Weekly Report for Week Ending November 16, 2006

LSC

Administration

Hanford Observatory

Livingston Observatory

Optical & Mechanical

Controls and Data Systems

40 Meter Facility

TNI

LASTI

CIT Science Group

Laboratory Computing

Adv. LIGO Development

Past Weekly Reports

The LIGO Executive Committee Agenda for Monday, November 20, 2006 will be:

(Meeting time: 10:30 am Pacific Time)
1.             Announcements
2.             Programmatic (Marx)

3.             Comments on weekly report
4.             LSC Issues (Saulson)
5.             LIGO Lab Operations

6.            Enhancements (Zucker)
7.            Advanced LIGO (Shoemaker)
8.            Change Control Board/Technical Review Board Session as needed

Site and other business issues:
Special Items:

Special Announcements:

There will be no meeting on 27 November (Fincance focus) due to people traveling to the PAC meeting.

Weekly Report Highlights

LSC Issues (Saulson)

A meeting of the LSC Executive Committee was held on Thurs 16 November.  A new version of the MOU with Virgo was discussed and approved for transmission to Virgo, for meetings of the Virgo Steering Committee on 6 Dec and of the EGO Council on 8 Dec. We are hopeful that we are converging on a final version, which would then be submitted to the LSC Council (on our side) for final approval.

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)

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

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

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

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Funaro, Brambila, Kaufman)

>From: "Funaro, Catherine" <Catherine.Funaro@caltech.edu>

1)      For ACCOUNTS PAYABLE HISTORY Press Here.

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

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Jasnow, Salone)

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

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

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

Submitted the end of October monthly report to the NSF.  Next month we are going to be a bit more formal in collecting data from a few key individuals.

CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

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)

Duty cycles on LHO machines were impacted this week by many effects, including commissioning activities such as the floating of the 4k antisymmetric port table ISCT4, high microseism, high winds, seemingly endless baling of tumbleweeds delivered by high winds, and calibration studies.  The result was lower duty cycle on both machines, H1-61%, H2-57%.  Furthermore, bns ranges were reduced owing to microseism and baling, ~10-14Mpc for H1 and 5-6.5Mpc on H2.

LHO has a new local run coordinator in Greg Mendell, following on the meticulous efforts of Keita Kawabe.

Some S5/commissioning highlights from the LHO elog are bulleted below:

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

S5 Run Report (Igor Yakushin)

Still high microseismic noise and low range of about 11 Mpc most of the week. The duty cycle for a week was 54 percent.

On Tuesday calibration measurements were made by Brian, Gaby and others.

Also Evan and Brian made photon calibrator measurements and in the process found and fixed problems with channel hopping and photon calibrator excitation channel.

Yesterday fb1 had trouble writing frames. The problem was tracked down to a cluster user reading too much raw data from /frames. The user was advised to use L1 frames from /archive instead and /frames was removed from LDAS mount point to prevent createRDS and LSCdataFind using it.

CDS Computing (Lisa Bogue)

Safety/Security (Rich Riesen)

Found no site nor laser safety concerns this reporting period. I was very satisfied with my walk thru of the SEC before the grand opening concerning safety items I had identified early. My suggestions and recommendations were addressed in a very profesional manner and I would like to thank all who were involved.

General Computing

(Dwayne Giardina)

( Shannon Roddy)

LDAS maintenance (Dwayne Giardina)

LLO Outreach (John Thacker)

Held highly successful LIGO SEC Opening Event on Monday, Nov 13th.  [JG: this is an understatement; the effort and dedication by the entire staff and LIGO Science Education Center collaborators resulted in a facility and opening event that our many visitors won't soon
forget.]

Held Exhibit Training for new exhibits on Nov 14th.... about 20 faculty and teachers attended.  Conducted outreach for two High School Physics classes (48 students) on Nov 16th.

Prepared programs for Nov 17th (5th grade) and Nov. 18th (SUBR Project MISE teacher Professional Development).

Mechanical and Optical Systems (Coyne)

See Advanced LIGO

Controls and Data Systems (Bork)

Jay finished review of the successful testing of the revised LOS Bias Module. 10 units of the revised design will be manufactured for distribution to the sites.

See also Advanced LIGO

40-Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)

Lots of good progress this week, on tuning the PSL, MZ, and mode cleaner; lock acquisition of the dual-recycled Fabry-Perot michelson; commissioning of the DC readout servos; and vacuum squeezing.

DC Detection

Vacuum squeezing

IFO Commissioning, Electronics, Controls, Computers

IFO Modeling

Lab Infrastructure, Bake Lab

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

Nothing significant to report this week.

