Weekly Report for Week Ending August 2, 2007

Past Weekly Reports

The LIGO Executive Committee Agenda for Monday, August 6, 2007 will be:

(Meeting time: 10:30 am Pacific Time)

1. Announcements

2. Programmatic (Marx)

 

3. Comments on Weekly Report

4. LSC and Data Analysis (Reitze)

5. LIGO Lab Operations

  • Administration (Lindquist)
  • Sites (Raab, Giaime, Shoemaker)
  • Commissioning (Fritschel)
  • Optical and Mechanical (Coyne)
  • Control and Data Systems (Bork)
  • 40m (Weinstein)
  • TNI (Libbrecht)
  • LASTI (Mittleman)
  • Lab computing ( Anderson )
  • Data Analysis Group (Weinstein)
  • Instrument Science (Gustafson)

6. Enhancements (Zucker)

7. Advanced LIGO (Shoemaker)

8. Change Control Board/Technical Review Board Session as needed

  • There are no open change requests

Site and other Business Issues:

 

Special Items:

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights

LSC Issues (Reitze)

  • Preparations are underway for the LSC MOU panel review to be held at MIT on August 16-17.  LSC groups have been sent instructions for reporting last year's work and the coming year's plans. The deadline for reporting is August 7.
  • Some observational results publication news:
    • The SGR 1806-20 QPO search analysis "Search for gravitational wave radiation associated with the pulsating tail of the SGR 1806-20 hyperflare of 27 December 2004 using LIGO" has been accepted by Phys. Rev. D.
    • The S3/S4 known pulsar upper limit paper "Upper limits on gravitational wave emission from 78 radio pulsars" has been published online and can be found at:

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=

PRVDAQ000076000004042001000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=Yes

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

  • MOUs received and processed for 2007 review:

MOU

Attachments

ACIGA

ACF, Z

Carleton

DAT, OPS, Z

NAOJ-TAMA

ACF, Z

University of Rochester

DAT, Z

Trinity University

OPT, OUT, Z

University of Wisconsin

DAT, OPS, Z
  • Work continues with Phil Ehrens and Dave Reitze on setting up the information that will be reuqired for the MOU review 16, 17 August.

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

  • We are preparing a list of publications for the Continuing Operations Proposal.  Citations have been added to all publications that could be found in the Spires database.  For those still missing a citation, a second pass-through using Google is in process with a few being picked up through that search engine.  Additionally, I'm pulling in the actual publication from it's respective journal when available, so that the DCC has an actual copy of the published work.

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

  • Focused mainly on processing of presentations from last week's LIGO/Virgo Collaborations Meeting.
  • Scanning Update - Scanning has slowed down quite a bit as attention has been diverted to other items.

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Funaro, Brambila, Kaufman)

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

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

  • Completed the purchase of the vehicle for Livingston, and also change order #1.
  • Responded to the auditor's request for procurement documents on the NSF audit.  Submitted all orders that will be audited.
  • Submitted Release of Claims to close several subcontracts.
  • Awaiting for the completed Debarment Certificate on the pending order to the University of Glasgow.
  • Submitted the revised mod to MIT.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

  • Responded to requests from account managers about data on the Payroll Distribution Confirmation reports for the six month period ending March 31, 2007.  Reminder if you have not signed and returned the sheet sent to you, please do so as soon as possible.
  • Submitted a request for funding realignments to Project Accounting.
  • Worked on issues related to the Cost Transfer for I2U2 and the expenditure type corrections required in this Award.
  • Prepared a summary of expenditures for January, February and March 2007 for the TBSR Review.
  • Financial reports can be found at: http://docuserv.ligo.caltech.edu/~fireport. (For passwords contact Florence)

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

Trying to sew up the proposal for continuing operations (FY 2009 – FY 2013) and we cannot accept any more changes with the exception of correcting significant problems or revisions that we have already agreed to accept.  A final draft will be prepared for subsequent review.

Also trying to build an Annual report for current Operations.  Initial attempts to extract material from the Continuing Ops proposal have proved difficult, and we may have to request additional information.  Hopefully not.

The LIGO Visitors program is officially over as of July 31, 2007 (subsequent visitors will be covered by Operations accounts), and a Final Report must now be prepared for that Grant.  We will be asking for input.

Preparations for the NSF Total Business Systems Review (TBSR) scheduled August 20-24 are underway.  Have been providing pointers to various documentation and preparing some documentation that does not currently exist.

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 Wednesday, August 22.  The agenda for the Staffing Committee is on the SC web page.  The minutes and action items from the July Staffing Committee meeting have been posted on the SC web page.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

Nothing significant to report this week.

