3511-2 (part of /home) shut itself down due to the high temperature; after it was brought up, several corrupted files were found; also one of the T3 disks failed and was replaced. The result of the third incident: 3 failed T3 disks that had to be replaced. We are working to install temperature probes in the LDAS room so that operators can promptly notice any HVAC problems from the control room. It might be useful to have LDAS room temperature in the raw frames together with other PEM channels as is done at LHO (H0:PEM-LDAS_ROOM_TEMP0 and H0:PEM-LDAS_ROOM_TEMP1).
  • Two new 3511s (that will replace /frames T3s in couple weeks) and 1 JBOD for fb0 are upgraded to the new firmware and are currently being tested.
  • The transfer of h(t) and new burst MDC frames from CIT to LLO continues (very painfully and slowly due to the huge mess with h(t) production and poor LLO's network).
  • The new burst MDC and h(t) frames are published to LDR at CIT.
  • Transferring GWN2 burst MDC frames from PSU to CIT. After 3776 (out of 4248) files were transferred, LDR is stuck (looks like a problem with publishing the frames at PSU).

(Dwayne Giardina)

  • Ejected tapes for shipment to CIT, imported and labeled new.
  • Failed disks in T3-8 and T3-1, replaced with disks from spare units.  we are down to 8 spare disks.  I am going to check directly with disk vendor on warranty status.
  • Numerous changes and additions to cluster_mon.
  • With Bernie, racked the 3 new 3511s, connected power.
  • Replaced network cable for nodes 57 and 182.
  • Replaced power supply in nodes 114 and 121.  Also one of our recent arrival nodes has a bad power supply.  I only have one spare and am waiting for more to arrive, as this is not yet a production node.
  • node31 has bad hda, and node35 continually freezes up.  need to replace hda in node31 and troubleshoot node35.
  • Found 3 "missing" tapes that the robot could not detect.  They were in the silo.  I re-injected them and robot now finds them.
  • Verified the additional channels added to the frames would not consume all of /frames filesystem.  Lisa reduced look-back to help avoid this, and we should be OK.
  • L4 createRDS restart required due to reduced look-back of full frames.  Process was looking for a directory that had been removed.
  • L4 Publishing restart repeatedly failed.  Call to the expert (Ben) resolved.  Ben discovered LLO was running old versions of the publishing scripts.
  • Need to swap network cable at our work area in the LDAS room.
  • Under high load yesterday, some nodes (in a rush I neglected to write down which ones (BAD! BAD!)) made / filesystem read only.   They would only respond to ping, local console was frozen with the disk errors on screen.  Rebooting brought them back to life.  I will keep a close eye on these, as we may experience higher disk failure rates due to the recent HVAC problems in the LDAS room.

Hanford

(Greg Mendell)

  • I have been performing routine sys admin tasks, but have nothing much to report since the last Weekly. I will soon be generating and publishing into LDR SFTs for the pulsar group made from h(t) for times these are missing, once new h(t) files are synchronized between the sites and Caltech.  And I am working to help procure another order of tapes for archiving the S5 data throughout the next year.

(Ben Johnson)

  • Installed new 3511 JBOD on fb0. This included updating firmware on old 3511 on fb0 and growing fb0's /fb0_frames filesystem.
  • Finally have a LSCdataFind client and server that support the --show-times option.
  • Upgraded Condor to 6.7.20. Shutting down condor caused a user's dag to fail; this appears to be due to not using the ldas-grid:/usr1 directory for the dagman log files. Removed /ldcg/lib from the cluster's ld.so.conf at the same time as the upgrade.
  • Replaced two T3 HDDs. One in /frames, one in the /dmt T3. Plans are to move /dmt over to /fb0_frames when possible.
  • Working with Malik Rakhmanov (and Vern Sandberg, when he returns from the PAC meeting) on how to identify where and how possible glitches/corruption can enter the data stream.

General Computing (Wallace)

MIT

(Keith)

  • Reviewed a number of ldap logistical issues with Larry.

