There will be no LIGO Executive Committee scheduled Monday, January 22, 2006 due to the Staffing Committee Meeting scheduled for that time.
Weekly Report Highlights: LSC overwhemlingly approves MOU between LIGO and Virgo
After a special telephone meeting of the LSC Council on Friday 12 January, the Council voted (by email) to approve the agreement between LIGO and Virgo. 55 Council members voted in favor of the agreement, and 3 voted against it. We are rapidly moving ahead with the process of getting signatures on paper, and with obtaining the required endorsements from funding agencies. Meanwhile, we will be starting to work under the provisions of the agreement. The LIGO and Virgo Directorates are now working together to appoint and launch the new committees called for in the MOU and Attachment. We are also starting the planning of the agenda of the March LSC meeting, which will become the first joint meeting of the two Collaborations.
The LSC Executive Committee held a meeting on Thursday 18 January. Two observational papers were discussed and approved (with small changes), the S3/S4 known pulsar paper and the S4 stochastic "radiometer" paper. The LSC Exec Comm heard a report from Rai Weiss (chair of the Detection Committee) on the plan (soon to be proposed) for a blind detection challenge.
LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)
STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)
- MOU's signed-off by Peter Saulson and routed to the PI's for their signature this reporting period are:
MOU |
Attachments |
Columbia |
DAT, OPS, OUT, Z |
NAOJTAMA |
ACF, Z |
Stanford |
ACF, LAS, OPS, OPT, OUT, SUS, Z |
Trinity |
OPT, OUT, Z |
PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)
>From: Rod Luna <rluna@ligo.caltech.edu>
- Provided assistance to the Detector Group (H. Armandula) with packing and shipping of spare magnets to MIT ( B. Shapiro), Account Number LIGO.PRLAS-5.16-NSFLIGO.FY02CA.
- Assisted the CDS group (R. Abbott) in extending the loan document for a Dynamic Signal Analyzer to Logic Plus Inc. in San Luis Obispo, Ca.
- Created property records for three JDS4 Lasers (D. Cook @ LHO).
- Continued working on LIGO's Equipment Inventory @ CIT.
- Continued assisting Property Services by providing back up documentation on equipment purchases for the Contractor Procurement System Review.
DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)
>From: Linda Turner - turner@ligo.caltech.edu>
>From: Cleveland Mak <mak_c@ligo.caltech.edu>
- Over the last six weeks there has been a flurry of old talks being submitted to the DCC for processing from past year's conferences, seminars, workshops, meetings, etc.
- Updated mail roster lists.
- Scanning Update - Progress continues on scanning of old Chronological Files.
Document Management System - Plan B (Lindquist)
The Document Management System Plan B committee chaired by Joe Giaime has scheduled a Kickoff meeting Friday, January 19.
FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Funaro, Brambila, Kaufman)
>From: "Funaro, Catherine" <Catherine.Funaro@caltech.edu>
>From: "Brambila, Ruth" <Ruth.Brambila@caltech.edu>
- Completed change order #9 to ASI and submitted to vendor.
- Provided assistance on tax issues pertaining to invoices.
- Working on the change order to Northrop Grumman.
>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>
- Preparing a listing of travel expenditures for LSC meetings and face to face meetings for calendar year 2006, at the request of Albert Lazzarini.
- Worked on updating the monthly reports for January 2007.
- 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>
- A modification was issued to the contract with General Optics to incorporate the revised schedule for receipt of the polished test mass optic. The revised schedule calls for delivery of the optic on February 28.
>From: Ed Jasnow <jasnow@ligo.caltech.edu>
- One proposal has already been received for the Pathfinder optics procurement. The deadline for receipt is Friday, January 19.
- Forty LIGO staff members in Pasadena, Hanford, and Livingston, have been signed up with E-Corporate to receive electronic faxes in their e-mail. This is a 90-day trial to see if this is beneficial to LIGO.
PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)
The end-of-December report for the National Science Foundation was sent at the end of last week.
The NSF notified us last week that they are scheduling a Total Business Systems Review (TBSR) of LIGO and associated Caltech business systems at Caltech February 27 through March 2. The NSF team will be looking at the following functions:
- General Management
- Accounting and Finance
- FCTR Reconciliation
- Procurement/Acquisition
- Human Resources/Employee Payroll
- Property and Equipment
- Budget Development/Execution
The head of the NSF team has expressed an interest in visiting one of the sites as well.
CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)
- There are no open change requests.
HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)
>From: Cindy Akutagawa cindy@ligo.caltech.edu
- The next Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled for Monday, January 22, and I am preparing the agenda.
Quality/Safety (Tyler)
>From: Bill Tyler tyler@ligo.caltech.edu
Safety Audits of LIGO campus labs were started this week. The audit results so far have been good with no significant safety issues identified by the audit team. The audit team is comprised of personnel from PMA, the Caltech Safety Office, and LIGO.