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

Summary of S5 Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory (compiled by K. Kawabe)

A week of good run. The duty cycle of H1 and H2 (from Thu. 26/Jul/2007 to Wed. 1/Aug/2007) were 92.1 and 84.6 percent, respectively, with typically 15.5 Mpc and from 6.5- Mpc binary range. H2 continues to operate with only 3 AS diodes due to acoustic coupling issue.

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

Highlights from the LHO elog:

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

S5 Summary (Igor Yakushin)

  • Duty cycle 79%. Most of the time the range was around 14Mpc.
  • On Tuesday Valera, Brian and SURF students worked on scattering measurements (3 hours of July's commissioning time).

[JG: We learned this week that the volunteer fire department test carried out last month was not successful, and we have tentatively agreed to let them do it again on August 21, for a few hours after the normal maintenance period.]

Safety & Security (JG for R. Riesen)

  • Worked to close out two action items from safety audit.
  • Planned staff re-training on large equipment in preparation for post- S5 work.
  • Scheduled CPR training for several staff members.

LLO Outreach (JG for J. Thacker)

  • Hosted SUBR's Project MISE for two days... prepared and delivered programs
  • Our outreach calendar is now available online
  • Attended Current Phase Closeout committee meeting
  • Discussed outreach plans with Marco Cavaglia and Ole Miss reps
  • Planned, prepared, and delivered teacher training workshop for ST. Tammany Parish school system

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)

  • We decided not to vent for drag-wiping, out of fear that it will reduce the arm cavity losses to the point where they are almost critically coupled, which will make locking much harder. We'll wait till Rob finishes his DC readout transfer function measurements.
  • Rob has returned to locking the full IFO in power-recycled FPMI mode. He had to tweak the alignment of the MC optics, and fix a few other problems, but it all seems to still work fine.
  • All the 40m SURF students have prepared abstracts and progress reports. Next week, they're off to LLO. Sonia is testing a new set of OSEM input matrices for the three mode cleaner optics. Next: optimizing the gain, automating the procedure, and moving on to the core optics.
  • Alice has completed her noise analysis of the new RF photodiode design, and is preparing to assemble a prototype for testing.
  • Josh continues to develop his code for automating recognition of higher order transverse modes in the PMC (and later, OMC) transmission scans.
  • Keenan gave us a nice talk on the status of his gravity gradient analysis; see his slides.
  • Steve and Josh continue to refine their photographic skills in capturing resonant spots on the test masses in exquisite detail.
  • Steve removed a faraday isolator from Go's squeezer and returned it to Nergis.
  • Bob is expecting a new shipment of powerful magnets to build a new Faraday isolator for eLIGO.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

  • This week we finished aligning the arm cavities, closed the chamber, and pumped down. The mode cleaner is having some issues, and we need to resolve those before we can take data. Akira has some ideas on how to resolve the problem.

LASTI (Mittleman)

  • Construction work continues. We have installed the stage 0-1 locker/locator assemblies and have moved on to installing the blade springs. We have started on with the stage 1-2 blades and hope to have them in by the end of this week. Joe Hanson and Cory Grey have left and been replaced by Hugh Radkins.
  • After some debugging we determined that the cable inside of the STS2 pods had been incorrectly wired so we are working with Danny and Brian at LLO to get a patch cable to plug in outside of the pods that reroutes the wires to the correct pinning. The horizontal GS13 were tested by Brian O’Reilly, and look to be working normally.

Quad Noise Prototype

  • We have started to assemble the masses onto the Gazebo. While doing that a problem was found in the upper support structure. Four holes are in the wrong place and some holes that should have been tapped and helicoiled were not. We are going to try and drill new holes and tap the ones that should have been in a clean manner and move on. Joe and Tim have returned to the UK and Brett is in charge on his own at the moment.

Cavity Testing

  • Matt and Lisa have tested the ESD drive and found that it does not behave as expected. The likely cause is that we have an extra ground planes due to the metal test and reaction mass. There is a nice entry in the Lasti ilog on 7/29/07. The bottom line is that although the force coefficient seems to be a bit larger the reduced voltage means that we have less force available then anticipated probably not enough to use the quad for locking.

CIT Science Group (Weinstein)

________________

New Data Analysis postdoc Anand Sengupta has arrived. Please make him welcome!

