There will be no meeting of the Executive Committee since a Staffing Committee has been scheduled for that day.
Special Announcements: Ron Drever and Rai Weiss awarded the APS Einstein Prize and Gabriela Gonzalez is awarded the Bouchet Prize.
Weekly Report Highlights
LSC Issues (Reitze)
- The LSC was well represented at the April APS meeting last week, with four invited presentations, including three 'prize' talks by Ron Drever and Rai Weiss (Einstein Prize talks) and Gabriela Gonzalez (Bouchet Prize talk), and invited talk on Advanced LIGO by David Reitze, as well as 22 contributed presentations by LSC members. All of the gravitational wave astronomy sessions were well attended. See Stan's photos of the event:
Ron , Rai, Rai & Kip, Gaby, Rich Isaacson with awardees.
- A web site for the upcoming L-V meeting (https://pub3.ego-gw.it/lscvirgomay07/) has been advertised to the LSC.
LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)
STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)
- The Institute of Applied Physics of Russian Academy of Science was signed-off this week with Attachments OPT and Z, and was posted and submitted to the DCC.
PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)
>From: Rod Luna <rluna@ligo.caltech.edu>
- Screened the GSA web site for two pieces of equipment for R. Adhikari @ CIT ( Signal Analyzer and Network Spectrum Analyzer)
- Created property records for a JDS4 Laser (D. Cook @ LHO)
- Created property records for three Sun Computers (I. Yakushin @ LLO)
- Created property records for three Sun Computers (B. Johnson @ LHO)
- Coordinated the disposal of a copier machine and a metal table.
DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)
>From: Cleveland Mak <mak_c@ligo.caltech.edu>
- Processed a flurry of papers being submitted for LSC Review.
- Processing presentations from the recent APS Meeting.
- Scanning Update - Progress continues on scanning of all non-electronic "L" category documents on file.
Update to Current Document Management System (Lindquist)
The Committee met 4/13/2007. J. Giaime had previously provided an email description of his experience with DocDB. His experiences were discussed in depth. One thing not yet covered is how the Lab's and LSC's use model for Doc DB (scripts for both DocDB and DocuShare are needed). He suggests that we review possibilities alongside of requirements, without necessarily feeling the need to adhere completely to the requirements.
D. Shoemaker has received permission to run the trial version of DocuShare for a little longer and Joe has access to DocDB. However, it is important to know how we think we will use these systems. We plan to generate a list of scenarios (application cases), e.g., casual user access, LSC searches and submittals, Engineering team and control documents, DCC staff maintenance, etc. Also within each user there are different scenarios, different document types, different life histories and revision tracking. D. Coyne agreed to work on engineering scenarios and has recruited R. Abbott to help.
Each solution (DocDB, DocuShare, the current, but enhanced, LIGO Document Management System) that we have been considering has a different definition of what is a document. In DocDB a document can be a collection of documents or a web hierarchy, etc. Metadata are required for a document including author(s), topics, who can view or who can change it, etc.. When one goes into a document's metadata they identify the files in that document, they show the documents, and one can download one or all, old versions are listed, who has access is listed, etc., etc. It is possible to identify the version as of a specific date. Can create a page that links to the versions as of a certain date.
Searching - publicly readable files can be searched by Google. DocDB also provides a basic search capability. Also plug-in that will index by metadata and content, even protected stuff (that you have permission for access). Unfortunately in searching there is no NOT operator (so far).
Support Needs - at FNAL, DocDB is managed by a computer operator - the person administers hardware systems (10 percent of her time). It is not clear that they have an equivalent of our DCC where they manage the quality of documents. The committee strongly believes that this is something that we want to continue to do. We could, e.g., make every document a managed document. Email notification provided for documents that need to be approved or processed.
DocDB seems to be designed to share information among groups.
DocuShare seems to be designed to give individual users access. Being a commercial product, the focus is on kaing sure there are authorized (paid for) licenses for every individual who accesses the system.
J. Giaime agreed to ask the DocDB developer questions that were raised during this teleconference and get back to group.
FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Funaro, Brambila, Kaufman)
>From: "Funaro, Catherine" <Catherine.Funaro@caltech.edu>
>From: "Brambila, Ruth" <Ruth.Brambila@caltech.edu>
- Completed change order #10 to University of Michigan and submitted to the their procurement department. The U. Mich. came back and we are working out the differences.
- Working on change orders #183 and #184 to Triad contract.