LIGO
Hanford
Observatory (LHO) and Interferometer Operations (Raab)
Summary of S5 Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory (compiled by R. Savage)
We've had colder and less variable weather this week with temperatures dropping to single digits (deg. F) and snow the past two days. The stable weather has resulted in some 20+ hour lock stretches. However, controlling the temperatures in the LVEA and VEAs has been difficult. Ranges were reasonable on both H1 and H2 with duty cycles over the past seven days of 87% for H1 and 82% for H2.
We are preparing for a week of commissioning starting next Monday (1/22). The main planned activity is commissioning of the H1 PEPI system. Details of the planned work can be found on this wiki page.
Highlights from the weeks LHO elogs:
LIGO
Livingston
Observatory (LLO) and Interferometer Operations (Giaime)
S5 run (Valera Frolov):
- The science data taking duty factor was 80% for the week ending Thursday. As in previous weeks the downtime was due to seasonally high micro-seismic activity coupled with daytime seismic noise.
- The binary inspiral range varied between 10 and 14 Mpc depending on seismic motion.
- The periodic hourly glitching re-appeared during the weekend. The onset was possibly correlated with network problem that caused the timing error on one of the front end VME processors. The glitching was evident during the low noise period with bns above 14 Mpc and was triggered by the automatic backup script but the root cause is not known and suspected to be associated with increased network traffic during the backup.
- The periodic glitching investigation will be continuing this week. Another continuing investigation was the increased broad band noise in one of the LVEA magnetometer sensors. After the replacement of the ADC which reads the magnetometer the noise floor went down by a factor of 2-3 but still remains higher than it was in the past by another factor of 2-3. The calibration of the magnetometer was verified to be correct.
CDS Computing (Lisa Bogue):
- working with the team on chasing down our hourly glitch problem.
- gave Rusyl a hand with replacing a 110b in l0pemadcu.
- configured remote syslogging for cds switch.
LIGO Science Education Center (John Thacker):
- Facilitated LA Tech's Project RIPPLE (teach professional development workshop) on Saturday & Sunday
- Prepared programs for three groups: Community Christian School (Denham Springs) 5th & 6th Graders, Physical Science Enhancement Project (an Academic Distinction Fund grantee), and AAPT/PRTA.
- Interview with reporter from Livingston Parish News
- Prepared three Letters of Support to universities interested in forming limited partnerships with LIGO SEC in order to conduct teacher professional development
- Conducted Outreach program for Community Christian School of Denham Springs
- Conducted workshop for Physical Science Enhancement Project
- Updated SEC webpage
- Reported minor Exhibit issues to Exploratorium for resolution
- Began work on NSF Annual Report (NSF Grant 0355454)
LIGO computing and network security (Roddy)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Reported under General Computing, see below.
General computing and LDAS admin (Giardina)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Reported under General Computing, see below
Reported under LDAS System Administration,
Data analysis & computing (Yakushin)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Storage/Condor/LDAS admin:
Reported under LDAS System Administration,
Data analysis:
Reported under Data Analysis activities, see below
Mechanical and Optical Systems (Coyne)
See Advanced LIGO
Controls and Data Systems (Bork)
From: Rolf Bork rolf@ligo.caltech.edu
LIGO:
- ETM controller code modified for use in pringle mode tests at LLO next week. This code will only be used for testing during the commissioning period, then removed.
40m Lab:
- The new alignment controlls were installed.
See Advanced LIGO
40-Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)
IFO commissioning, Electronics, controls, computers:
- Sam and Rob did some work to make SRC lock acquisition more flexible and robust.
- Tobin and Kirk remeasured the length of the Mode Cleaner by driving MC_AO with a sine wave at 2 kHz, and scanned the 166 MHz marconi frequency while monitoring the power of the line at the AS port. The length seems to have increased by ~ 60 microns since last October. They adjusted the frequencies of all the RF signal generators accordingly.
- Tobin mplemented a simple PID loop in Perl to control the C1:PSL-FSS_SLOWDC using C1:PSL-FSS_FAST as an error signal. This replaces some EPICS state code.
- Kirk and Steve cleaned up the IPANG monitoring optics and got rid of some clipping.
- Rolf and Alex installed new front-end CPU c1ass for dither-alignment of the main interferometer. The plan is for Valera to commission this system when he visits in February.
- Alex built and installed new version of daqd in preparation to the addition of the new C1ASS into the DAQ. However, this produced errors when ezcademod was run, so Rana backed it out and informed Alex.
- Justin has written a small perl program, called blinky, which provides a clean mechanism for making the PSLwatch, FSS slow servo, and autolockMCmain40m scripts blink their BEAT channels.
- Justin tested all the IFO optic's dewhitening filters switching functionality using a battery of ifoTest scripts. All of the dewhitening filters appear to switch, as expected.