 

________________

Kent Blackburn:

GRID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT:

  • Wrote agenda for weekly LIGO-Pegasus telecon. Discussed challenges associated with LIGO's 1000 jobs peak utilization milestone on the OSG which is coming due in September. Discussed porting of the  Einstein@Home application to the OSG and Teragrid. Discussed an alternate plan for reaching the 1000 jobs peak in the event that data storage is a problem on the OSG.
  • Met with Kent to discuss ways to tune the binary inspiral application to be more efficient on the OSG by shortening the amount of data used and increasing the run time. This will be helpful in meeting the 1000  jobs peak milestone.
  • Attend weekly LIGO-Pegasus and DASWG telecon and wrote minutes for weekly LIGO-Pegasus telecon.
  • Ran 24 LIGO WFs concurrently at 12 (LIGO stable) OSG sites.
  • Found additional OSG sites to run at:
    • add MIT entry to sites.xml and tc.data
    • test 6 new sites: 3 successful: UCSDT2, GROW_PROD,MIT_CMS
  • Continued to work with the OSG Troubleshooting team, the Condor developers, the Globus developers, and the Pegasus developers on the stdout problem seen by LIGO's binary inspiral workflow:
    • changed condor version to stable release 6.8.3
    • tested at 12 sites, problem persists at: SAR_BNL, OSG_LIGO_MIT, UFlorida_PG, UWMilwaukee

NOTE: It is now widely agreed that there are several issues with the underlying technology which need to be fixed. Three modifications to software base have been proposed and are being tested. Even though LIGO is the only VO to encounter these bugs, they do exist and because the relative complexity of LIGO workflows we were the first to be able to identify the problems.

OPEN SCIENCE GRID INTEGRATION TESTBED (ITB/VTB):

  • Attend OSG ITB telecon and VTB telecon.
  • Attend OSG Site Administrator Meetings, July 29 - Aug 1, 2007 at Fermilab.
  • Install condor-6.8.3 on submit server (osg-itb-se), verify by running test case successfully on osg-itb and osg-vtb cluster.
  • Debugged/edited condor preemption policy on osg-vtb server in order to run LIGO test case prior than OSG Grid Excerciser jobs.

OPEN SCIENCE GRID MANAGEMENT:

  • Worked with OSG Executive team to prepare Annual Report to the Funding Agencies.
  • Reviewed contract with UNC-Chapel Hill for hosting next March's OSG All Hands Consortium Meeting.
  • Reviewed several Change Control Requests for adjustments to funding and staff levels as OSG prepares plans for second year as the chair of the OSG Finance Board and Resources co-Manager.
  • Began preparations for the next OSG Finance Board meeting in November.
  • Worked with LSC users to get DOEGrids user certificates now that a new set of scripts are available for requesting and renewing via the LSC Data Grid Client software package.

________________

Gregory Mendell:

________________

Kari Hodge:

________________

Alan Weinstein:

  • Read and commented on progress reports for SURFer Becky Tucker (and 40m SURFers)
  • Re-read GRB paper, prepare for review telecon
  • Work on the LIGO Lab Ops proposal, Data Analysis section
  • Meet with Gaby to prepare for MOU review
  • Announce send-off party for Steve, Eirini, Vuk, Michal
  • Look over follow-up writeup from Romain and Eirini
  • Worry about some salary issues for Florence
  • Work on allocation of offices and desks in Millikan

Laboratory Computing (Anderson)

LDAS Software Systems (Maros)

  • After getting out version 1.9.0 of LDAS and fixing some local issues, efforts this week have focused on unifying the System tests that are used for validating LDAS. To ensure consistency, some core Tcl packages are being created. Contained in these packages are procedures for the most common tasks. Also, each test is being modified to use the tcltest harness allowing for simple PASS/FAIL analy sis. Finally, a master script is also being create which runs the tests in a batch mode. Where possible, it will run groups of tests in parallel thereby minimizing the time required to validate an LDAS sysstem. These tests are being placed into the LDAS distribution so they can be run after a system has been installed. The following tests have been converted to the new model: fracc6.tcl, dtcheck.tcl, compresstest.tcl, and frgap.tcl.

LDAS System Administration (Dan Kozak)

MIT

Fred Donovan

  • data13 online now - some disk replacements
  • Cannot bring data5 up - bad mainboard?

Livingston

Igor Yakushin

  • T3-11 spontaneously rebooted yesterday morning due to a cache memory problem. One RDS frame got corrupted and fixed.

Dwayne Giardina

  • Tape eject for shipment to CIT
  • Tape storage eject

Ben Johnson

  • Fixed 12 broken nodes. They had issues ranging from foundry switch problems to failed power supplies.
  • Researched OpenLDAP + OpenSSL.
  • LLO had a T3 restart itself. No data was permanently corrupted.
  • The diskcacheAPI does seem to be robust to node shutdowns etc. It has ridden out the node fixing and rebooting I did in the first item.
  • Drive 44 was replaced. It seems to be working without keeping tapes to itself.

Hanford

Gregory Mendell

  • The certificate utilities distributed with LDG, LSCrenewCert, LSCrequestCert, and LSCretrieveCert, have changed and need to be updated. Users needing to request or renew their personal certificate for use with LDG should read the item posted here http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/lscdatagrid/ under the "News" ection on 07/28/2007.  We are working on a new release of LDGs that will include the new utilities.