- Provided assistance on renewals for various computer maintenance orders for the campus and the sites. There is only one outstanding issue on a renewal, which has been resolved, but only needs to be sent to the vendor.
- Obtained the necessary documentation to complete several orders that had missing documents.
- Provided backup services for pcard reconciliation.
>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>
SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Jasnow, Salone)
>From: Gina Salone <gsalone@ligo.caltech.edu>
- Extensions for two contractors were issued one of the contractor employers.
>From: Ed Jasnow <jasnow@ligo.caltech.edu>
- Agreement has been reached to address property inventory at LLO on Tuesday, May 8. Ed Jasnow will be there to assist with the search and implement improved property management policies that will be uniformly applied to both sites.
- A meeting has been scheduled for Thursday, April 19, to determine the impact to Advanced LIGO of ITAR/EAR issues on material coming from foreign countries. This meeting is being held to classify each item to determine whether or not a permit will be required from the Department of Commerce. Participating in the meeting will be Ann Bussone, Caltech Office of General Counsel, Dr.Kuei Shen of JPL, Dennis Coyne, David Shoemaker, and Ed Jasnow.
PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)
We have received the funding for the second half of the fiscal year for LIGO Operations.
Prepared a draft long-overdue final report for the now-completed and closed follow on (2001-2003) Visitors Program, and distributed it for internal review.
Proposal activity for LIGO Continuing Operations (FTY 2009 – FY 2013) – distributed individual reminders of writing assignments and due dates. The LIGO Continuing Operations Proposal web site can be found at the (password-protected) URL: http://castor.ligo.caltech.edu/philinfo/OPsProposal/OPsProposalWebPage.htm. I have posted a version of the writing assignments sorted by responsibility at http://castor.ligo.caltech.edu/philinfo/OPsProposal/WritingAssignments.pdf.
CHANGE CONTROL/CONTINGENCY MANAGEMENT (Lindquist)
- A change request is being prepared to reflect actual costs through the first half of the current fiscal years and budget that is not expected to be used.
LIGO
Hanford
Observatory (LHO) and Interferometer Operations (Raab)
Summary of S5 Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory (compiled by M. Landry)
The intererferometers achieved high duty cycle despite higher than typical microseism for some of the week, H1 - 90% at ~15Mpc, and H2 - 87% at ~6.6Mpc.
Some S5 highlights from the LHO elog are bulleted below:
- summaries: Tuesday maintenance, CDS maintenance, most recent range & duty cycle weekly, IFO maintenance
- Observed H2 30m-period noise is thought to be an LVEA compressor motor that wanders through the test mass roll mode, ringing up optics such as FMY. A followup study including qscans was posted. Efforts to identify the compressor this week were unsuccessful
- Fscan spectograms for recent data (Jan 07, and Mar/Apr 07) were posted... an H1 noise increase was observed coincident with a range drop, but it is not yet understood (the range has seemingly recovered since then but the source of this change will be tracked down)
- Valentine's Day-like noise, characterized by elevated and coherent AS_Q and POB (plus a WFS signal without optical levers) was spotted several times though the week, see for example here
- A close, shallow earthquake was recorded without incident at LHO. Despite the M2.4 quake's proximity (few km) and depth (2km), power was concentrated above test mass pendulum modes, at 6Hz (near a stack resonance!)
- 11Hz and 22Hz lines observed in the LVEA radio channel were shown to originate in the 4MHz timing system, as seen in this study. The peaks appear to wander as a function of MSR temperature.
LHO Outreach (D. Ingram)
Three groups of WSU Pullman Landscape Architecture students presented design plans at LHO on 4/18 under the supervision of Professor Sean Michael. The plans (a course assignment for the students) are part of LHO's exploration of the development of a nature trail and nature study area at the site.
LIGO
Livingston
Observatory (LLO) and Interferometer Operations (Giaime)
S5 run summary (Antonio Lucianetti):
- During the last week, L1 collected 74.1% science data. The binary inspiral range varied between 12 and 14 Mpc depending on seismic motion. Wed (04/11) night the inspiral range was close to 15 Mpc for many hours. During the last weekend, we had high microseismic noise due to spring storms on the east coast.
- No major technical problems for the L1 IFO, except for Tuesday's maintenance activities.
CDS Computing (Lisa Bogue):
- made significant progress on vpn configurations for CDS.
- dropped code to support the blind injection project.
- did some testing with perl distributions on the ilog.
