Weekly Report for Week Ending May 10, 2007

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

LSC Issues (Reitze)

• The Elections and Membership Committee completed a demographic survey of the LSC.  At the present time, there are 519 members of the LSC not including undergraduates (563 including undergraduates) representing 55 institutions, 16 states, and 11 countries.
• Gregg Harry was elected to the chairmanship of the Optics Working Group.
• Finally, plans continue for the upcoming LSC-Virgo meeting.  Information and registration details can be found at https://pub3.ego-gw.it/lscvirgomay07/
• The CW search group paper, ``Coherent searches for periodic gravitational waves from unknown isolated sources and Scorpius X-1: Results from the second LIGO science run'', was accepted in Phys. Rev. D.

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (Luna)

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

• Provided assistance to the Detector Group  (H. Armandula) with filing a Duty-Free entry form to US Department of Commerce for the Glass Mass from University of Glasgow.
• Assisted Joe Giaime at LLO in reconciling outstanding assets for LLO's Inventory and updating information in Oracle.
• Worked with Lisa Bogue and Shannon Roddy at LLO in creating a list of surplus / obsolete computer equipment.
• Provided assistance to the Detector Group (H. Armandula) with making arrangements to ship back a coated Fused Silica Substrate from VIRGO, France.  Account Number LIGO.OPT - 5.4 - NSFLIGO.FY02ON.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

• Continuing to work on the publication surge that has hit us the last few weeks.
• Scanning Update - Progress continues on scanning of all non-electronic "L" category documents on file.

Document Management System - Plan B (Lindquist)

There was no meeting scheduled last week.  An instance of DocDB has been provided to the committee for testing.

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Funaro, Brambila, Kaufman)

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

• For ACCOUNTS PAYABLE HISTORY Press Here.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

• Prepared and posted the monthly report for FY07 Operations as of the end of April.
• Attended a Sponsored Research Forum in which the findings and recommendations that came out of the NSF Office of Inspector General's recent audit were discussed.  Though the focus of the audit was on Caltech's Payroll Distribution Reports, the findings covered a variety of areas including cost sharing, cost transfers and proposal preparation. 
• Assisted in the preparation of four new fabrication requests - two from John Worden for the vacuum system at Hanford and Livingston, and two from Ken Mason for HAM SEI Controls and Instruments and Mechanical Structures.
• Prepared and sent out a report as of the end of April for Kent Blackburn's award from the University of Wisconsin.
• Prepared and sent out an Intra Award Transfer form at Richard McCarthy's request to transfer expenditure from HAN/2.6 to HAN/2.11.
• Prepared an Intra Award Transfer form to transfer expenditures from LIGO.TEC/1.3 to the fabrication account LIGO.PSLTD/5.3.
• Financial reports can be found at: http://docuserv.ligo.caltech.edu/~fireport. (For passwords contact Florence)

SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Jasnow, Salone)

• A contract for the HAM SEI ISI system has been prepared and submitted to the Caltech OSR for signature prior to being sent to the NSF for review and approval.  A few minor comments from OSR are being addressed.

• Rod and Ed conducted a property inventory at Livingston this week.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

Inputs for the Monthly Summary Report for LIGO Operations are due Friday.  The report will be submitted early next week.

Draft contributions for the proposal for continuing LIGO Operations (FY 2009 – 2013) are due next Tuesday.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

• The next Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled for Monday, May 14.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

Nothing significant this week, the LLO safety audit will take place next Tuesday and Wednesday.

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

Some relatively large earthquakes, and some windy time, but the duty cycle (Thu May/3 to Wed May/9 2007) of H1 was 88.8 percent with typically 15 to 15.5 Mpc binary inspiral range, H2 84.3 percent with typically more than 7 Mpc.

Summaries: Range and Duty Cycle update. Tuesday maintenance summary.

Highlights from the LHO elog:

• Keith Thorne's spectral line finding program was updated (both in LHO and in LLO). Several findings were posted in the elog.
• An earthquake of magnitude 4.6 in Montana, another one with mag 5.2 off coast of N. California.
• A study of glitch group showed no glitch from ISCT10 (this is a followup study of some H2 glitches which seemed to be related to isct10 accelerometer events).
• Two interesting "bumpy" glitches in H1, separated by 10 sec..
• Another round of calibration run was performed both for H1 and H2. This doesn't necessarily mean that we need V4 calibration, though.

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

Due to the net interruptions at LLO, contributions were not compiled this week.