Livingston

(Dwayne)

  • Security server activity logs automatic archival and posting to website had failed. They were cron errors due to GID changes.  I manually ran the missing weeks, and fixed the cron problem.  All is well.
  • New GC and email accounts for 2 users
  • With Shannon(mostly Shannon), troubleshooting various network issues, switch swap, etc.
  • With Shannon(again mostly Shannon), mail server disk issues.
  • Installed backup software on new hire PC, connected external drive
  • Began creating rules for our spam filter, this will be an ongoing process
  • Other usual user requests and support

(Shannon)

  • Still working with Caltech & Charter Communications on the backup network connection.  There are some issues with Grants of Easement, etc.  Waiting to hear back from Charter at this time.
  • Network outage over the weekend for about 2 hours.  This was again somewhere in the Bell South circuit, not LLO or LSU.
  • Working on the LLO vulnerability assessment.
  • Ordered a temperature monitor for LDAS.  If LDAS chooses to use a different method, I will use it in the computer users room to monitor GC servers.  If LDAS chooses to use it, I will likely duplicate the same system in the CUR.
  • Attended a free VMware seminar in Baton Rouge.  The seminar had some useful information and possible future items useful to GC.
  • Worked with Dave on firewall changes to LHO's CDS NAT router.  Needs some further changes.

Hanford

(Christine)

7/6/06 weekly

  • Still setting up new computers.
  • Set up a new account for a new SciMon, directed a new short-term visitor to the reception office to get checked in.  The visitor wants me to provide him with a GC Linux computer, so I'm working on finding something suitable.
  • Spent some time working with Dave to figure why dataviewer wasn't working on GC computers.  The display isn't automatically being set.  There are several versions of the dtt and dataviewer startup scripts, trying to figure out which version works best.

7/13/06 weekly

  • Finally have a Cisco engineer working on the problems with the router.  His first comment is that our current router can't do GigE bandwidth.  The most it is capable of is 300 Mb/s.  He also thinks that much of the dropped packets and congestion problems are caused by poor fiber between LIGO and PNNL.  This is something we have known about since the beginning, but the reflections and losses on the fiber line have been so far deemed to be acceptable.  The Cisco engineer will be here next week to do a more thorough exam of the problems.  Right now it sounds like I need a new router in order to get GigE bandwidth and possibly in order to get the backup network working.
  • Working on the cybersecurity vulnerability assessment for Albert and Shannon.
  • Reviewed the Nessus scan that Shannon did from CIT just before 4th of July.  Started cleaning up the computers that had security holes.
  • Still setting up new computers.
  • The Sun Ultra 25 computers that I ordered through TechMart have not shown up.  I am trying to get a status on those.
  • Removed the hard drives from 6 computers that are being taken to be surplussed at an auction house.
  • Other user support for summer visitors.

CIT

(Mike)

  • Problems with my sysadmin laptop. I ended up having to reload this from scratch. I still have a few more applications to load that I support.
  • Backed up Barry Barish's laptop.
  • Setup PAC meeting with wireless access point plus other misc. support.
  • Looking into renewing our Primavera maintenance contract. This will give us access to download the latest version of this software. It looks like I will be loading a new server for this upgrade/migration. We are currently running on server 2000, we will be upgrading to server 2003.
  • Started loading a new Sun server for the home accounts. Larry is finishing this installation up. I had many problems using the vi editor working off a VT100 terminal connection. Larry has decided to purchase a video card for these types of servers.
  • Microsoft released its monthly patch cluster. I tested these patches with all GC/Engineering software. All have passed.
  • Finished up end of month backups on all NTSRV's.
  • Other misc. user support.

(Veronica)

  • LIGO:  Worked on the Educational Resources website.  Installed and tested the backend apps, updated the frontend.  Updates of the Elba website.  Updates /support of the PAC meeting.  Updates of the LIGO webpages.  Worked with Dave Beckett on the how-to of webpage updates for the newsletter.  Updates of the roster database.
  • LSC:  Updates of the database of technical papers and the LSC-related mailing lists.