- Justin wrote an MC test script, and started some documentation on all the IFO test scripts he is assembling.
IFO modeling:
- Kirk continues to use OpTickle to find a good signal for MICH control in SMOO locking of the PRFPMI.
Vacuum squeezing:
- Osamu and Go tested the newly installed picomotor mirror for the first time after pumping down. It seems to work well, and they can direct the AS beam to the squeezing optics. However, the picomotor moves the mirror too fast to allow fine tuning; he and Osamu are working on slowing it down or servoing it.
- Go updated he layout for the homodyne PD and some of the injection optics.
- Osamu and Go then installed the mode-matching telescope and steering mirrors for the squeezing injection optics, and mode matched using light from the asymmetric port.
- They then found good signals for locking the signal-recycled Michelson (SRMI) with a small MICH offset and only a small contribution from RF sidebands out the AS port, as measured with an optical spectrum analyzer at the AS port.
- They then realigned the IFO beam to the OPO cavity using the steering mirrors. After the alignment, they installed and aligned the DC PD with high quantum efficiency. The PD is for measurements of squeezing-enhanced laser interferometry.
- Go measured the noise floor of the DC PD used in his squeezing system, in preparation for measuring the shot noise of the LO field from the AS port in SRMI.
- All the components are in place to perform a measurement using injected squeezed vacuum. They are gearing up for this now.
Lab Infrastructure, Bake lab:
- Tobin and Kirk snatched a discarded whiteboard and brought it to the 40m, so that we could "have a proper discussion on a whiteboard, like normal physicists."
- Steve measured the particle counts at all the 40m flow benches, and measured 0 counts.
- Steve discovered and fixed a leaking N2 supply line (used for control of the vacuum valves).
- Steve notes that we now have several PZTs in vacuum and we need a hardware interlock to turn off the PZT HV when the vacuum pressure transits through the ionization region (either intentionally or because of some vacuum system failure). We are soliciting volunteers.
Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)
- Greg has been working on the spot size measurement, and he has found a hardware problem with the beam scan. Tech support thinks the problem is serious enough to merit returning the instrument. He is working with the company to resolve the issue. We had requested a loaner to use while ours was being repaired, but apparently none were available. Greg has requested expedited service on the repair.
- Eric and Akira have been working on a calibration report for the TNI advisory board meeting, scheduled for this Friday, January 19. The document was distributed to the advisory board members on Wednesday.
- Sebastjan has been organizing the tools and labeling the toolbox drawers, and he has been reading papers on Pound-Drever-Hall locking and thermal noise.
LASTI (Ottaway)
No report received.
CIT Science Group (Weinstein)
__________________
Eirini Messaritaki
I started working on coding, testing and incorporating the null stream veto in the follow ups used by the inspiral group.
__________________
Igor Yakushin
- Continue working on coherent waveburst online infrastructure.
- During the last week coherent waveburst review telecon the question was raised why all the loud triggers found by the incoherent waveburst and missed by the coherent one have strong signal in L1 and weak signal in H1 and H2. Here is a possible explanation: http://ldas-jobs.ligo.caltech.edu/~igor/SG235Q9.1/index.htm
__________________
Xavier Siemens
- Refereed paper for J. Phys. A
- Worked with Vuk and Jolien to re-submit cosmic string stochastic paper to PRL
- Worked more on pulsar populations, talk with Curt Cutler to start working on this together
- Gave informal talk at Kip's meeting on pulsar searches and various ways to speed them up
- For h(t) review: worked on finding times when S4 H2 1s factors were unreliable and making DQ flags for those times. Comparing with SNRs and amplitudes of string triggers for those times.
- Worked on code that produces analysis segments for next Einstein@Home run. Created said segments and sent SFT lists to Greg Mendell who has kindly agreed to produce them
__________________
Duncan Brown
- Worked on completing paper on rates estimates for IMRIs
- Started looking at eccentric binary waveforms
- Continued with S3 SBBH review
- Submitted abstract for APS
__________________
Gregory Mendell
- I have added options to the SFT generation code in LALapps under lalapps/src/pulsar/MakeSFTs to allow generating of SFTs from channels stored as INT2, INT4, or INT8 in frames, as well as REAL4 and REAL8. This will allow the generation of SFTs from PEM channels for the study of lines that have an effect on pulsar searches. I will report on this to the pulsar group once I get a chance to test the changes.
__________________
Kent Blackburn
NOTE: Kent is at the Joint DOE/NSF Atlas/CMS software review this week. David Meyers compiled this week's report.
TCLGLOBUS:
- Setting up one of LDAS test systems for running LDAS managerAPI using Globus threaded libraries within valgrind to investigate coredumps.
- Communicated by email with Globus team related to GSI authentication failure on Opteron systems.
GRID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT:
- Completed the first OSG milestone, running LIGO workflow at UCSD with local cache and job clustering using 25 or more slots continuously for one week.