LIGO computing and network security (Roddy)
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Reported under General Computing, see below

General computing and LDAS admin (Giardina)
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Reported under General Computing, see below

Reported under LDAS System Administration, see below

Data analysis & computing (Yakushin)
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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:
  • Rob made laser intensity noise measurements using a single bounce off the PRM and the REFL33 diode. He finds a forest of peaks in the 1-2 kHz region that closely parallels our DARM noise spectrum. Rob suspects some clipping in the REFL path.
  • Rana made measurements of the ITM and ETM OSEM coil driver contribution to our DARM noise in the 100 Hz region. He and Rana have pulled the dewhitening boards and are putting in new lower noise op amps and newly designed PZ dewhite filter stages.
  • Steve has been using our Nikon with a new zoom lens to take closeup pictures of the laser-illuminated test masses, at 0 and ~45degree view angles, in order to undersand the observed scattering. He has identified what appears to be a sizeable (~ mm?) scratch in the middle of ETMX, visible only at ~ 45degree viewing angle.
  • Controls computer is chronically misbehaving, presumably associated with the fact that it has two video cards and heads. We will need some help to make it useable.
• IFO modeling:
  • Rana and others have been thinking about modifications to the 40m to test the new AdLIGO RF sensing scheme, featuring a much longer, folder PRC, and much lighter ITMs to enhance radiation pressure effects which will be important with the higher laser power in AdLIGO.
  • Rana did some modelling of the effect of the Krypton from our leaky DCPD nipple on the noise. It is surprisingly large, and he says it would be neat to leak some more in our vacuum to see the noise in DARM.
• DC detection:
  • Rob measured the relative coupling of laser frequency noise to the DARM signal, in RF and DC readout, in a PRFPMI. There is a 20 db reduction in the noise coupling with DC readout above ~ 600 Hz.
  • The new DCPD board is stuffed, and in its pipe nipple. Ben started a functional test last week, and he'll finish it up next week, when he gets back.
• Vacuum squeezing:
  • Go and Nergis have a near-final draft of a paper on the 40m squeezing experiment, which is intended for Nature Letters.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

LASTI (Mittleman)

CIT Science Group (Weinstein)

Laboratory Computing (Anderson)

LDAS Software Systems (Maros)

LDAS System Administration (Anderson)

Caltech

(Dan Kozak)

• Did lots of work with stuck tapes in drives and drives power cycling themselves.Worked with Sun/STK to upgrade power supplies, power supply cables and firmware for 9940B drives.Continuing to verify md5sums for data on tape to detect bit rot and to allow us to relabel tapes.Attended Sun meeting. Worked with Sean Cochrane from Sun to figure out why our 6140s were so slow--then answer is it was only using one controller.Did more work with the 6140s (multiple mms, RAID5 mms, etc.).Did a samfsck of /scratch.Discovered and fixed problem with gettapes script under SAM-QFS 4.6 (samfsdump has a ~3660 argument limit now).Provided support for (SAM-)QFS upgrade at LLO.Monitored temperatures in Booth.Deleted non-science S5 L1 data in CIT cluster.
• Set up directories and archive set for Virgo data and made sure it was making it to tape.

(Phil Ehrens)

• Worked on MOU webforms project. Completed file upload and backup version code. Modified Apache config to hide backup files from user view. Began to write pdfLaTeX header and file normalisation routines.  Debugged validation routines, error handling, and logging subsystems.Updated travel and visitor webforms to handle ALL client character encodings transparently. Currently testing visitor form for LaTeX compatibility before deploying.  TAR with full client character encoding support has been deployed.
• Began writing installation scripts which will create required directory hierarchy and necessary pre-existing template files with correct permissions for MOU webform project.

(Erik Espinoza)

• Worked with Virgo to transfer data. Received WSR8 data. Responded to High Temperature Alerts in Synchrotron.Submitted core dump feature request ticket to condor group. Testing kernel 2.6.20-11 on frog for use on cluster nodes.Looked into backporting nfs-utils again, lots of rpc.mountd issues. Working on wrapper for rpc.mountd issues.Tested web app in IE for Phil.Installed test LSCSOFT rpms on frog.
• Put max connections limit to ldas dev/production gateways.

MIT

(Fred Donovan)

• Wiped datacache1, installed centos 5, removed one bad drive from 3ware array - sent 3 drives to Seagate(Maxtor) for replacement.
• /dso-test/home full, thinking of /home2 for cluster-wide user dirs.

Livingston

(Igor Yakushin)

• QFS is upgraded to version 4.6 on gateway and dataserver.
• X4500 is mounted and turned on, no OS is installed yet.

(Dwayne Giardina)

• Tape eject for shipment to CIT.Replaced failed disk in T3-24.Rack mount of new x4500, with Bernie, Igor and Shannon.Replaced failed power strip with a temporary solution, so all  nodes should be up now.  I just realized that cluster_mon is reporting them as down, so I will investigate.
• Equipment inventory.

Hanford

(Greg Mendell)

• I am continuing to work on a new driver script for h(t) generation, and I am working on making sure we have enough tapes to keep archiving data until the end of S5.

General Computing (Wallace)

MIT(Fred)

• Set up altium machine electronics lab; vm ware for F. laptop.Flexlm licensing issues (alcor); hibay pc(pi) disk bad.New zone (ligomail.mit.edu) on pellinore.Set up squirrelmail web mail under  https (ligo.mit.edu/webmail); will test.
• Usual desktop assistance.