(Christian)

  • Alan Weinstein - Hardware failure on laptop. Rebuilt new hard-drive  with Windows XP and transferred back all of Alan's data and settings.
  • Bill Kells- transferred all of Bill's data and settings back to his new laptop.
  • John Miller - Configured new workstation with the standard Ligo image for John.
  • Cindy Akutagawa - Replaced drum kit on local printer.
  • Cleveland- Replaced old monitor with new LCD monitor.
  • Gina Salone - Replaced old monitor with new LCD monitor.
  • Millikan - Replaced toner cartridges on HP 5500 printer.
  • 3flr W/B - Replaced toner cartridges on HP 5500 printer.
  • Worked on the Spam Filters with Mike and Larry.
  • Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone support.

(Bruce)

  • iLog Maintenance:                    (0.5 days)

General iLog maintenance (user adds, keyword adds, systems work, etc.)

(Larry)

  • The procurement cycle continues. Still placing orders for different items. It appears we need a number of new workstations and will be working on acquiring one of SUNS new systems.  No work on the maint. contracts but they need to be worked on in the near future.  Worked with Mike concerning some license issues and quotes.  Still working on a resolution to the Monarch computer issue. I hope to hear something back on that next week.
  • Still working with the PMA group in trying to get a air-conditioning unit for the computer room upgraded.
  • Working with Mike on a number of new installations. The Solaris10 installs needed some minor tweaks but overall they went OK.
  • Rebuilt one of the major home drives. The build took a full 24 hours and then recovering from stale NFS handles trickled in for about a week.  Along that same line the new home account server has been built. Thanks to Dan Kozak the new drive system is installed on the server and we are presently testing it out. Transferring home accounts to the new system should start next week.
  • Tested out a new projector system. It looks like we will be able to replace the existing projectors with quieter ones.
  • Started working on a little project for Stan in getting something setup for the display cabinet in front of the LIGO office.
  • Worked with Gina on a number of procurement and office equipment items.
  • Still adding student accounts. This and the orientation of the new students has been taking up some time the past few weeks.
  • Working on and delivered a couple of documentation items for Albert.
  • Repaired another E2E machine. They are starting to get to the point where they need to be replaced.
  • Assisted the DCC with a number of document items.
  • Repaired the backup tape system again. The tapes are getting to the point to where they need to be replaced. The system also will need to be augmented in the near future to accommodate the increased amount of data being generated.
  • A lot of misc. user support.
  • Worked a number of e-mail issues. So far all the problems were found to be enduser misunderstandings, typo's, items going to their junk file, incorrect addresses....

Mail Statistics for Jun 29, 06 - July 12, 06

Mail Statistics

7/13/2006

Rejected Messages

79,9771

Virus Messages

4,148

Accepted Messages

40,017

Total Messages

119,994

Note 1. Possibly a couple hundred more

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Systems, Management

From: Hiroaki Yamamoto <hiro@ligo.caltech.edu>

Modeling and Simulation (Hiro Yamamoto)

Advanced LIGO LSC/ASC study using FP with Quad suspension (Osamu)

Investigation of a FP cavity with AdLIGO parameter is almost done. We got several numbers as result. First, lock can be acquired with less than 0.5% (~3kW inside cavity) of full power if radiation pressure exists. Even if lock is acquired, pitch offset due to the radiation pressure by 10% of full power brakes the lock if there is no ASC. E2E says that the ASC using WFS is possible with AdLIGO quad-suspensions by feeding back the control signals to penultimate mass with 10Hz band-width. RMS test mass angle fluctuation will be less than 10-9m (depends on filters and gains) and control signal will be 0.1mN (Max 20mN). Optical spring in ASC has been seen in frequency domain on E2E.  It will be 4-5Hz and this frequency agrees with models well.