- continued support of S5 operations.
LLO Outreach (John Thacker):
- Uploaded documents to LIGoOP website
- Uploaded photos to LIGO SEC webpage
- Planning for and delivered programs for 2 school groups Continued to work on SEC webpage
- Gave invited talk at Spring APS meeting
- Prepared material for Science Buddies mentor training
- Background work on upcoming F2F meeting May 3rd
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, see below
Data analysis & computing (Yakushin)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Storage/Condor/LDAS admin:
Reported under LDAS System Administration, see below
Data analysis:
Reported under Data Analysis activities, see below
Mechanical and Optical Systems (Coyne)
See Advanced LIGO
Controls and Data Systems (Bork)
See Advanced LIGO
40-Meter Interferometer (Weinstein)
- IFO commissioning, Electronics, controls, computers:
- Tobin continues to commission our new digital dither alignment system, and Valera is visiting, to help. Finding and fixing bugs in TDS, with help from Matt Evans. He remeasured the x-arm sensing matrix using the oplev readback as a measure of the excitation, and it looks sensible. They are making good progress in implementing the servos.
- Steve has been carefully monitoring the temperature and power of our MOPA laser, because of the power and temperature glitches that have plagued us in recent weeks. He reports that the MOPA has been running stably this week, with no sign of glitching.
- Rana found and fixed some bugs in the FSS slow servo code.
- Rana is ordering a 4 input USB frameGrabber so that we can save camera images of our test mass optics before and after drag-wiping, and also to quantitatively mode-analyze the beams transmitted from the PMC, MC, IFO, and OMC. This will be a good SURF project.
- Rob got our new laptops working with dataviewer, dtt, and epics/medm.
- Rana is moving autoscripts over to our "headless" control computer and it seems to be working stably.
- There are still a variety of problems associated with our controls computers. For example, only one computer can perform excitations via dtt and see the relevant testpoints. Rana is working on having one computer serve all the LIGO controls applications, so that all controls computers can be configured identically (so either they all will work or none will work). This is proving to be more complicated than we had hoped.
- Steve is getting longer ethernet cables to allow the relocation of a control computer further from the AP table.
- DC detection:
- Rob is working on measuring the laser frequency noise coupling to DC readout, and is making new cables to facilitate these measurements. He's also working on the modeling of these couplings for comparison with the measurements.
- Rob is working on a document summarizing the expected advantages of DC readout: elimination of RF intensity noise, RF frequency noise, RF mode overlap imperfection (up to OMC finesse); reduction of carrier junk light (up to OMC finesse). The document will enumerate the relevant noise couplings that he is measuring in both RF and DC readout for his thesis (laser frequency and intensity noise, RF oscillator frequency and intensity noise, loop couplings, etc).
- Vacuum squeezing:
- Go is working on his thesis, and papers.
- Lab Infrastructure, Bake lab:
- A film crew filled up the 40m lab last Friday in order to film an interview of Kip Thorne for the PBS series "Closer to Truth". Steve shuttered the laser during their filming, and when they left, everything (PSL, IFO) came back up nicely.
- Visit by 60 Hamilton Elementary School 6th graders on Friday cancelled because of rain.
- Steve is rearranging desks and workbenches in the office area, to better suit our needs.
Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)
Nothing significant in the lab to report this week, but congratulations to Akira are in order. He passed his candidacy exam last Thursday.
LASTI (Ottaway)
HAM SAS
Unfortunately a broken coil driver prevented us from using the last opportunity to get the testing data to the committee to best effect. The Virgo coil driver boards were replaced with a SOS coil driver board and the system was up and running with similar noise performance to that was demonstrated in the initial report.
LASTI Computing
Rolf spend the week with us, helping us to understand and fix our computing issues
LASTI General
Rich Mittleman has agreed to take over Dave Ottaway's LASTI responsibilities. The transition will happen over the next two weeks.
CIT Science Group (Weinstein)
______________________
Eirini Messaritaki:
- I spent a long time interpreting the results of the injection runs of spinning signals recovered with non-spinning templates. The goal was to identify the parameters of the inspiral signals that most affect the
match between the two different kinds of waveforms. I also tried to
determine what effect that will have on the recovered parameters of a
spinning signal.
- I reviewed an LSC paper to be submitted for publication with the GWDAW11 proceedings.
- I worked on finishing up the coding of the null stream test to be incorporated into the inspiral analysis pipeline.