LASTI (Ottaway)

CIT Science Group (Weinstein)

Kent Blackburn

TCLGLOBUS

Added Globus assert to check for XIO operation index value whenever it gets modified. This effort would be useful for solving LDAS managerAPI core dumps.

OSG

Testing nano HIPE workflow with Pegasus job clustering feature.  We need to move "seqexec" executable binary to $APP in order to use this feature at the remote execution site. The one installed (from OSG 0.4.1 software stack) is fairly old and doesn't work.  I've completed running nano HIPE at OSG_LIGO_PSU and it's still running partition 2 at UCSD.

Current status of running HIPE with 24 partitions at 2 more OSG production sites:

STAR_BNL: still running partition 2

FNAL_GPFARM: still running partition 4

Had technical discussion with Kent Blackburn, Stuart Anderson and David Meyers on adding LDG support into LIGO Workflow planner.  This is to support running Condor jobs on LDG cluster through the planner.

OSG INTEGRATION TESTBED

Debugged segexec - Pegasus executable required for clustering Pegasus DAG nodes.

Added voms proxy support to osg-vtb.

Discovered problem installing latest ITB client package from ITB cache on fc4. Created a trouble ticket at the OSG GOC.

FERMILAB VISIT

On Friday of last week, met with the WAN network group at Fermilab. Discussed the LIGO WAN and out increased involvement with OSG sites and the need to efficiently move data from LDG onto OSG. Also heard about efforts underway at Fermilab to provide WAN moniotoring. These are both areas in common with both groups.

OSG RESOURCES MANAGER

Continued to work with the statements of work for the 18 separate institutions involved in OSG.

Continued organizational effort for OSG Executive Board meetings to be held at Caltech in December.

Met with Julie to provide signature on Caltech DAF so that my name can appear on the Caltech SOW, allowing the SRO to approve so that funds can flow. Still need PMA, Vice Provost and SRO officer signatures before sending to UW Madision's Contracts Office.

Data Analysis

_______________________

Vuk Mandic

I prepared a new draft of the S4 isotropic stochastic paper, in response to the suggestions of the ApJ referees. The new draft has been approved by the stochastic review committee and by the stochastic group, except for a few minor modifications. The paper should be resubmitted to ApJ next week.

I worked with Nick Fotopoulos and Joe Romano on formulating veto parameters, based on PEM-coherence studies and on time-shift studies, to be used in the H1H2 isotropic analysis.

I have restarted the pulsar hardware injections on all interferometers.

I participated in the review of the Output Mode Cleaner suspension design.

_______________________

Duncan Brown

_______________________

Eirini Messaritaki

_______________________

Gregory Mendell

I am continuing to work with the pulsar group on plans for the SFTs needed for the next stage of the S5 Einstein@Home search. We may regenerate the SFTs using the new S5 calibration due out soon. As I said last week, I hope to start some coding tasks for the Einstein@Home search this week. I have also been discussing with Pinkesh Patel the distributed demodulated FFT algorithm he is working on, and which looks promising to me.

_______________________

John Zweizig

This week I have been working on scanning L3 RDS frames for dataValid errors in the DARM_ERR channel. When these occur during science mode it indicates that the a data acquisution error occurred that could make the GW channel unreliable. In fact the glitch group has noted loud glitches caused by these errors. I previously performed a preliminary scan on LLO data and found several segments to within 256s (i.e. within a L3 frame). I am now iterating this with a new program that uses the auxillary information within the frames to limit the times to within a 62.5ms slice.

This has been performed on all IFOS over the first year of S5 operation and will be published as data quality flags as soon as possible after the lists are finalized.

_______________________

Rejean Dupuis

(www.ligo.caltech.edu/~rejean/S5/spectrograms)

Laboratory Computing (Anderson)

LDAS Software Systems (Maros)

The version of the Sun Studio 11 compiler suite was upgraded to the latest development version. This has not resolved any of the outstanding issues with building LDAS for the Sun Opteron platform. A new approach of building a minimal datacondAPI has been adopted. With this approach it should be easier to resolve the outstanding issues.

The cmonClient has been modified to default to port 10000 when adding a new site. This is also the port number given in the context sensitive help message for the form. Also removed deleted sites from list of sites immediately upon deletion.

The cntlmonAPI now traps out exceptions when loading tclglobus and writes the error to the log files.

Tcl debugging information used to debug tcl 8.4 has been removed from the frameAPI.

The managerAPI has been modified to have resource variables from the globus location and LD_PRELOAD_64. Also, if tclglobus cannot be loaded, the error is caught and written to the log files.

The runLDAS script has been modified to read the additional managerAPI resource variables for LD_PRELOAD_64 and the globus library path.

System testing of LDAS was done using version 1.8.369 of the software. All system tests passed successfully.

Modified the putStandAlone test to not remove ilwds which were still needed. This was first an issue on the linuxopteron box.