- Wrote Tcl script to push LIGO GWFs from CIT repository to UCSD Storage Resource Manager repository.
- Resolved issue when running nano HIPE by not clustering one job type that can't be clustered because that job runs for 20 minutes and clustering causes this job to lose parallelism.
- Monitored full HIPE executing on CIT cluster with job clustering and no data transfer: 30% of the workflow (a total of 1571 jobs) is completed.
- Continued working on integrating workflow planner with the Storage Resource Manager problem at UCSD with Abhishek Singh Rana, Terrence Martin and Karan Vahi.
OPEN SCIENCE GRID VALIDATION TESTBED:
- Reinstalled and tested VTB cache 1.6.1 three times, as configuration files and components were refined.
- Discovered configuration issues in accounting package - gratia and monitoring infrastructure package - cemon and and documented these on OSG Twiki.
- Attended VTB telecom.
OPEN SCIENCE GRID INTEGRATION TESTBED:
- Restarted testbed after chilled water problem resolved by campus facilities.
- Produced ppt documentation on recent HIPE milestone workflow on UCSD OSG site performed by Michael Samidi.
- Attended LSC Computer Committee face-to-face meeting at CIT.
- Attended weekly ITB, Pegasus and VDT telecoms.
Laboratory Computing (Anderson)
LDAS Software (Maros)
Testing of code to prevent the diskcacheAPI from hanging when it encounters a hung NFS file system was not successful when run on the ldas-dev system. The new code caused excessive memory usage and is being studied as to why.
Additional work on PR#2152 (providing sampleRate for PROC structures) was needed to prevent the api from generating segmentation faults. The new code now allows for the user to specify explicitly what meta data and what extended meta data should be retrieved.
Corrections for displaying multi-line variables and descriptions from within cmonClient (PR#3098).
System testing was performed using version 1.8.427 of the software. Some regression tests failed in FrDump and FrVerify. These have been associated with the system tests copying the files in ASCII mode. LJcopy has been modified to transfer the files in BINARY mode by default.
Due to cooling issues, only ldas-dev ran loop tests over the weekend. An error in running dcmangle has been corrected.
LDAS System Administration (Anderson)
Caltech
(Dan Kozak)
(Phil Ehrens)
- Issued and installed new inspiral certs for LLO.
- Fixed accented character mishandling in visitor-application.tcl
- Began reconfiguring the maachine ldasdata6 to be the new ldas-dev dataserver "opterondata-dev".
(Erik Espinoza)
- Racked the new storagetek RAID units w/ Dan & Stuart.
- Rebuilt node114, bad 3ware controller.
- Balanced the air conditioning in the room.
- Turned the nodes back on after chilled water returned.
- Assisted Ed Maros w/ FC6 Networking.
- Looked into E@H issues.
- Cleaned up node permission issues on /usr1.
- Fixed permissions on Condor 6.8.3.
- Sent 6 HD's & 1 3ware card to ASA for RMA.
- Opened up Sun case (#64310611) over bad x4600.
MIT
(Fred Donovan)
- Lscsoft installation etc on nova
- Disk replacement on data11 (dataserver3)
Livingston
(Igor Yakushin)
- Mysterious crashes of ldas-grid machines at both sites continue. There was another one almost simultaneously at LLO and LHO a few days ago. The 'top' script running each couple minutes on both ldas-grid machines did not show anything suspicious.
- Continue the burn test of the new dataserver. No problems found so far.
- Renewing our SUN support contract for another year.
(Dwayne Giardina)
- Replaced disk id4 in 3510-1.
- Tape eject and shipment.
Hanford
(Greg Mendell)
- As per usual routine tasks, I and the other LDAS sys admins continue to monitor data archiving, publishing, LDR transfers, and RDS generation to keep these running smoothly. Currently I am working to fix a problem with the transfer of Level 3 and Level 4 RDS data from LLO to LHO, and there may be some load issues on one of the servers at LHO. Otherwise LDAS services are running smoothly.
(Ben Johnson)
- Participated(ing) in DASWG/CompComm meeting at Caltech this week.
- Worked on C-based back-end to LDRdataFindServer and publishing. The basics searching innards are finished. TODO: Networking layer, and threading layer (for concurrent requests).
General Computing (Wallace)
MIT
(Fred)
- LDAP server Camelot unstable; rebuilt bdb databases
- More work on webmail ( squirrelmail)
- Some printer, wireless dhcp and new account work
- Building 2nd zone on pelllinore (emvogil-2) backup web server
Livingston
(Shannon)
- Installing a new switch in the computer users room. Will move the old one to the other building
- Used the loaner OTDR to look at several fibers, including the Bell South fiber. We will quite likely need to install a new fiber between the two buildings at some point. The Bell fiber looked like it has ~1-2 db loss between LLO and Livingston. Evidently it is not enough of a problem to cause issues on either the phone or network fibers. They must be on the best six out of the twelve since it appears that there is quite a bit of difference depending on which fiber is analyzed.