______________________
Gregory Mendell:
Nothing significant to report this week, though I am working on abstracts for two talks/posters I plan to present at Amaldi.
_____________________
Kent Blackburn:
OPEN SCIENCE GRID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
Completed "OSG LAb 3" review: Grid Resources and Job management
- wrote simple shell scriptwrote submit file, dag filesubmitted jobs to OSG sites using condor_submit, condor_submit_dag
- monotored jobs using condor_q and tailsites.xml and tc.data files
Began running NANOHIPE on OSG sites:
- used gencdag to generate dag files from dax filestried to run nanohipe on several OSG and OSG-ITB sites with partial successtutorial on sites.xml and tc.data files with D. Meyersgenerated sites.xml and tc.data files
- learned about and applied cleanup
OPEN SCIENCE GRID INTEGRATION TESTBED
- Worked with Pegasus engineering team on paper submission process to establish next steps for LSC paper review.Provided support for Britta Daudert including tutorial on use of transformation and site catalogs and use of vds-get-sites.Working with the Globus web service developers, determined that setting MaxThreads to 100 in the Java container has mitigated the problem when many short jobs are submitted via the web services interface. Globus developers and OSG engineers to test the fix on additional Compute Elements in the next week.Created a script to package the 70 gwf files used in nanoHIPE for exercising the Storage Resource Manager client when a batch file of gravitational files are specified.Reviewed latest draft of paper "Optimizing Workflow Data Footprint"Chaired the ITB and Web Services meeting this week as Rob Gardner was attending the blueprint meeting.Chaired the LIGO-Pegasus telecom.
- Attended DASWG, and VDT telecoms.
OPEN SCIENCE GRID MANAGEMENT
- Held telecon with OSG Project Associate, Chander Seghal and OSG Resources co-Manager Paul Avery to discuss materials to be presented at next weeks finance board meeting.
- Summited quarterly report for Resources Manager's area.
- Passed letters of reference for candidate (Charles Huang) to Staffing Committee.
____________________
Patrick Sutton:
LSC-PP:
- Reviewed and approved ~6 bursts presentations for the APS meeting.
- Handling reviews of GWDAW proceedings articles by Sung, Hayama et al., Khan and Chatterji.
Network analysis:
- By request, wrote matlab script for computing SNR of generic waveforms in S5 detector noise spectra for LIGO, GEO, and Virgo. Made tarball and distributed to bursts group for use by Shawhan and Katsavounidis in tuning blind injections.
- Telecon with Heng and Chatterji to plan X-Pipeline coherent follow-up for Q-Pipeline.
- Finished DARM_ERR inspiral frames for GRB070201 analysis.
- Continuing work with Was on GRB070201 analysis with X-Pipeline.
______________________
Xavier Siemens:
Worked on h(t):
- started online generation of V3 h(t) at GPS 860527884 (April 13th) at LLO and LHO (only H1 for the moment)
- prepared for off-line V3 generation: will make about 10^6 frames, 40TB of data
Laboratory Computing (Anderson)
LDAS Software Systems (Maros)
-
Modifications to the diskcacheAPI were made. One such change was to prevent a rare core dump. Another was to properly throw an exception if a read/write mutex lock could not be obtained. With this correction, greater stability in the diskcacheAPI should be achieved as data structures should be properly locked (protected).
-
The editing of variables from the cmonClient has been enhanced to allow a right mouse click on any field brings up the value edit dialog.
-
The frameAPI has been modified to correct the issue of createRDS leaking threads when the jobs timeout (PR3132). Two resource variables, :THREAD_TIMEOUT and ::RESOURCE REAP_THREAD_DELAY, have been added to control the cleanup. The one issue left to resolve for this issue is the cleanup of the job sockets.
-
System testing of LDAS was done using version 1.8.519 of the software. All tests passed with expected values. The lsync command continues to be modified to better handle the receipt of the termination signal.
-
DB2 has been upgraded to 8.2.7 for tandems 3, 4, and 5 and the query_heap_sz value on ldas-test has been increased from 1000 to 2000. The head size modification has allowed DB2 to run without problem on the test system for nearly a week.
LDAS System Administration (Anderson)
Caltech
(Phil Ehrens)
- Numerous Certificate related support tasks.
- Worked on front-end CGI for MOU Webforms. Collected list of MOU DCC-Numbers for use in creating password files for groups.
- Installed Solaris-10-u3 on sunopteronbuild.