CIT

Erik Espinoza

  • Worked with Sean@ASA on fan problem
  • Worked with PMA for clearing mezzanine
  • Provided more info to new Sun engineer on NFSv4 problem
  • Assisted Britta and Drew on dagman config files
  • Fixed disk problem on node165
  • Made space on node228 (full disk) - Condor is running again
  • Diagnosing ldas-pcdev1 (two crashes

Phil Ehrens

  • Bugfixes, documentation, and customer support of the MOU Webforms Project.

Dan Kozak

  • Sent more info to Sun about morbo crash (at their request). Got all of the old SAM-QFS /home on tape and am running a final samfsdump.
  • Turned off the top tape drive in the CIT silo and haven't had any strange problems with tapes/robot since.  Will try to get Sun to replace it, but it doesn't fail in any obvious way so this may be difficult.
  • Discovered problem where clusterstage using rsync meant that diskcacheAPI will not see files that are filled in long after the directory is created.  Since doing a 'touch' on the directories in question caused diskcacheAPI to "see" the files, I suggest that clusterstage use '-O' option to rsync to avoid resetting the timestamps on directories.
  • Working on deleting level 1 h(t) on cluster nodes (H1 & H2 done, L1 in progress).
  • While deleting H2 level 1 h(t) file from cluster, managed to accidentally delete H2 level 2 LLO h(t) on cluster nodes as well.
  • Am currently copying these back from /archive/frames.
  • Gave some help to LLO after their T3 reboot.
  • Gave some help to LLO after their T3 reboot.
  • Discovered tape erroneously marked unavailabe at LLO and fixed it.
  • Am working on fixing/removing all tapes marked in error at LLO.
  • Did some followup on dataserver-cit's spontaneous reboot. There's not enough info to file a problem report.  If it happens again, I'll do a diagnostic reboot as the problem is/was probably hardware related.  On the up side, the "Australian" patch worked correctly and the machine came up without any intervention vis a vis QFS/NFS exports.
  • Helped Kevin Flasch with LDR transfer problems.  Believe that files are being released before he can transfer them.
  • Discovered that general computing UFS dumps were using 6.2TB of /archive (which was causing problems like the above).  Set up NFS export of /archive/backups/GC to mizar (the GC machine with the tape drive) so Larry could start moving some of this stuff to tape.

General Computing (Wallace)

MIT

Fred

  • Some net outages NW22 (plasma link down)
  • Solidworks computer - bad mainboard; RMA in process
  • Cad data recovery; notebook data recovery (again...)
  • Update license servers (matlab; mathematica)
  • Meetingmaker tomcat issue
  • Nagios scan of ligocalendar
  • Quite a few desktop issues

Livingston

Dwayne

  • Finished rebuilding a MacBook Pro, installed third-party software and XP inside of parallels
  • Cleaned viruses/spyware off a PC
  • Patched two of our DNS servers
  • Rebooted kantech security server
  • HTML/PHP development for SEC field trip registration process
  • Installed GCAM utility on PC in visitor office
  • Usual user support requests
  • Cleared spam trap

LLO mail summary for 26 July 2007 - 2 August 2007:

Rejected:  8,048(85 containing virus)

Accepted: 3,997

Total: 12,045

Shannon

  • Spent most of Friday working a support issue with Sun concerning renewal  of an SSL cert on the mail server.  One of the patches seems to have broken the console.
  • Looked into a bind vulnerability, affects most linux & solaris 10.  No sun patch yet.  Linux patches mostly available.  Cache poisoning vulnerability.
  • IDS logs, etc.  In addition to the normal logs, looked through the logs for signs that one machine in particular was infected.  Machine had spyware, etc. but not much showed up in the IDS.
  • Checking on a mail php script to be sure it is not vulnerable to script injection.
  • Patched one of the external servers (ns1).
  • Much discussion about the trinet seismometers and placement on the network, etc.  Discussions with Szabi, Dave, etc. about future management of these.

Hanford

Christine

  • Still moving home directories to the new disk system.  Still doing some user account clean up.
  • Upgraded a user's laptop to Win XP and the latest versions of the standard software.  Installed Dreamweaver software.
  • Helped a new contractor working at the site with computer problems and set up user/email accounts.
  • Investigated a problem with the wireless in the LSB.  Discovered the wireless AP had been un-plugged.
  • Misc. user support for the SURF students and other visitors.

CIT

Mike

  • Worked on pherkab due to some system errors, that is causing the server to reboot which kills the services one which is the roster. After trouble shooting the server with Larry we have decided to build another server. This is an on going project.
  • Helped installing a new UPS in room 19 with Larry, also moved some equipment to our surplus room. I also connected menkar to this UPS.
  • Setup some additional user accounts.
  • Trouble shot some user issues with spyware, and adware. I was able to clean this computer.
  • Ran end of month ghost backups on all critical NT servers.
  • Additional misc. user support and sysadmin tasks.