Advanced LIGO Mechanics : preparation for it  (Sany and SLU group)

Continued e2e modeling of LIGO 1 Mode Cleaner. Feeding DAQ ground motion signals recorded at LLO as input to the e2e HAM1 and HAM2 boxes, computed MC transmitted beam?s angular fluctuation. By adjusting the MC suspensions? Yaw local damping gain, the power spectrum of the computed transmitted beam?s Yaw motion is very close to the corresponding DAQ signal (the MC transmitted beam Yaw recorded at the same time as the DAQ ground motion). The spectrum of the computed transmitted beam pitch motion appears to be different from the corresponding DAQ pitch motion; especially, there is a high peak around 1 Hz in the computation. This indicates that the position and pitch local damping is not working well in the e2e model. We are currently looking into the problem.

Advanced Virgo Simulation (Monica)

Tests of lock acquisition for one Fabry-Perot cavity (with AdVirgo parameters) have been performed: the cavity has been locked using the reflected and transmitted signal independently with a laser of 20W. The feedback filter has been improved in order to avoid a strange oscillation at 1kHz that was preventing modler_freq to work properly.

Static IFO Simulation (Hiro)

Code development of SIS still going. A FP version is finished.  The loss due to the orange peel structure was revisited. The loss is estimated to be a few ppm.  In order to validate this calculation, and to study the effect of surface aberration in general, a noise generator has been implemented.  This code generates surface distributions with a given rms with frequency spectrum of f0, f-1 (most likely one) and f-2.

ALFI ( e2e front-end) (Bruce, Melody)

Keep working on new feature implementations : primitive using templates, GUI based comments and grouping of objects.

Seismic Isolation

Joseph Giaime  Agenda for the weekly SEI telecom

Friday, July 7, 2:00 pm Eastern, 1:00 pm Central, 11:00 am Pacific time

BSC SEI Status

  • received the stage 1-2 shims this week.  Stage 0-1 shim modification designed and ordered.
  • John (summer student) has made mass simulators for the actuators.
  • John is also making a SEI web site similar Oddvar's HEPI web site.
  • Rich is working on the mass & cg calculations.
  • John remeasured the pod can resonance w/o mass loading; data aren't reduced, but resonance moved from 75 - 100 Hz.
  • Hole for barrel nut in the riser for 0-1 springs is undersized.  Myron is reaming it out a few mils.
  • Ken is having difficulty getting through to accu-glass regarding our overdue wiring order.
  • Shyang teaching Joe H how to lock/unlock seismometers and change 'programs.'
  • Joe H and Ken W assembling and examining seismometer pods.  Modifications to wiring harness to be communicated to Ben.

Stanford

  • Tarm working on seismometer machining.
  • Brian & Dan collaborating on calculation relating thermal sensitivity and resonance frequency of Euler spring, as compared with non-buckling spring geometry.
  • Corwin's HEPI paper in final edits.
  • Matt & Brian wiring L-4C's for noise test.
  • Witness STS-2 acting 'oddly.'

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

BSC Seismic Isolation Assembly and Test

Problems were encountered with the spring installation fixture. The fixture has been redesigned and the modifications made which allow us to install the longer stage 0-1 springs. New shims to compensate for the softer springs has been designed and ordered. The stage 1-2 shims have arrived and the stage 0-1 are expected shortly.

Dummy masses to replace the actuators during assembly have been designed and ordered. This will prevent damage to the actuators as the stages are released from the alignment pins and hung on the springs.

The in-vacuum cables from Accu-Glass have been received and sent along with several flanges and feedthroughs to Bob Taylor for cleaning.

A telephone conversation was held this week with Ken Smith of ASI to review the blade/rod tuning procedures. Rich Mittleman is running through the calculations accounting for softer blades.

From: Ben Abbott <abbott_b@ligo.caltech.edu>

HAM-SAS

The new front panels for the Virgo Coil Drivers have come in, and look great.  Paul assembled the boxes with the new connector, and I'm going to give them a quick check to be sure that the pinout is correct.

The results of my test of the in-vac Cooner wire's ampacity can be found at http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~babbott/Cooner_wire_ampacity.pdf   I'll write the results up into a tech note sometime soon.