- Configured webserver betelgeuse.ligo.caltech.edu. This machine is a Sun X2100 running Sol-10-x86.
(Erik Espinoza)
- Installed CentOS 5 on x4600m2.
- Testing/porting FC4 configuration to CentOS 5.
- Contacted ASA about hard drives.
- Reading up on Foundry LACP (aggregate nic) configuration.
- Tested our nodes for tg3 issues.
- Used BitTorrent to download DVD iso's for CentOS 5.
- Building FC4 repo for updates post-EOL.
MIT
(Fred Donovan)
- Some conf work on osg-ligo; ligo-burst clusters (dual homed; firewalling; set up new head node.
Livingston
(Dwayne Giardina)
- LDG upgrade on gateway, grid and pcdev1.
- Failed power strip nodes 159 - 166.
- Tape storage eject.
- Tape eject and shipment to CIT.
Hanford
(Greg Mendell)
- The LSC Data Grid (LDG) 4.4 Client and Server packages have been released. This has been tested on various versions of Linux, with some support for Mac and Solaris. There is a known problem with installing or using pyGlobus from the LDG ClientPro distribution on Mac's under Intel. See: http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/lscdatagrid/
(Ben Johnson)
- Sent off NonComp form for Sun support. Hopefully this will be the last bit of paperwork for this year's Sun support contract (4/1/2007 through 3/30/2008).
- Delving further into OpenSSL. I was able to determine whether a X509 host certificate (signed by DOE + ESnet) was valid or not. We may be able to put grid certificate authentication into the NDS server using OpenSSL.
- Shipped our 34 data tapes this week because I forgot to ship them last week (I performed other ejections and forgot).
- Continuing to design the NDS server for LDAS. So far, perl is still the language of choice.
General Computing (Wallace)
MIT
(Fred)
- Ligo spam filter hung again. Tried adding xtra network card to ligo.mit.edu,
- (Antares), driver won't load; will try sysconnect. (want 2 net interfaces on mail server);
- Mimedefang; spamassassin; and fuzzeyocr on pellinore (ligo-zone) to try ocr spam filtering.
- Upgraded tintagel (RHEL4 to FC 4); purchasing issues; set up sunblade 1000 with sol 9, moved to LATSI control room for dtt; one wireless accesspoint not working; repeated kicking of dchp wireless servers; another laptop install/cfg for new arrival.
Livingston
(Dwayne)
- applied patches to ns2, www, bartholomew, and kantech
- with Shannon, cleaned up the Communications Room
- removed spyware from a user's PC
- installed Acrobat Pro on a user's PC
- setup a new PC for scanner use.
- spam filter cleanup
- other usual user requests and support
LLO mail summary for 12 April 2007 - 19 April 2007:
Rejected: 11,076 (194 containing virus)
Accepted: 3,898
Total: 14,974
(Shannon)
- Updated the IDS rules at CIT.
- Passed a number of IDS alerts off to Larry to investigate.
- Added patches to support.ligo-la, cleveland.ligo-la, and a couple of other non-essential machines.
- Moved all of the LVEA network connections to the new switches and removed the old switch.
- repaired the internal wiki.
- Working on new network documentation to reflect the changes over the last year.
- Set up SSL for nebula on the new web server.
- Replaced the keyboard on Janeen's laptop.
- quite a number of other miscellaneous tasks.
- Setup Foundry access point for the outreach building.
Hanford
(Christine)
- The first RAID disk system is setup and the user files have been rsync'ed. I'm building the new file system on the second RAID, which will be completed today. The plan is to move all the user home directories to one RAID system then rsync that to the other RAID system and then to backup to tape from the second RAID system. The user files have been mirrored to the RAID system, but it will take some time to go through NIS+ and change the home directories. We now have ~1.3 TB of disk space broken in to 2 partitions of 658 GB each.
- Sunday I will be taking down the file server to install a new scsi card and connect the new tape robot. I should have the tape backups started by next week.
- Still working on the dtt problem.
- No word from Lockheed Martin since the beginning of the week. They should be completed with their inspection and move to new fibers for the backup network.
CIT
(Mike)
- Hardware issue with one of our DHCP servers. Called Sun and lucked out this box is under warrantee. Until this box gets fixed I built and loaded an additional Sun box to get these services up and running again.
- Worked on moving accounts over to our new home account server. This is an on going project. We still have many accounts to move over.