Efforts are underway to consolidate all of the tests scripts used for system testing into a single directory hierarchy. Once this is done, it will be put under CVS and be part of the standard build of the LDAS software.

LDASJobH has been modified to conditionally load tclglobus. The SeqInsert program on linuxopteron has been extended to support globus options for LJrun.

The createRDS system tests are being run each night on sunopteron.

The standard LDAS loop scripts are running nightly on ldasopteron.

LDAS System Administration (Anderson)

Caltech

(Phil Ehrens)

(Erik Espinoza)

MIT

(Fred Donovan)

Livingston

(Igor Yakushin)

(Dwayne Giardina)

Hanford

(Greg Mendell)

(Ben Johnson)

General Computing (Wallace)

MIT

(Fred)

(Dwayne)

(Shannon)

Hanford

(Christine)

CIT

(Mike)

(Christian)

(Bruce Sears)

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

(Larry)

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Systems

Modeling and Simulation (Hiro Yamamoto)

From: Bruce Sears <bsears@ligo.caltech.edu> (Bruce Sears for Hiro Yamamoto)

-----------------------------------------------------------

AdvLIGO LSC/ASC design using FP arm model with quad suspension (Osamu Miyakawa)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

No E2E work this week.

Fast simulation of Dual Recycled Michelson Cavity  (Keiko Kokeyama)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The iteration number N(*) is being validated. In static cases or some cases when the mirror has a constant velocity, N~10000 is ok. In other cases that mirror tilt angle oscillates (tilt angle=sin(wt)), N can be only 50. In such cases, there must be some reasons that the approximation is broken. We will unveil what term(s) in the expression breaks the approximation so that e2e can stop using the approximation code when this expression is applied to e2e. In parallel, we are investigating how tilt angles and mirror velocities affect the result analytically.

(*)This number determines the time of the next calculation point. For example, the code compute the field at the time t=0, t= 2 N tau, t=4 N tau... tau is an original time step which is determined by a cavity length.

Modeler (Bruce Sears, Melody Araya)

---------------------------------------

Bruce - I/O interface implementation for user defined primitives completed.

Now working on the merging FUNC_X code into UserDefinedPrimitive in order to have the modeler  dynamically create the code and instantiate these objects as needed, in the same manner as they  are for FUNC_X objects.  (In fact, when completed, FUNC_X will be subclassed from the more general UserDefinedPrimitive class.  (4.5 days)

Melody - Reacquainting myself with the FUNC_X code to help with UserDefinedPrimitive implementation. (1.0 day)

Mechanical Simulation for advanced LIGO (Sany Yoshida and SLU team)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We continued modeling the AdvLIGO Input MC triple pendulum placed on  HAM-SAS. Andrew and Jameson started to work on the Input MC?s length  sensing control. At this point, they are learning the basics about  length sensing control using the triple pendulum e2e code we built. We  still need to improve local damping filter for the yaw degree of  freedom.

We received a revised state-space matrix of the HAM-SAS vertical model  from Valerio Boschi. We confirmed that this model is stable. Further  analyses such as comparisons of transfer functions from the base to  optical table etc with Valerio?s results, investigation on back  reaction from the triple pendulum to the HAM-SAS for the vertical  degrees of freedom (vertical translational, pitch and roll DOF) are  under way.

ALFI : e2e front end (Bruce, Melody)

-------------------------------------------------

Bruce -  No work on Alfi this week.

Melody -Finishing up in the graphical implemention for the new User Defined Primitive.

              Graphical icons can now be assigned to the UDPs.  (4.0 days)

Seismic Isolation

No report this week. 

Suspension

From: Janeen Romie <janeen@ligo-la.caltech.edu>

*LIGO SEC Kinetic Art Project*

Finishing up some invoice questions.

 

Advanced LIGO

Preparing for an internal SUS/ISC review of the OMC suspension for enhanced/advanced LIGO tomorrow.

 

Participated in an ear/prism bonding jig meeting today with Ian Wilmut and Glasgow folks.

 

 

From: k mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu

 

The CES shop is modifying the fixture rotator assembly X-axis plate to match the arm, and the LASTI set up.

I have made drawings for Mike Smith showing the SOS with a faraday isolator, and the cone baffle with the new beam

locations, I'm also running a cavity beam dump FEA, to see if additional bracing is required.

 

 

From: "Greenhalgh, RJS \(Justin\)" J.Greenhalgh@rl.ac.uk

 

ALUK held its latest Project Management Committee on 10th November 2006 (See LIGO-M060318-00-K).  A brief activity summary follows:

RAL: Currently focussed on getting parts drawn and built for the noise prototype. All the contracts have been placed for the noise prototype parts following DCN process and it was still planned to complete the dirty assembly by the end of January. Sample welds are expected shortly from the manufacturer of the structure. The long lead items for the laser welding machine are on order. BS initial assembly procedure drafted and design proposals now ready to be presented to the SUS community.