- Lots of the usual... IDS logs, hardware quotes, ordering bits and pieces, etc.
(Dwayne)
- More canit configuration changes, rule modifications, joined the RPTN, etc.
- Added some audio/visual alerts to the kantech software for certain events in the HPLF, modified some alert messages to be more descriptive. Also replaced a broken connection between the controller and the emergency stop buttons so that an alert will display when the buttons are pressed (with Bernie).
- Spam filter cleanup
- Other usual user requests and support
Hanford
(Christine)
- Installing Solaris on one of the new servers. Setting up the file system on one of the new raid disk systems. Installing the Veritas backup software on the server and learning how to use it.
- Created a new user account for an LSC member. Helped with info about the different types of accounts available and how each account is used. Reset the password for another user.
- Found a freeware program to provide an SSH mail tunneling GUI for MAC OS X 10. Installed it on a couple of MAC laptops for users.
CIT
(Bruce)
- iLog Maintenance: (3.5 days)
- General iLog maintenance (user adds, keyword adds, systems work, etc.)
- More work on implementation of restricted view access option for entries in a log.
- Bug fix for international style format for user phone numbers in the user database.
(Christian)
- Configured new laptops with 24 inch monitors for Norma Robertson, Eric Gustafson and Mohana Mageswaran
- Rod Luna Installed and configured new label writer printer for Rod.
- Phil Willems- Upgraded Adobe acrobat writer from 6 to 7.
- 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.
(Mike)
- Worked in B/A server room bringing up servers that was shutdown due to last week's air conditioning issues. It looks like we are fully back on-line.
- Tracked down a licensing issue on Ansys. The renewal license they sent us was missing some additional features that were included by default. They have sent us a temporary license until this gets resolved.
- Setup multiple new GC user accounts, and added additional wireless mac addresses to our access points.
- Additional user support plus other sysadmin tasks.
(Veronica)
- LIGO: Homepage redo work. Various website updates.
- LSC: Updates of the database of technical papers, publications website. Updates of LSC-related mailing lists. Improvements of the MOU database and html-generating scripts to make it more user-friendly and easily updatable.
- Assisted in keeping watch over equipment during the air-conditioning problem
- Misc. user support.
(Larry)
- Worked a couple of procurement issues. Resolved some order problems with Dell and finally received the correct items. Purchased another s/w tool pkg. that works with the Ansys pkg. Worked a couple of billing issues with Gina. Reconciled P-card items. Purchased a number of items for different groups on the project.
- Updated a couple of licenses including the mathematica network server and the matlab server license.
- Finished up jury duty service for this year.
- Spent time monitoring systems while the campus air-conditioning problem was going on. All of the units are now back on-line.
- Updated one of the systems in the 40M. Working on a replacement unit and setting up a dual head system in their control room.
- Resolved some samba issues and running tests on a couple of different versions of installs. We should start getting some people moved over in the next couple of days.
- Assisted PMA in a couple of the room modifications taking place. Also, working with them on a couple of logistical issues concerning the moving of computers in room 19.
- Setup a number of new accounts and a couple of new web locations for different services.
- Installed a couple of computer systems and working on a number of other new installations.
- Worked the mail services. Still blocking over 10K messages/day. Now that all of the equipment is back up I should be able to get back to testing the new mail server.
- Worked on different wireless modem items. It looks like it is a cost affective tool nationally. International use may or may not be, we still have some testing to do for that area.
Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)
Advanced LIGO Systems
From: Hiroaki Yamamoto hiro@ligo.caltech.edu
Modeling and Simulation (Hiro Yamamoto)
modeling and simulation (Hiro Yamamoto)
-----------------------------------------------------------
e2e weekly meeting
----------------------------
Mark Barton summarized the latest designs of the quad suspensions.
Andrew Kinchen (SLU) talked about the study of the effect of the back reaction of the HAM-SAS.Fast simulation of Dual Recycled Michelson Cavity (Hiro, Keiko)
Keiko finished her visitor program and went back to Japan at the end of last year.Her work, fast calculation of field evolution using the time domain modal model, will be reported in a LIGO note in a few weeks.Static IFO simulation (Hiro, Melody)
Hiro has modeled a 3D BS, and talked about the preliminary result at the COC meeting on 17th.More details are studied to find the true requirement to set the limit of the loss to be around 100ppm.Melody is working the data management part of the code.Modeler - e2e simulation engine (Hiro, Bruce, Melody)
Bruce has finished the implementation of the UserDefinedPrimitive code.Bruce and Melody are validating this implementation.Melody is reviewing and update the e2e primitive manual.Mechanical Simulation for advanced LIGO (Sany and SLU team)
Andrew summarized his HAM-SAS study with a realistic ground motion signal as input to the base and a triple suspension on top of the table. He is going to present the result in this week's telecon.