- Barry Barish: Replaced a hard disk on his laptop due to bad sectors on his current drive. I then moved all his data over to the new drive, and loaded some additional software, plus ran all Microsoft's updates.
- Worked in the B/A server room doing some network/electrical cable clean up work before I could install some additional servers in our racks.
- More work on SolidWorks upgrading a few more boxes to SW 3.1. One is a sandbox running on 64bit server 2003, for users to login via Remote desktop.
- Other user support and sysadmin tasks.
(Veronica)
- LIGO: A couple of video assignments: Processed the latest lock video for the presentation by Rai Weiss, prvided various formats to choose from. Making the video for LIGO Engineering: Working with Ken Mailand on shooting the footage, compressed it for streaming and DVD. This is an ongoing project. Continued working on the new homepage. Continued work on the new roster database. Addressed a couple of media inquiries, provided high-resolution images. Updated the mirror page at MIT. Attended a seminar on web accessibility as a part of the campus webmaster forum. Misc. web upates /user support.
- LSC: Updates of the database of technical papers. Updates of the last meeting's presentations page.
- CaJAGWR: Shot a video of Tuesday's seminar, assisted in its setup. Web updates /user support.
(Christian)
- Installed and configured two workstations with the standard Ligo image. I also installed and configured Solidworks 2007 SP3.
- Disabled FTP and Telnet on all ligo printers.
- Alan Weinstein- Reinstalled parallels and Adobe acrobat 8.
- John Miller- Installed additional monitor.
- Robert Taylor- Configured new system with the Ligo image and transferred all of Roberts¹s data.
- Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone support.
(Larry)
- Worked a number of procurements. Most of which have arrived and have been delivered. Still working on a couple of procurement items for different people. Renewed maint. contract for misc. hardware and a couple of s/w items.
- Working with Rod on a couple of different property items. Along with locating equipment, checking on some items and getting equipment removed we are also working on a web display for the equipment lists. We are going to use this as an opportunity to do a internal audit to help update the MAC address list.
- Worked with Mike on a couple of different h/w and s/w problems. One of the interesting items was that a case fan was causing a system to shutdown even though the case fan was working on the SUN box. It appeared to be a power-supply problem but it was the fan.
- Worked with Veronica on a couple of different web related items. The new CIT LIGO front web page is ready and should be on-line in the near future, once it is approved.
- Tracked down some minor security related items. A couple of computers and printers needed some processes disabled.
- Working with PMA on a number of room changes. The plan for the air-conditioning upgrade in the computer room has been finalized and work should start in a couple of weeks, as soon as the new unit arrives. Work on the other rooms has already started.
- Cleaned up a number of accounts.
- Made some minor modifications on the ligo.org system including a DNS update
- Also working with Mike on getting the home accounts moved to the new system. Just a few hundred to go. We want to get it finished before we have to start getting things ready for the SURF students.
Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)
Advanced LIGO Systems
Modeling and Simulation
From: Hiroaki Yamamoto hiro@ligo.caltech.edu
e2e weekly meeting
Sany Yoshida summarized his study of the frequency noise out of simulated advLIGO locked MC.
AdvLIGO LSC/ASC design using FP arm model with quad suspension (Osamu, Hiro)
I am investigating the gudelock algorithm for an AdLIGO arm cavity with 450uN force at the ESD instead of 100uN. Maximum lockable speed can be enhanced by optimizing the gain predicting the relative position and velocity between mirrors, but this gain optimization causes failures of lock acquisition at lower speed. This is because prediction of velocity is not so correct due to the slope change of error signal with high speed mirror motion. When the force gets stronger, gap between low lockable speed and high lockable speed gets bigger. In other words, this gudelock algorithm cannot use full benefits of strong force. I am looking for another algorithm using the height of transmitted light.
Static IFO simulation (Hiro)
Analysis of the effect of BS size was updated and presented at the COC meeting. www.ligo.caltech.edu/~hiro/talks/COC070418.pdf.
Current design of BS (37cm aperture, 6cm thickness, 9cm flat) and RM (aperture 26.5cm) are acceptable.
To suppress the asymmetry due to clipping by BS for the signal recycling cavity, it is preferable that the BS goes through the center of HR surface, rather than the center of BS. The effect of ESD on ITM was also studied and essentially the clear size can be as small as RM, i.e., 26.5cm.
These results will be summarized in LIGO-T070052.