From: Riccardo DeSalvo desalvo@ligo.caltech.edu

BSC Clean Air Flow Study

Riccardo went to Flomerics for the kickoff meeting.  This project is to study the feasibility of establishing a clean air laminar flow in the BSC chambers using the optical bench and an additional donut structure as plenum to generate the shower and a perforated floor to recover the laminar flow.  The study is performed with Flovent, a FEA gas flow program.  The clean (and dry) air shower is developed in response to  the necessity of avoiding in Ad-LIGO particulate and film mirror contaminations like the one found in Hanford. On top of preventing contamination, the dry air flow should also keep the transpiration away from the BSC walls, and possibly shorten the pumpdown time of any access and thus improve the observatory duty cycle.  John Wilson at Flomerics has responsibility of this project.  Riccardo and John Worden are providing the scientific and technical feedback.  Ken Mailand and Dennis Coyne the solid work necessary to define the mechanical conditions.  The first flow simulations, showing the laminar/turbulent flow inside the BSC chamber and around the SUS may be ready as soon as early August.

HAM SAS Prototype Advancement

Present: Valerio, Jay, Ben, Dennis, Dave, Chiara, Riccardo

Announcements

  • have decided to have G&M purchase an  (G&M to provide written quote)
  • Riccardo going to G&M saturday for 3 weeks, Valerio already there, can help Riccardo for the first week.  Virginio the following week for ~10 days.  Dave may go in the week across July/August
  • FTIR machine for LIGO ordered to G&M and ordered by G&M from thermo Nicolet.  Will be delivered to G&M end of July
  • The Change Request  to cover increased welding costs and fabrication of a 3m oven for bake-out was discussed by the LIGO Change Control Board (CCB) and accepted, the corresponding order is out and will get to G&M soon.  Preliminary construction meeting was held (Chiara, Marcello, Carlo Gianni). Oven thermal insulation availability issues makes that a precise schedule cannot be done until next week.

Fabrication issues/status:

all drawings practically up to date including weld preparation drawings, cabling routing design and pinout completed.  Pinout verifird by Ben and Riccardo on latest drawings.

The base top plate that was mis-machined has been replaced with a new one.  The new machining is done, it is going for cleaning and welding will follow friday or early next week.  The final machining of the base structure will be done next week after inspection from Riccardo.

The clean room floor is in house and being laid.  The clean room will follow immediately after.  End of next week we will be able to use part of the surface for the dirty assembly, next week we are still in the small room.

Status of Test Plan for LASTI (Dave)

Clean room arrived in LASTI, and being prepared.  Virginio preparing test instruments to be used at G&M for the dirty status tests.

Simulation & Controls Design (Virginio, Valerio, Yumei, Dave & Cassey)

Cassey working on FEA model

Valerio advancing model on Dynaflex, now possible to insert asymmetries.

Electronics (Ben/Jay, Virginio)

Coil driver panels made by Ben, Valerio has spoken with Federico Paoletti, who will provide the additional 2 coil driver units (3 already available, 4 needed).  Customization of LVDT boards lagging, Valerio will go again to talk with Francesconi and speed him up.

Suspension

From: Janeen Romie romie_j@ligo.caltech.edu

Double checking the RM design information Norna sent. Reading over the OMC paper Norna sent. Participated in the Quad PDR #3 on Monday. Supporting Steve Penn and Gregg Harry on their thermal noise experiment. Checked, redlined and faxed osem drawings for Stuart at Univ. of Birmingham.

From: Ken Mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu

I'm  using the latest information from Ian and working on a lower quad installation arm shop drawings, and a 'conveyor' version to be used at the LASTI site.  The existing 5 axis fixture has been disassembled,  the stainless hardware change out is ongoing, other parts are being modified for stability.

Core Optics

From: Bill Kells kells@ligo.caltech.edu

 

From: GariLynn Billingsley Billingsley_G@ligo.caltech.edu

 

From: Helena Armandula ahelena@ligo.caltech.edu

LASTI

Repaired and shipped magnet assemblies.