Veronica

  • LSC:  Postings of the July meeting presentations.  Other misc. web updates.
  • LIGO:  Copies of the DVD of laser safety course.  Additional copies of all-hands meeting DVD.  Refreshing my memory on web security issues. Ongoing web updates and user support.

Christian

Nothing to report.

Larry

  • Wrapped up a few items from the conference at MIT. Overall things went well on the technical side of the setup. We are now working on a checklist to work from for future meeting setups.
  • Worked a number of procurements and still a number of orders to place. Still working on documentation for the p-card group on past purchases.
  • Ran the backups for the user accounts. Now working on getting things cleaned off of the backup disk server to tape and a few other house cleaning items.
  • Still working on the mail-server. The new unit is just about ready for the local users to move to. We are also getting another box ready to be used as a backup server.
  • More updates and assistance given on the TBSR project.
  • Put another box on-line for the PSU group to work on. It is to be a backup mail-server for the LSC mailing list.
  • Still working with PMA and the contractors on different items. The most pressing being to get the condensation issue resolved in the computer room.
  • Regular user assistance. Actually, this activity has taken a little more time this week than it has in the past.

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Systems

Modeling and Simulation

From: Hiroaki Yamamoto hiro@ligo.caltech.edu

e2e weekly meeting

  • Mark, Richard, Osam and Sany attended this week’s e2e telecon. Richard Williams (SLU Undergrad) brought up issues concerning the newest release of the Mark Barton’s mathematica codes of Advanced LIGO suspensions. In short, the problem was that somehow the main file was unable to recognize some files even their paths were correctly specified. After 30 min or so discussions, Mark identified the cause of the problem. Mark also reported a recently discovered bug in his triple pendulum model. The corrected case will be released soon.  

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

No report

COC loss study (Hiro)

  • The conversion of the Varely's new measurement to be compared with Bill's measurement and CSIRO PSD was wrong by 2 pi, and his measurement is consistent with Bill's and is almost 10 times larger than CSIRO PSD. The phasemap data measured by Caltech Fizeau turned out to be 10 times smaller than CSIRO PSD in the long wavelength region. These are summarized in G070586, which is available at www.ligo.caltech.edu/~hiro/talks/. 

Static IFO simulation (Hiro)

  • Details of Stable Recycling Cavity is being investigated by adding more tools to understand the details.

Modeler : e2e simulation engine and ALFI : e2e front end (Hiro, Bruce, Melody)

  • Melody and Bruce are working to finalize the User Defined Primitive codes and documentations, both for modeler (simulation engine) and alfi (GUI front end).
  • A few more real day examples will be used to confirm the reliability. 
  • Intel released a new library (Thread Building Block) as an open source. Melody is evaluating the usefulness of this library if more of the simulation engine can take benefit of threads. Right now, the use of the thread is limited because of too much overhead.

Mechanical Simulation for advanced LIGO (Sany and SLU team)

  • Made another progress on e2e modeling of AdvLIGO Input Mode Cleaner. Recent modification on the frequency and MC length sensing control filter designs has made the MC lock very robust. With realistic ground translational motion in the direction of the X-arm fed into the suspension points of MC1 – MC3 (via the base of HAM table), the fluctuation of the transmitted power is now less than 0.01%. The model is still in the translational mode only (the input laser is in the plane wave mode and seismic disturbance is in the X-direction only). Richard continued looking into the problem concerning execution of the Mark Barton’s newest release of the Advanced LIGO suspension model in mathematica. The problem was discussed in details with Mark Barton during the e2e weekly telecon. They will be solved shortly.

CDS Prestabilized Laser

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

  • Most of the parts for a new low-noise (hopefully) amplifier have come in.  The circuit boards should arrive by week's end.
  • The layout for a new high voltage amplifier has been completed.  The amplifier is intended to drive a set of mirror mounts.
  • Work continues to acquire the safety-related items so that the 2-W NPRO can be turned on.  This includes an emergency shutdown button outside the nominal hazard zone - intended for use by emergency services.
  • No news from the FDA concerning the accession number.  There's been no news from Customs and Border Patrol either, so at least the 35-W laser hasn't been moved to a warehouse yet or deported.
  • Some measurements of beam pointing have been carried out.  The activities in the machine shops located below and next door to the PSL Lab tend to mess up the measurements at random times.

Control and Data Systems

From: Rolf Bork rolf@ligo.caltech.edu

LIGO  Ops

  • Working with Barker on CDS cyber security plan. We hope to have a draft ready late next week.