Modeler - e2e simulation engine, Alfi - GUI front end of e2e (Hiro, Bruce, Melody)
Bruce and Melody working on the implementation of UDP in modeler and Afli. (UDP is what mex file for matlab, a module to build arbitrary primitives without compiling e2e anew)
Mechanical Simulation for advanced LIGO (Sany and SLU team)
Continued the e2e modeling of AdvLIGO Input Mode Cleaner. To optimize the locking performance, adjusted the dc gains of the length sensing and frequency sensing controls. With the better gain setting, the MC locks more stably (with realistic ground motion fed to the base of the AdvLIGO HAM-SAS isolation model). The resultant MC length fluctuation is being analyzed.
CDS Prestabilized Laser
From: Peter King <pking@ligo.caltech.edu>
Christian Veltkamp, of LZH, had a long discussion about interfacing with the Beckhoff Automation software and about the power requirements for the laser power supplies. In order to simply things, we are thinking of using single-phase power supplies, since the current model being used requires a three-phase voltage not readily available at the observatories. On the software side of things, following complications experienced in trying to communicate between TwinCAT, EtherCAT and Ethernet, LZH are looking into the possibility of changing the modules being used so that they talk EtherCAT instead of TwinCAT. This change will not happen in time for EnLIGO.
The last 2-W NPRO laser was characterised using the diagnostic breadboard. The breadboard is more than a useful tool. I might clone it for future use on campus.
Control and Data Systems
See Advanced LIGO
Seismic Isolation
From: Ken Mason kmason@ligo.mit.edu
BSC Seismic Isolation System
Bob Taylor has cleaned and shipped the first two crates of parts back to MIT. Crates 3 and 4 are in process. Galli & Morelli has begun cleaning the large parts.
The actuators and other miscellaneous parts have been shipped to Kyle at LLO for cleaning.
We have received an undersized set of locker parts which will be sent out for coating this week.
Myron has begun raising the test stand to its upper height. The BSC ISI will be built in this high position so that the quad noise prototype can be installed. He is looking at ordering a catwalk for assembling the structure.
HAM Single Stage Isolation System
HPD is approximately 90% complete with the fabrication drawings. They have been able to get multiple quotes on the structure and have submitted a cost to us for the two prototypes for Enhanced LIGO. A schedule has also been completed showing the delivery of the two prototypes to the sites by years end.
Suspensions
From: Norna Robertson <nroberts@ligo.caltech.edu>
- Several series of measurements on output modecleaner structure have been made with and without loading (non-suspended mass) and with and without plates on legs designed to stiffen weld areas (various combinations of Sam W, Vuk, Janeen, Peter F, Norna). Tests are to the design meets the 150 Hz requirement for lowest structural resonant frequency. Initial analysis of results is promising.
- Updating (with Janeen and UK colleagues) Adv LIGO review slides for next week's internal review
- SWG monthly telecons restarted (first one Friday 20th April)
From: Janeen Romie <janeen@ligo-la.caltech.edu>
Enhanced/Advanced LIGO
- Last week, performed preliminary resonance tests on the loaded and unloaded OMC structure with Norna and Sam in the machine shop at Caltech. Looks good. Held a meeting this morning on the OMC parts lists and asked Chris to report on some parts & fixtures. With the Synchrotron lab being moved, coordination is important. Mike Gerfen will need the OMC structure to add vent holes to the blind holes for the OMC structure cover plates.
- Participated in a number of interviews for mechanical engineers at Caltech. Will continue to do that this week. Provided feedback to Mike Smith.
- Worked with Norna on internal review slides.
- Talked to Ken Mason and Justin about tasks and labor requirements for LASTI noise quad work.
- Ken Mailand walked through his quad assembly/installation tooling. He's going to video a dry-run of the tooling with a dummy BSC chamber door tomorrow. The video will be made available to the UK and LASTI team.
- Ordered spare accelerometers, adapters and cabling for resonance testing. Set up Meeting Maker.
From: k mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu
- The LASTI tooling assembly parts are in final assembly.
- Instruction video has been made describing each tooling assembly.
- final clearance tests using the full size suspension mock up will be done today.
Core Optic
- Most of this past week was occupied by filling in (11th hour) a Sci-mon shift at LHO.