We continued e2e modeling of AdvLIGO Input Mode Cleaner locking. Using a very simplified control filter, we worked on the frequency control path. To mimic the effect of frequency control, we fed back the frequency servo signal to MC2 optic directly. (In this way we can change the cavity length instantaneously. Currently, the e2e package does not have a mechanism to change the laser frequency as a function of time.) For white noise disturbance applied to MC3 triple suspension?s suspension point, we confirmed that the cavity was locked stably.
Continued modeling AdvLIGO Input Mode Cleaner locking. Using the pseudo-frequency control (feeding back the error signal from RF Demodulator to MC2 optic via frequency control path so that the optic moves instantaneously), measured the open loop transfer function. Excitation signal (swept sine) was injected immediately before the control filter and compared the signals before and after this junction point. The result appears reasonable. More analysis will follow.
Resumed the e2e modeling of modal control that we started last summer. By converting the simulink model developed by Laurent Ruet to an e2e file, examined the yaw control. An impulse input was fed to the suspension point and the optic?s motion was monitored. When the control loop was open (i.e., free hanging), the spectrum of the optic?s motion seems reasonable. However, when the loop was closed, the system appeared to be unstable. The problem is currently being investigated.
CDS
AdvLigo:
Ham-Sas:
- Installed stepper motor controllers and Guralp interface electronics at Lasti.
- Two additional coil driver units arrived from Italy, but are missing NIM packaging.
- Four QPD units tested and delivered to Lasti.
- In-Vac breakout boards: 2 units arrived and stuffed. Frames, hardware and boards are being cleaned and baked. They should be finished and arrive at Lasti by next Tuesday.
- In-Vac Accuglass cables: 9 shipped last week and remaining 4 shipped this Tuesday. All will have arrived at Lasti by first of next week.
- Guralps cables - Latest word is that they will arrive 2/2.
ISI:
- Work continues on ISI interface chassis designs.
Triple controls:
- First controls installed this week at Lasti and undergoing testing.
ISC:
- Received test chamber for analysis of in-vacuum electronics packaging. Using a vacuum pump on loan from the 40m lab, I am now able to evaluate the thermal performance of in-vacuum components at a pressure of ~100mTorr. Previous experiments have indicated that this is a sufficiently low pressure to allow isolation of radiative heat transfer mechanisms.
- The printed circuit boards for the in-vacuum DCPD are due back from the board house today and will be immediately stuffed and tested.
- Orders have been placed for a custom ring heater to be used as part of the thermal length actuator in the OMC system.
- Samples of aluminum are being prepared for evaluation of flame sprayed coatings to improve in-vacuum radiation cooling. These samples are to be sent to the coating facility to evaluate two different coating materials. When the samples return, they will be evaluated for vacuum compatibility and thermal performance relative to physically identical, but uncoated samples.
- Started to produce schematics for the driver amplifier use to supply current to the in-vacuum thermal length actuator.
Prestabilized Laser
From: Peter King <pking@ligo.caltech.edu>
Still trying to get a hold of the Beckhoff sales people, who seem to like not answering their phone, replying to e-mails ... etc. Just as I was typing I finally got an answer about the pricing and availability of their analog and digital modules. The parts will be used to replicate the front-end interface and I will be trying to establish the communication between the Beckhoff control and EPICS.
I received pricing information from Innolight about the customised 2-W NPRO that will be used for the front-end laser.
Seismic Isolation
From: Ken Mason kmason@ligo.mit.edu
ISI Single Stage HAM isolation system
A PDR for the single stage ham isolation system was conducted at HPD in Boulder, CO on Jan 11,2007. We were pleased with the overall design and analysis work by HPD and agreed to move forward with the design presented.
ISI two stage BSC isolation system
A problem was encountered in the design of the second stage. ASI aligned the stage 1-2 horizontal actuators with the upper ZMP of the flexure instead of the lower ZMP. This resulted in a large amount of cross coupling. Laurent Ruet is redesigning the actuator mounts to move the actuator into its correct position.
Fabrice Matichard has calculated new shim dimensions for two sets of shims. 1 set is for the corrected load, with no height change for the upper and lower zero moment points of the flexure. A second set is being made for the corrected load, with a best guess correction for the new lower zero moment shim. Shims have been ordered and should be in next week.
We have received quote for cleaning and air baking the 9 large machined parts. Both valid quotes are very high as each supplier needs to build or modify an oven and additional clean room upgrades. We are looking into the possibility of using the oven built by Galli & Morelli for this air bake.
From: Brian Lantz <BLantz@stanford.edu>
Meeting notes from the SEI telecon
Friday, Jan 12, at 2 pm eastern, 1pm central, 11 am pacific, etc.
Announcements
HAM SAS arrived, to be installed next week
HAM contract status
- PDR was Thursday, Jan 11,
It went well, we generated a big action item list.