A carrier and storage box for the LASTI test mass have been designed, I am in the process of getting a shipping box designed for it.

Advanced LIGO Coatings

First Contact.  Optical absorption measurements, before and after, on a mirror covered with the strippable film are the same (within the instrument's error).  A report will follow.

CSIRO

Preparing single material layers to measure Young's modulus.

Input Optics

From: David Reitze reitze@phys.ufl.edu

AdL Adaptive telescope (Muzammil Arain)

One phase of experiments regarding adaptive optics for Ad. LIGO had been completed. A tunable positive lens with a range from infinity to 4 m has been demonstrated. We have submitted a paper titled "Adaptive beam shaping by controlled thermal lensing in optical elements" for LSC review. The idea is to have an adaptive telescope built into input optics for in-situ mode matching into the arm cavities of the interferometer. Further experiments are being planned for thermal compensation in Ad. LIGO.  Also working on TCS review.

AdL ISC/CDS interfaces (Volker Quetschke, Guido Mueller, Dave Reitze)

  • Alignment sensing and Control - Guido has developed a Finesse file to analyse ASC signals for advanced LIGO.
  • Volker and Dave have had discussions with Rich Abbott and Peter Fritschel to identify IO-CDS interfaces for AdL.

AdL Mode Cleaner (Volker Quetschke, Guido Mueller, Dave Reitze)

  • using Comsol Multi-Physics package to compute mode cleaner mirror resonances for AdL.
  • based on discussions with PSL about pointing noise and ISC, we are looking seriously at reducing the finesse of the mode cleaner from 2000 to ~ 400 or so (final value pending PSL pointing data)

AdL Modulation (Stacy Wise, Volker Quetschke, Jeremy Pidgeon (REU student))

  • finalizing LIGO technical note for MZ noise couplings in Advanced LIGO
  • Jeremy is setting up a AM/PM experiment for sideband cross-product suppression.

AdL Faraday Isolation (Ken Franzen, Luke Williams, Dave Reitze, IAP group)

  • discussions with the IAP group on redesign of the AdL Faraday rotator housing are ongoing.  A new case has been proposed by Luke and is being studied by the IAP group for issues relating to magnetic field homogeneity.
  • the LLO high power test lab is performing more isolation measurements on the AdL FI

Mechanical (Luke Williams)

  • Designed a new breadboard and component mounts for the Mach-Zehnder interferometer for high power modulation.
  • Looked at position of MMT3 (in a triple suspension) in a stable power recycling cavity layout.  By moving the MMT3 toward the center of HAM1, a triple will fit in the layout.
  • working on a design for spatially segregated wavefront sensors to eliminate cross talk.

Pre-Stabilized Laser

From: Peter King pking@ligo.caltech.edu

An attempt to implement a 1 Hz low-pass filter with a sample rate of 200 kHz using the FPGA was made.  Unfortunately the large number of taps required to implement this filter was beyond the memory capacity of the PC host.  The filter was realised by paring back the sampling rate to 44.1 kHz.  The measured transfer function of the filter was consistent with the design and it's magnitude was flat down to 0.18 Hz.  Glitches in the DAC output are a concern however and it is not obvious to me how to remove these just yet.

Auxiliary Optics

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

LAYOUT

Non-folded IFO

A complete list of optical component data, organized by HAM and BSC tables was prepared and given to Dennis for updating the T010076-01 Optical Layout for Advanced LIGO document. The component data includes their locations in gobal coordinates, their surface normal vectors and the main optical beam vectors.

An updated Vertex optical layout, D060024 was checked in to the PDM Works vault.

OPTLEV

All optical lever beams in the non-folded IFO vertex were modeled in Zemax and SW. Luke and Chris will mount optical lever transmitters and receivers on appropriate support structures.