- While at LHO I had the opportunity to make substantial head way in a long outstanding issue: what exactly is the "contrast" contained in the typical "globular cluster" beam spot images of the arm cavity TM surfaces? Turns out, Cheryl Vorvick had complete sets of photos she had taken some time back ('04) of one TM spot. This was known. But she also had the facility to analyze the pixilated image data in Matlab. Effectively we were able to analyze those images completely, in a way equivalent to how we can the scatter scans on optic surfaces taken in our OTF. This has been very revealing. However I want to undertake further analysis before anouncing any conclusions (since some of these may be quite different from previous).
From: GariLynn Billingsley <Billingsley_G@ligo.caltech.edu>
- The metrology review meeting for CSIRO has been scheduled for 22-23 May at CSIRO. Kathy Creath and GariLynn Billingsley attending.
- The metrology review meeting for QED is tentatively scheduled for May 11 at QED, Rochester, NY. Kathy Creath and GariLynn Billingsley attending.
- Both QED and CSRIO have delivered status reports.
- The Beamsplitter size has been fixed at 370 mm diameter, a RODA is forthcoming. The PRM, SRM and MMT3 sized are recommended to be 265 mm, a RODA is forthcoming. Recycling mirror radius of curvature tolerance appears quite tight at ~±1.5 nm in sag, this will be visited in the coming weeks.
From: Liyuan Zhang <zhang_l@ligo.caltech.edu>
- Using the integrating sphere, we scanned the two 1" dia. gold coated samples recently coming back from CSIRO. One sample is a gold coated 1"dia. REO HR mirror, and other one is a gold coated substrate. While the both 'as received' samples show some point/dust scatters, the gold coated substrate shows a lower 'microroughness' peak, which is consistent with what we observed using a detector at 45 degrees in the first gold coating test. Before making a conclusion, we are looking forward to somehow removing most of the point/dust contamination one these two delicate samples and repeating the measurement.
Auxiliary Optics
From: Michael Smith smith@ligo.caltech.edu
- I developed a louver concept for the arm cavity baffle, using vertical strips of black glass at Brewster's angle to form a series of parallel cavites. This has the advantage of providing a low BRDF, and a low reflectivity because the trapped beam undergoes 5 bounces before it exits. The strips of glass will be held in a top and bottom frame, and overlapped at the joints--the fabriction is straightforward. We can expect a net reflectivity of < 0.005^5 = 3E-12 and a BRDF < 0.001
From: Phil Willems willems@ligo.caltech.edu
Finite Element Modeling of OSEM Actuation
- At the request of Mike Landry and Brian O'Rielly, I modeled the elastic response of the test mass to forces applied by the OSEMs. Not surprisingly, the mirror flexes like a drumhead to the OSEM forces applied at its periphery. In the frequency range of our calibration, the quasistatic approximation to the elastic response is very good- the bending is independent of frequency, even as the bulk recoil of the mass falls as 1/f^2. The motion of the HR surface ends up larger than predicted by bulk recoil of the optic. At 100 Hz the correction is about 0.016%. At 1000 Hz the correction is about 1.6%. At 5000 Hz the correction is about 30%, and the quasistatic approximation begins to break down as the drumhead mode of the optic is excited. Slides describing the work may be viewed at www.ligo.caltech.edu/~willems/PC/Photon_Calibrator.html
Study of TCS Actuation Noise in Virgo Plus
- I modeled flexure noise in the Virgo Plus input mirror using parameters given to me by Alessio Rocchi from the Roma Tor Vergata group. Results are preliminary but suggest that the power stability required will be of the order RIN=1e-7/root(Hz), unless clever tricks we know of are used to reduce the net flexure.
Input Optics
From: David tanner@phys.ufl.edu
This week everybody is working on finalizing their contribution to the AdvLIGO IO PDR. The final version will be submitted by Friday by Dave Reitze.
In addition:
Dave Reitze:
- Revising the DRD, responding to the action items, and working on a test plan
Guido Mueller:
- Worked on the monolithic Mach-Zehnder Design for the PDR.
- Working through the ASC code from Valera Frolov and prepare a document to get the student started once classes stop.
Muzammil Arain:
- Shack-Hartman sensor is being refurbished/updated to be used in thermally induced aberrations in optical elements.
Wan Wu:
- Setting up the experiment to test the EOM with wedged crystal built-in.
- Aligning the optics and optimizing the mode matching between two lasers.
Wan, Muzammil, and Rodica gave 10 minutes talks at the APS April meeting in Jacksonville. David Reitze gave a 30 mins talk at this meeting.
For additional information about this report, contact Albert Lazzarini or Phil Lindquist