ELigo/AdvLigo

No report.

Computing

  • Renewed our realtime Linux licenses for the next two years.
  • Alex modified realtime code to allow running a stand-alone, test stand type system without requiring a realtime network interface card.
  • Received PCI to VME bridge hardware, which would allow us to run VME I/O from our new systems, as well as the PCI-X I/O modules. We are starting on the software part of this and will run some tests to see if this is viable.
  • PCI Express expansion chassis - To date, the distance from our PCI I/O chassis and the front end, realtime computer has been limited to/by a 10m cable. The vendor informed us that their new fiber uplink is available (one we have been waiting for). Jay is making arrangements to have a unit shipped to us for testing.

ISI - 2 stage

  • There were some problems reading out the STS-2 signals when the pods were being tested last week.  The cause of this has now been traced to a pin-flip on the cable internal to the STS-2 pods.

ISI - Single Stage

  • SS-ISI Interface - (4 + 2) Ben re-designed the ISI interface as a Single Stage Interface.  The PCBs are all back, the parts have arrived, and the front panels are in fab.  I will send the PCBs to Screaming Circuits soon.
  • Coil Driver - (4 + 2) (Mohana) - The Coil Driver chassis are being built and tested.
  • ADC Interface Rev7 (4 + 2) - The filters are being sent to be tested, and the front panels and interface boards are finished, and ready to go on a chassis.
  • AI Interface boards (2 + 2) - The filters are being sent to be tested.
  • Binary I/O Interface Boards (4 + 2) - Jay's making these

OMC

  • Received parts from machine shop for OMC in-vacuum metal work.
  • Submitted parts for DCPD whitening board to board house.  All components are on order.
  • Worked issues with the in-vacuum cabling for the OMC ISC and SUS components.
  • Sent parts back to ceramic coating house after the coatings were applied in areas that were supposed to be masked.
  • Finished layout of QPD Whitening board with additions for the new noise cancelling circuitry.
  • Conducting thermal cycling tests of the OMC thermal actuator to check the strength of the glue joints under stress.

Seismic Isolation

From: Ken Mason kmason@ligo.mit.edu

BSC Seismic Isolation Assembly and Test

  • The keel plates, gs-13 pods, and stage 0-1 lockers have been installed this week. The blade springs have been assembled and will be installed as soon as the installation tooling is cleaned.
  • The STS-2 seismometers were tested and all (3) gave us bad signals. Brian O'Reilly believes the problem is caused by bad internal cables with incorrect pin outs. An adapter is being made to correct the pins assignments.

Single Stage HAM Isolation Procurement and Build.

  • The design contract to HPD has been completed and is being closed out. A cost overrun of $38,184 occurred. Gina Salone and I are working on the paperwork so that invoices can be paid.
  • Fabrice has completed layouts of the Enhanced LIGO risers. He is also looking at the modifications required to use the SAS installation tooling for the single stage HAM.
  • Andy has sent the test stand drawings out to fabricators to quote. He is beginning to look at modifying the HAM gull wings.

From: Ben Abbott abbott_b@ligo.caltech.edu

All new activity since last weekly is written in red.

40m: DCPD

  • The In-vac electronics for the DCPD has been delivered.

ISI: Two Stage ISI (BSC)

  • The LASTI two-stage ISI electronics have been delivered, installed, and tested. The specialized STS-2 cables have all now been delivered.  Paul is almost finished making them in the back shop.  My thanks go out to Jay, Russel, Alex, Rolf, Richard, and the people at LASTI that helped install the system.
  • There were some problems reading out the STS-2 signals when the pods were being tested last week.  The cause of this has now been traced to a pin-flip on the cable internal to the STS-2 pods. 

Single Stage ISI (HAM):

  • One SS-ISI is needed at HPD in August.  Shortly thereafter another system, and that one, will be delivered, one to each site.  In order to deliver these systems, the following work is being done:
    • SS-ISI Interface - (4 + 2) I have re-designed the ISI interface as a Single Stage Interface.  The PCBs are all back, the parts have arrived, and the front panels are in fab.  I will send the PCBs to Screaming Circuits soon.
    • Coil Driver - (4 + 2) (Mohana) - The Coil Driver chassis are being built and tested.
    • ADC Interface Rev7 (4 + 2) - The filters are being sent to be tested, and the front panels and interface boards are finished, and ready to go on a chassis.
    • AI Interface boards (2 + 2) - The filters are being sent to be tested.
    • Binary I/O Interface Boards (4 + 2) - Jay's making these.