Livingston(Dwayne)

• multiple printer setups on user PCsactivated a dead network port in an officeassisted with HTML/javascript on www.ligo-la <http://www.ligo-la> sitereceived six SEC laptops, began installing appsinventorynetwork outage.  mail server / spam filter have been moved to new network (mostly Shannon, all I did was the DNS changes) usual user support requests
• cleared spam trap

Hanford

(Christine)

• Purchased a Solaris Subscription to get access to all patches and updates. Needed a multitasking patch for Matlab 2007a. I have the patch and I'm installing it on all the Sun computers.Started planning the location and computer needs of the summer visitors.Purchased a new printer for the Computer Users room.Tried to fix the GC PC in the Control Room. Windows will not boot in any configuration. Tried to re-install, but it gets to the point of trying to start Windows and hangs. Tried to boot from the Knoppix CD to look at the hard drive, but even Knoppix won't boot. Re-seated memory, hard drive, CD, etc. Still no luck. I guess I'll try a new hard drive.-
• Other misc. user support.

CIT

(Mike)

• Continued work on moving users over to our new Home Account server.Worked with Larry moving equipment out of our server room in B/A to make room for the new air conditioning unit PMA is installing.
• Other user support plus sysadmin tasks.

(Veronica)

• LIGO: Continued working on the DVD project for Ken Mailand's group. Ongoing work on the new roster, assisted Cindy with its maintenance.  Troubleshoot of a DCC document search utility on pherkab. Working on the updates of the homepage. Other web updates.
• LSC: Updates of the database of technical papers. Posted several belated presentations from the last mCaJAGWR: Website updates /user support.

(Larry)

• Worked through a number of procurement items. Still have a few more orders to place but they will have to wait a week or so. Getting paperwork wrapped up on some warranty items that have been replaced.A lot of time spent with the different people working on the changes to the labs and computer room. The cleanup of electrical wiring has been wrapped up in the computer room and they are getting things ready to install the new airconditioning unit. Having a number of LIGO network lines installed in different rooms and in the labs.Wrapped up the support for the campus safety group. It looks like they have everything they need to have campus set things up for them and we (the GC group) are now out of the loop.Setup a couple more mailman accounts. Worked on a new mail server. Things are compiling and working but still having a problem with relaying services.Worked with Mike in debugging a few issues on moving the accounts over to the new server.
• Setup a couple of new user accounts. Assisted users with various problems, including remote connectivity. Working on the logistics for the SURF program.

(Bruce Sears)

• General Computing:   (0.5 days). General iLog maintenance and issue handling.

(Christian)

• Finished installing new WSUS 3 server. The server is ready to accept Windows clients. Re-imaged laptops that were returned to the loaner pull this week. 3flr W/B - Replaced toner cartridges on HP 5500 printer. I did an inventory on printing supplies. Minor tweaks on the unit in the display case.
• Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone support.

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Systems

Modeling and Simulation

From: Hiroaki Yamamoto hiro@ligo.caltech.edue2e weekly meeting

• Osamu summarized his work on locking AdvLIGO arm. After improving the guided lock acquisition method by introducing velocity dependent correction factor, he could lock up to 500nm/sec using SED with maximal force of 450 microN. This is the summary. SPI  is implemented as a device to suppress the seismic noise by factor 10 below 1Hz based on the thesis by Aso. The main purpose of this work is to find a reliable way to lock one arm at the first fringe crossing.

Static IFO simulation (Hiro)

• Thermal deformation is fully implemented with proper interface using the previous locked state. This automates the calculation of the effect of thermal deformation (start from cold start, let the mirror deform using the previous power distribution, calculate the field, etc , repeat until the beam becomes stable). This should work for the mexican hat setup as well. John is testing.
• Implementation of coupled cavity with audio sideband signal source being developed.

Modeler - e2e simulation engine, ALFI : e2e front end  (Hiro, Bruce, Melody)UserDefinedPrimitive, a la, max file in matlab:

• Interface front-end in Alfi and simulation code in modeler are almost done.
• What needs to be done before the release has been discussed.

Mechanical Simulation for advanced LIGO (Sany and SLU team)

• In the effort of locking the AdvLIGO Input Mode Cleaner (MC) more stably in our e2e modeling, we tried to frequency control the MC by feeding back the error signal directly to the laser model. Previously, we tried to do this without success (the frequency control did not work at all), and decided to pseudo-frequency control by adjusting the optic directly. Recently we found that the problem was due to the fact that we did not change the sideband’s frequency in accordance with the carrier. After fixing this problem, the frequency control seems to respond as expected. We will need more investigation on it.

CDS Prestabilized Laser

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

• Considerable progress has been made in a low-noise amplifier circuit, with the amplifier's input referred noise being below the levels required at 1 Hz.  A photodetector using a similar topology is about to be tested. The air-handling fan at LZH was replaced, so the lab is back up and running.  Unfortunately we couldn't get a hold of the Beckhoff Automation programmer in Hannover.  Their support in Hannover would appear to be on par with the support we get on campus.
• Rolf and Alex completed installing two digital control systems here at the AEI.  The PSL diagnostic breadboard was locked using the new-style digital controls.  A quick attempt at a digital servo for the pre-modecleaner had a unity gain frequency of approximately 2.5 kHz without any resonant notches for tuning out the PZT resonances.  The pre-modecleaner lock acquisition works well too.

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