STRAY LIGHT CONTROL

Concepts for errant beam baffles, IO baffle, and Input Modecleaner baffle were modeled in Zemax and SW.  Concepts for the ITM Arm cavity baffle "surfboard" with holes for optical lever beams were modeled in Zemax.  Cavity beam dumps were modeled in Zemax. Ken Mailand is working on the SW model.

PO Telescope

An ACAD conceptual design for the PO Telescope/Hartmann Telescope is being modeled in SW by Ken Mailand. This telescope serves a dual function as a Hartmann probe for the ITMx and ITMx PO telescope. A Hartmann Telescope is needed to probe the ITMy. The BS PO telescope was eliminated by making the BS PO mirror the primary mirror of a beam reducing telescope.

I will visit Tydex, J. S. Co in St. Petersburg, Russia on Aug 4; they are a potential source for large, off-axis parabolic mirrors

From: Chris Echols <cechols@ligo.caltech.edu>

Building outlines inserted into vacuum equipment layout (D060165).  Penultimate end stations moved to 56.730m from origin per Mike Smith's request.  Buildings overlap but okayed by Mike.  Replaced "BSC Support Rod" in vault with D060141_BSC_Support_Rod_ICD.  Replaced "BSC Chamber and Support Rods" with D060142_BSC_Overall_Assembly_ICD in D060100 and 20007970 bsc.  Acquired LIGO numbers for ASI and Hytec drawings for renaming per LIGO standards (renaming not started yet).  Inserted new spools into vacuum equipment layout (D060165) showing new optical viewport locations between HAM3 and BSC2, and HAM4 and BSC 2.  Modelled spools A-1, A-7 and B-9 per PSI fabrication drawings and inserted into vacuum equipment layout assembly.

Controls, Data systems

From: Jay Heefner jay@ligo.caltech.edu

  • A draft of a technical note detailing the measurement result for the PCIX ADC modules has been completed. The note should be available for distribution next week. Additional, more detailed, tests are planned for next week and beyond. Preliminary results show that the input referred noise of the module is ~10uV/rtHz on a 40Vp-p input and a sample rate of 16384Hz. In comparision, the Pentek 6102 has an input noise of ~15uV/rtHz on a 10Vp-p input.
  • Anti-Alias, Anti-Image, and Timing Interface boards for HAM SAS, LASTI ISI, 40M DC detection and the LASTI Squeezing Experiment are being fabricated and tested.

Other Laboratory R&D

From: Riccardo DeSalvo desalvo@ligo.caltech.edu

John Miller

This week I began my appointment as a long-term visitor (from the University of Glasgow) with LIGO. I spent last Summer working on non-Gaussian beams at Caltech and have now returned on a more permanent basis to continue this work.

Antonella Iuorio and Livia Cerullo

just arrived from University of Sannio (Benevento) in the framework of the summer exchange program with Virgo/EGO/VESF.  Livia will join John working on the mesa beam interferometer.  Antonella joins the TNI experiment (E. Black).  Two more exchange students, Riccardo Ciolfi (from University of Roma I) and Alberto Stochino (from University of Pisa, already a SURFist at Caltech 2 years ago) will arrive in the next weeks to work on the 40 meter and on test mass studies respectively.

Yumei Huang

I simulated in computer and calculated by hand the stress of the Flex Joint of the invert pendulum as well as generated a diameter versus nominal load curve. I'm writing the report about the Flex Joint study.

Marie Giron

This past week I have been getting more acquainted with the glassy metal spring (LM001).  We took many test runs by adding balls to the mass hanging from the springs to make sure the data looked clean (before fitting).  We found some big jumps in the graphs, figured out what was causing them (things hitting wires), and have taken data since then.  I am now fitting the displacement data.

Michael Floyd

This week I have run tests at the synchotron with Marie, filtering the data with both electronic and digital filters, to test the new DAQ hardware, and a newer version of labview. I have also been fitting the graphs to find the residuals and the noise of the system to determine whether or not the noise of this DAQ is more or less than it claims, and whether or not it has more or less noise than the DAQ Marie is using.

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