Progress on the BSC
- compliance measurements?
Stage 1 is still rubbing. However, some estimates can be made from the measurements on the two free corners. Based on these measurements, two new sets of shims will be made. 1 set will be for the corrected load, with no height change for the upper and lower zero moment points of the flexure. A second set will be made for the corrected load, with a best guess correction for the new lower zero moment shim, based on the two free corners. All 3 lower zero moment point shims will be the same size.
- stage 2 actuators in the wrong place
ASI put the stage 0-1 horizontal actuators at the upper zero moment point of the flexure, rather than the lower zero moment point. We suspect they did this because the spring is at the lower zero moment point. This puts the actuator about 6 cm too high. It's not yet clear how much we can move the actuator down before things get very complicated. A quick look at the easm files seem to indicate a few cm is easy, but we need to take a close look at the real CAD files and hardware.
- additional space cap sensors?
Ben Abbott is working on gettting some spares. Based on Ben A's conversations with ADE - If we put a new readout onto an existing head, the calibration will be incorrect, because there is a reference cap on the board, which only has a 5% tolerance. This can cause both an offset and a scale factor error. The offset can be as much as 10% (Based on Ben's recollection). This means that if a readout breaks, we can replace the readout, but we will need to redo the tilt decoupling measurement to calibrate out the scale factor error.
Ben will send Rich M an email to see if he wants a spare head, also.
Has ordered 2 spare, in-air, cables.
- powersupply saga
Ground pin was touching the case and causing ground loops and lots of noise.
Jay has new drawing for backplane, will be tested in the HAM single stage
Voltages were not correct in the old board, but the voltage-setting resistors were changed, and now it's all working.
- pods at LLO - clamps/ lockers
According to Joe Hanson, clamps should be in from Southern on Monday 1/15
need 9 more locking-feet jam nuts for the GS-13s,
- Seismometer testing
We still need a test box to mimic seismometer, to test the computer wiring, and we still need a test stand to test the seismometer. We'd like to be able to test the seismometer in the pod, before installation on the platform. The interface of the test box and the test stand should be that they plug directly into one another. It would be smart to also make a cable assembly so that we could test the seismometer with the test stand before the pod was fully assembled.
Ben A will write up a little description of how this will look, and Brian L will check it. We want it when clean equipment comes back. Will try to get this in the next month. (mid Feb.) before the ISI interface box is done. That way we can use it to test the ISI interface box, and we can use it to get the seismometer pods tested.
- cleaning
Ken Mason still in transit, unable to report
Feedforward at Stanford
- nothing to report
Seismometry and Corner station SPI
Tarm back, changing over to optical sensors, and some other mechanical issues. Hope to finish machining in the next few days.
From: Dennis Coyne <coyne@ligo.caltech.edu>
HAM-SAS status, 1/18
The HAM-SAS unit has been placed into the HAM chamber at LASTI, without the optics table and its payload (as yet). Some of the cabling (the cabling which has limited access once installed) has been installed/routed on the HAM-SAS structure. The remaining cabling should arrive at LASTI next week, when Ben Abbott arrives to complete the electronics installation.
The support tube elevations and tilt will be adjusted today (1/18), by using the scissors tables on the piers, to level the baseplate which supports the inverted pendulums. The HAM optics table and its ersatz payload (weights) could be placed on the HAM-SAS unit tomorrow. We will then release the inverted pendulums and begin to tune the frequency of the IPs and the vertical filters.
From: Ben Abbott abbott_b@ligo.caltech.edu
All new activity since last weekly is written in red.
HAM-SAS:
Custom Electronics chassis: (# needed + #spares)
- LVDT Driver (2 + 1) -2 tested and delivered, one stuffed, but needs boxing and testing
- LVDT Interface (2) Installed
- Stepper Motor Interface (2 + 1) - Installed
- Coil Driver Interface (1) - Installed
- QPD Whitening (2 + 1) - 2 Installed, 1 here, needs testing and boxing.
- QPDs (4 + 1) - 4 tested, boxed, and delivered, 1 tested, but has no box, I'll keep it for a spare board.
- Guralps Interface (1 + 1) - 1 tested, boxed, and delivered, 1 built but untested.
- AA Interface Rev 4 (1) - Installed
- AA Interface Rev B5 (1) - Installed
- AI Interface Rev 3 (1) - Installed
- Coil Driver (4 + 1) - 3 modified and Installed, 2 Modified and being sent from Italy. Should arrive soon.
- In-Vac Breakout boards (2) 2 boards arrived, and stuffed. Frames, hardware, and boards are being cleaned and baked currently. They should be ready on Monday, and shipped to arrive on Tuesday morning.
Commercial Electronics:
- Opteron Processor (1) - Installed
- Stepper Motor Driver (4) - All 4 shipped to MIT, and installed.