Suspensions

From: Norna Robertson <nroberts@ligo.caltech.edu>

  • Sent revised set of parameters for beamsplitter/folding mirror to RAL colleagues
  • Worked on updating OMC schedule
  • Provided comments on /amendments to LSC instrument science white paper

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

Advanced/Enhanced LIGO

Recycling Mirror Suspensions

  • Working with Greer, Bob, Norna and Calum on a daily basis on the recycling mirror design. Due to some welding concerns, the structure has been changed to reduce the chance of weld non-conformace. Calum & Greer are performing FEA to address the changes, especially with respect to increased structure weight. Bob is working with Ian on incorporating their earthquake stop bracket concept into this suspension.

Output Mode Cleaner Suspension

Nothing new to report. Weekly meetings Thursdays at 8am PT.

Enhanced LIGO Earthquake Stops

  • Mike Z. at MIT assembled prototypes and provided detailed report with suggested modifications. Held a meeting Monday to distribute actions. Will have another meeting tomorrow to follow-up. Mike sent some of the prototypes to Joe LaCour at Kineoptics, which Joe then modified and will send back to Mike for more testing. Hope to converge on design in the coming days, in preparation for procurement of production parts.

LLO

  • Worked with Kathy to give a tour to some teachers on Friday.
  • Working on my employee performance evaluation.

Quad

  • Working with Betsy & Doug on travel plans to RAL week of Aug 20th.

Suspension Project Management

  • Worked with Norna and Dennis on suspensions risk registry. It was updated and sent to Carol this week by Norna.
  • Worked with Norna and Helena on July suspension schedule progress update. I sent it to Dwight yesterday.

From: k mailand kmailand@ligo.caltech.edu

  • I finished an FEA model of the Manifold Baffle and a Black Glass Cryo-Pump Baffle proposal, for Mike.
  • I'm doing a faraday 4 wire dampened suspension test,  setup parts are complete.
  • A set of spherical and ball bearing parts have completed a clean and bake cycle, we can now see how they perform in a dry condition.

Core Optic

From: Bill Kells kells@ligo.caltech.edu

  • Much of this week gathering material for and composing sections for the OPs propossal.
  • More substantively: Careful examination of all the HR loss data (much back and forth between Hiro and myself) has revealed some true puzzles about the overall mirror roughness PSD plots (taken to be summaries of the net surface quality). First (at high spatial frequencies) the scatterometer data is symmetrically high wrt the polish micro-roughness measurements. Second, the Fizeau interferogram maps (~ low spatial frequency) are inconsistent (CISRO's vs Caltech). We are somewhat baffled by all this: analysis ongoing.
  • Much discussion and analysis concerning the newly emergent OTF scan measurements of the LASTI TM. In particular it seems to have (uniquely ? ... looking into this) small (sub mm) "holes" in its HR coating.

From: Helena Armandula ahelena@ligo.caltech.edu

Advanced LIGO Coatings

  • The LASTI test mass is ready to be shipped to MIT.
  • Professor James Hamilton, the developer of First Contact, has been invited to give a talk to JPL's Materials/Processes and Contamination Control Group on August 9th, from 10:am-12:00pm. This talk, "First Contact Polymer: Surface Cleanliness on Historically "Uncleanable" Surfaces" was given a few weeks ago at the NASA C&C Conference. I contacted the group sponsoring this event and they will be very willing to accommodate any one from Caltech that wants to attend the talk . In the afternoon, Prof. Hamilton will stop by Caltech to discuss our requirements, get familiar with our work and suggest  methods to apply the polymer as per example, when the mirror surface is in a vertical position.

Contanination Control and Adv. LIGO SUS

  • Spent most of this week at Hanford, we are looking into ways to implement some contamination control tools during Enhanced LIGO to help reduce contamination during Adv. LIGO activities.
  • Discussed requirements for fiber pulling and ear bonding tasks.
  • Demonstrated a new "in situ" mirror cleaning procedure to be used during ELI installation.

From: Liyuan Zhang <zhang_l@ligo.caltech.edu>

  • Both the AR reflection scan and the transmission re-scan of the LASTI LEM1 are finished. The AR reflection doesn't show a good uniformity as that of HR, with about 230 ppm at center, 150 ppm at edge and an average of 180 ppm in the 16 x16 cm ^2 scanned area. The high transmission 'spots' are repeated in the 2nd scan and still get saturated though the dynamic range was set up to be about two order of magnitude larger. I then checked these spots point by point and confirmed they are tiny 'holes'. After calibration, the total points' contribution to the average of transmission is about 1/3. We're trying to do local scans around these points using focused beam.