Glasgow : Plans for CAC’s succession as follows. Dianne Masson will take over financial control and reporting. RAJ will take over chasing manufacture of optic components and the mechanical design aspects of the laser welding machine. MB will take over the control/science aspects of the laser machine. KAS will oversee and take steps to plug any gaps that appear. The new water chiller for the laser is delivered and the power stabilisation issues are now understood.

Birmingham : OSEM parts being made (problems with flexi-rigid circuit being ironed out) and DCN awaiting approval; satellite box (PD signal amplifier) nearing completion. Coil amplifier design work started. Contractors identified for satellite box mass-production.

Overall: still aiming to have the noise prototype at LASTI in early March.

Core Optics

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

Last week I was ensconced in the "Optics summit" meetings which were truly a watershead status summary of outstanding issues (see Ottoway's compilation to which I contributed).

This week was involved in follow up issues to last week's meeting. For me outstanding issues to pursue have been:

1. (After intense discussions and even initial calculations with Vyatchanin) I have been developing a numerical code which invokes his latest analytical description of PI for fully rcycled interferometers. This I can (and have ) compared to my own previous code (see T060159). Although we discussed enough to appreciate that we agree on matters of principle and concept, our numerical results significantly disagree. We parted ageeing to look into this in detail and resolve.

2. Last week the summary of more refined "as built" FFT simulations of Hiro Y. plus    reiteration that the H1 recycling gain appears "now" to be quite high (~55) combined

   to make it appear that per HR TM scatter loss was not so bad as I had previously

   (c. '02-'03) been concluding (ie perhaps only 15-25 ppm vs my old 60-80ppm).

   However just this week Rana tells me that he has established that the H1 Rgain

   of 55 is mileading. The calibration has been off for some time. The gain is

   more like 46-48).

3. Therefore I have been reviewing the direct, scatterometer determinations of scatter loss.

   How good are the measurements? How big is the discrepancy with "As built" FFT?

   Factoring into this are the (all too quick) scatteometer meausrements I made in 2/06.

   These nominally showed a ~50% drop in HR loss compared to scatter measured on the

   same TMs in '03 ! Many possible systematic problems !

Input Optics

From: Dave Reitze <reitze@phys.ufl.edu>

Mechanical Design (Luke Williams)

MMT (Muzammil Arain)

Modulators (Wan Wu, Volker Quetschke)

Faraday Isolator (Luke Williams, Dave Reitze)

Auxilliary Optics

From: Michael Smith smith@ligo.caltech.edu

 

SLC

I developed a method for calculating the scattered light noise due to large motions of a surface that causes fringe wrapping.

I am in the process of determining the effect of fringe wrapping. Preliminary results indicate that fringe wrapping is not a problem; however, in looking at this possible problem, it appears that scattered light noise from the AS beam off the Brewster's window between HAM 5 and HAM 6 may be problematic because of the horizontal motion of the HAM chamber ( especially if it has a resonance between 10 to 30 Hz). In a similar vein, the motion of the cavity beam dump attached to the BSC chamber walls may be problematic because of horizontal motion. I am waiting for some data from Robert Schofield regarding the motion of the HAM and BSC chambers at LHO.

 

 

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

Advanced LIGO R&D (AOS optomechanical):

Analyzed Brewster Window Plate for natural frequencies

Analyzed Brewster Window Plate for vibration response spectrum (in progress)

Analyzed HAM Chamber for natural frequencies

Illustrated new pick-off mirror suspension concept in SolidWorks

Pre-Stabilized Laser

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

A telecon was held with Benno, Maik, Rick and myself to discuss the requirements for the laser diode enclosure.  It is intended that this room be placed in the mechanical area.

Benno, Maik and I started developing a laser safety plan for the 200-W laser.  We have a number of ideas that I have to combine with the material outlined in the ANSI standard.

Basti Schulz has completed the package design for the amplifier module.  It is a nice compact design that mounts to the optical table via mounting forks.  The particular unit I saw was to be delivered to Virgo.  Some pictures are available on request.

A reference cavity identical to that used at the sites was suspended and placed into a vacuum chamber at the AEI.  The plan is to use the reference cavity to develop the frequency stabilisation.  A current edition table-top frequency servo from LHO arrived at the AEI whilst I was there and this unit will be fired up and tested out on either a 2-W Innolight NPRO or an 800-mW model.

Control and Data Systems

From: Rolf Bork <rolf@ligo.caltech.edu>

For additional information about this report, contact Albert Lazzarini or Phil Lindquist