- I/O Chassis (1) - Installed
- Power Supplies (2) - Installed
Miscellaneous:
- In-Vac Accuglass cables- 9 shipped last week, and the remaining 4 were shipped yesterday. These will arrive on Tuesday, and be available for installation when I arrive.
- Guralps cables - Specialty cables from Guralps Instruments Ordered 12/21 quoted a 30 day lead, but they now say that they should arrive 2/2.
- Special cable connecting the LVDT 25-pin Witness board connector to the 9-pin ADC connector was shipped last Friday.
ISI:
- ISI Interface - (3 + 1) I continue to work on the schematic.
- GS-13 Boards - (many) 15 boards came back from PCB Express. They'll get stuffed sometime soon, and delivered sometime thereafter.
- Coil Driver - (3 + 1) (Mohana) - The Coil Driver board has been stuffed and is in test. The interface board is stuffed and ready. The metalwork is finished and looks fine. Work has begun on the front and back panels.
Suspensions
From: Janeen Romie <janeen@ligo-la.caltech.edu>
- Having daily meetings with Chris & Calum on OMC design. Working on earthquake stop and bracket designs for OMC.
- Currently at Caltech for this. Discussed schedules and labor support for OMC and noise quad testing work upcoming with Norna and Dennis. Discussed with Jay and Norna electronics requirements and deliveries for upcoming suspensions. Working on SUS schedules for Dwight and Carol.
(Rupal Amin)
- I have been working closely with Valera on preparing a spare-PMC to analyze the mode structure at the dark port of LLO. We locked the cavity using an NPRO and a dither lock scheme. Presently, I am testing a MatLab code that plots and fits a curve to the intensity versus frequency data.
- This will hopefully be useful in next week's commissioning event and eventually result in our understanding of what the OMC transmission should/could be.
From: k mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu
- I met with Calum and Ian and others on the phone re. the progress on installation tooling, priorities were re-set to match the installation time-line for LASTI. Ian will send the lower sus support frame to CIT by 2-20-07 for cleaning, and we will check it to match our tooling.
- The CES shop is continuing work on the arm style, and LASTI conveyor style, installation tooling, also the 5 axis fixture, elevator assembly, and lift table.
- The full set of shop drawing details for the initial assemblies are complete, and in the CES shop.
Core Optics
Auxiliary Optics
From: Michael Smith smith@ligo.caltech.edu
COST UPDATE
- The cost estimates for ADLIGO AOS (except for TCS and Photon Calibrator) have been updated and will be sent to Dwight.
SLC
- The oxidized, SS baffle material was exposed to a 4 mm diameter, high power 1064 nm laser beam while it was thermally isolated under vacuum. The material became red-hot at a power level > 30 W. This material will not be used for the errant beam baffles, which must withstand a 125 W beam without damage. The new baseline concept for the errant beam baffle material will be polished stainless steel with a reflective, metallic coating; the reflected errant beam will be directed onto the walls of the vacuum chamber or onto the MC beam tube. A sample of a reflective SS baffle will be given to UFL for testing.
From: Phil Willems <willems@ligo.caltech.edu>
Advanced LIGO Photon Calibrator
-------------------------------
I have been polishing off the Design Requirements Document and Conceptual Design Document for the Advanced LIGO Photon Calibrator.
The design requirements document and conceptual design document for the Advanced LIGO Photon Drive are written and available for viewing at http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~willems/PC/Photon_Calibrator.html
Thermal lensing in Livingston
-----------------------------
Inspired by the good results Virgo has obtained by using the thermal drift of test mass frequencies as a measure of absorption, Sam Waldman and I (mostly Sam) have been investigating the technique for LIGO. Using archival data for Livingston, Sam found that there is plenty of signal to noise ratio in the frequency drift after lock acquisition (see his LLO elog entry last week). We are investigating the systematic errors and will probably try this technique at Livingston during the commissioning break, as well as the spot size measurement.
Input Optics
From: Dave Reitze reitze@phys.ufl.edu
UF Report
AdvLIGO Modulation - Wan Wu
- Evaluating the laser intensity noise coupling to the readout signal for Advanced LIGO based on the calculation in Somiya's paper. Calculating the requirement on the RFAM based on the Advanced LIGO's control requirement for the differential arm length.
Stable Recycling Cavities - Muzammil Arain and Guido Mueller
- We are working on a new optical design for a 'tunable Guoy phase' signal recycling cavity. The proposed design provides the flexibility of tuning the signal recycling cavity for BH-BH and NS-NS detection by thermally tuning compensation plate.
- Also looking at alignment issues in Advanced LIGO with Valera Frolov
Mechanical - Luke Williams
- Finished design and fabrication of parts for triple electrode EOM with 4x4x40mm RTP crystal.
IO PDR - UF
Working on the Preliminary Design Document
For additional information about this report, contact Albert Lazzarini or Phil Lindquist