Auxiliary Optics

From: Michael Smith smith@ligo.caltech.edu

SLC

  • Fringe-wrap Theory: Mike, with the help of Hiro, developed a quantitative Matlab model for calculating the scattered light displacement noise from large amplitude motions of a suspended scattering surface with a known motion transfer function. Fringe-wrap calculations were made for the suspended arm cavity baffle, the cryopump baffle, and the cavity beam dump. The calculations show that, with assumed pendulum resonances < 2.5 Hz and Q =1000, the displacement noise at frequencies > 10 Hz, due to fringe-wrapping at the resonant frequency, is negligible. This means that the suspended baffles and beam dumps need not be heavily damped.
  • Manifold Baffle: Ken made a preliminary FEA frequency analysis of the SW model for the manifold baffle. With the addition of stiffening rings, the lowest resonant frequencies are > 150 Hz.
  • Cryopump Baffle: Ken made a SW model of a black-glass cryopump baffle, with a long pendulum suspension. This will meet the requirement of a low BRDF and a low reflectivity from the baffle.
  • Elastomeric Damping: Ken has almost completed an apparatus for testing a concept for damping the baffle suspensions that uses plugs of elastomeric material in contact with both ends of the suspension wires.
  • Errant Beam Baffles: Mike made an estimate of the temperature rise of various baffle materials. Assuming an absorptivity of 10% with an incident laser power 125 W in a 1mm diameter spot and a 1 mm thick baffle: aluminum temp rises 17 deg C, copper temp rises 10 deg C, and stainless steel temp rises 285 deg C. A gold-coated, polished stainless steel baffle with absorptivity 2% should have a temp rise of < 60 deg C. It will be important to provide a large area of high thermal contact in order so that the heat will flow out of the baffle onto the optics table.
  • BRDF Measuring Apparatus: The lenses and mounts for the BRDF telescope (except for the focusing tube), and a new lens for the sample imaging were received. Dan has rebuilt the apparatus with better light shielding around the light collection path and better discrimination between the sampled scattered ight and the reflected beam-dump scattered light. He built a swing arm to hold the beam dump and rotate it to follow the direction of the specular reflection from the sample. He has incorporated a beam splitter and a video camera for continuous monitoring of the scattering spot.

Input Optics

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

UF weekly progress report

  • Muzammil Arain: We have measured the thermal lensing of TGG crystals and DKDP for E-LIGO. At 30 W, the combined thermal lensing of the system is reduced to approximately -50 m focal length. This level of comepnsation is adequate and would not alter the mode matching significantly.
  • Luke Williams: Planning for eligo FI installation; designing parts for eligo FI.
  • The rest of us: more ELIGO planning/testing plus AdvLIGO PDR action items.

Other R&D

From: Riccardo DeSalvo <desalvo@ligo.caltech.edu>

  • Alberto: Defended his thesis on HAM SAS, available at http://emvogil-3.mit.edu/~stochino/Stochino_Thesis.pdf passed Cum Laudem, back at LASTI to finish up the measurements, add a couple of addendum and write the related paper.
  • Zeb: I continued using the SIS simulation.  I produced a Pound-Drever-Hall error signal and an error signal corresponding to mirror tilts with the baseline mirrors.  I examined a Mexican Hat mirror profile John Miller provided and used it in the simulation to produce another tilt error signal. I began learning about the resin coating process and took photographs of captin samples to examine the bubbles of water vapor that form in poor samples.
  • Edward: I checked to see if it was going to be feasible to quantify contaminants on NaCl slides - I pipetted a range of concentrations of contaminants onto slides - the absorption has a good linear relationship to concentration but the procedure is limited how consistently it's possible to pipette - still working on this.  I've made the condenser coils for the evaporator - I ended up using 1/4 inch copper tubing and using neoprene corks to connect the tubing to the glassware.  I left some samples of neoprene in a vial of isopropanol for 24 hours and recorded the spectrum in case residue from the neoprene contaminants the solvent, but I'm planning on wrapping up the corks in UHV foil.  I looked at how quickly isopropanol evaporates from the slides; 60 degrees Celsius looks to be the optimum temperature.
  • Andrea: For the first measurement of the photodiode calibration I've used a very simple circuit in which the photocurrent generated by the absorbed light (from an LED) runs through a resistence, R, and the voltage, V, across the resistor is measured. The voltage is directly measured by the peak of the signal, at the frequency of the LED, in the spectrum analyzer, while the R is changing (0.1, 1, 10, 100 kOhm). I've also measured the difference in the output with both LED_OFF and LED_ON configurations.
  • Arianna: Maria and I have calibrated lvdt of gas filter.we have found the range of linearity of these instruments.we have also found the relation between weight and height of a coil with 1 ampere current kept near a magnet.this coil will be put under the load of the gas filter to generate an external force.
  • John: Tied up investigation into the mirror deformation caused by our mounts. New o-rings must be sourced. Prepared slides for LIGO seminar. Continuing study of thermoelastic deformation of test masses with non Gaussian beams.
  • Riccardo: collecting 7 years of data into a creep paper.

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