Weekly Report for Week Ending August 9, 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

Special Announcements:

Weekly Report Highlights

LSC Issues (Reitze)

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

MOUs submitted and posted for August 2007 review:

DOCUMENT CONTROL CENTER (Turner, Mak)

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

• Assisted in searching for missing cite references for all publications from 2001 to present.
• Continued to process LIGO/Virgo Collaboration presentations.
• There has been a major spike upward in terms of document submittals over the last couple of weeks.
• Took care of some final details regarding the YAG Laser from Germany.  I'm pleased to announce it has been released from customs and should be delivered today!

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Funaro, Brambila, Kaufman)

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

• For ACCOUNTS PAYABLE HISTORY Press Here.

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

• Submitted Release of Claims to JDS, High Precision Devices, Matt Evans, Excel, and Columbia Univ. Completed the close out of Total Energy Management. The others are pending releases.
• Completed change order #5 to Eskew Dumez & Ripple and submitted to vendor.
• Made changes to Triad package which is in routing and re-submitted the package.
• Completed change order #11 to Air Liquide and submitted mod. to vendor.
• Completed mod 18 to the University of Florida and submitted to the vendor.
• Completed close out of Total Energy Management.
• Issued the change order to Newleaf California for the seminars.
• The order to the University of Glasgow is pending receipt of the Debarment Certificate requested from R. Cowan.

>From: Florence Kaufman <fkaufman>

• Financial reports can be found at: http://docuserv.ligo.caltech.edu/~fireport. (For passwords contact Florence)

SUBCONTRACTS MANAGEMENT (Jasnow, Salone)

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

• Negotiations are underway to modify the contract with QED Industries to cover both new scope and an increase in labor hours.

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

• Discussions are ongoing to close down the contract with HPD for the design of the Advanced LIGO seismic isolation system for the HAM.  The next phase will be for the fabrication of the prototype, followed by a 3rd phase for the test and assembly of the system. 
• The laser shipped from Germany that was held up at LAX by U.S. Customs awaiting completion of a report required by the FDA has been released by Customs, and will be delivered 8/9.
• The large bake oven purchased by Galli & Morelli is on a ship from Rome and is expected to reach New Orleans by 8/19.  The Office of General Counsel has signed the Power of Attorney required to offload the oven in New Orleans.

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

Trying to sew up the proposal for continuing operations (FY 2009 – FY 2013) and the only further changes will be for correcting significant problems or revisions that we have already agreed to accept.  A final draft will be prepared this coming week to be sent to PMA and to the Caltech Office of Sponsored research fior their initial review.

Also working on the 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.  Albert has contributed a cut at one section and that will hopefully help.

The LIGO Visitors program is officially over as of July 31, 2007 (subsequent visitors are covered by Operations accounts), and a Final Report must be prepared for that Grant.  We will be asking for input from Lab persons who hosted visitors during the performance period of the award.

Preparations for the NSF Total Business Systems Review (TBSR) scheduled August 20-24 are underway.  We are providing URL pointers to various documents and we are preparing other documentation that does not currently exist.  Met with R. Seligmanof OSR to discuss preparations.  There will be another meeting towards the end of next week.

We must next begin preparing the budgets for Operations in FY 2008.

Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

There will be a Safety Audit of LHO the week of 27 August..

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

Summary of S5 Activities at LIGO Hanford Observatory  (compiled by M. Landry)

The H1 IFO banged in a strong week, with 94% duty cycle at or near 16Mpc, while  H2 posted 6-7Mpc 90% of the time.  A couple of S5 highlights from the LHO elog are bulleted below:

• summaries: Tuesday maintenance, latest range & duty cycle compilation
• the H2 mode cleaner locked and unlocked repeatedly on the weekend, finally clearing itself for reasons unknown

Outreach
Perseid meteor shower viewing takes place Saturday night at the lab.

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

S5 run (Valera Frolov):

• The duty cycle for the week is 75% and the inspiral range was between 12 and 14 Mpc. The reduced range is due the broadband excess noise which also appears in PRC degree of freedom and suspected to be the frequency noise. The search for the source of the excess noise is underway. The run was interrupted on Friday due to the work by the local power company. The interferometer was put into the safe mode due to possibility of the power outage, which did occur briefly during the switching between the temporary and clean power. The operation was recovered quickly after the power company was completed. During the Tuesday maintenance one of the crates was rebooted to recover the PEM channel, which stop producing data during one of the previous power outages. The reboot resulted in the channels hopping and required additional rebooting to clear. Another power glitch tripped the HEPI pump controller at the corner station and required restart to resolve.

CDS computing (Lisa Bogue):

• Worked with Rusyl on fixing missing channels at the X-end.  We also did some investigation of the increase we've seen in the timing offset these last few weeks but were unable to pin down the cause.
• Worked with the team on diagnosing and recovering from the problem with the hepi pumps.
• Fixed the statevector audio alert.

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)

• The 40m SURF students visited LLO, and seemed to have had a grand time. They all continue to prepare for their final papers and talks, next Tuesday. Sonia has installed new suspension input matrices for MC1, MC2, MC3; they are much more diagonal. She is now optimizing the damping gains by minimizing the rms signal from MC_F.
• Tobin is back to the alignment servo comissioning (c1ass). He's taking swept-sine transfer functions.
• Sam is preparing to dirty-assemble the eLIGO OMC in Bob's clean room.
• Bob is off to deliver a bake oven to LLO, back in 2 weeks.
• Stefan and Seiji are developing an Optickle model of the 40m, including the application of RF sidebands with a Mach Zehnder, to plan for a test of the new AdvLIGO sensing and control scheme.

Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

LASTI (Mittleman)

CIT Science Group (Weinstein)

Laboratory Computing (Anderson)

LDAS Software Systems (Maros)

LDAS System Administration (Dan Kozak)

General Computing (Wallace)

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Systems

Modeling and Simulation

From: Hiroaki Yamamoto hiro@ligo.caltech.edu

e2e weekly meeting

• Discussed about the SLU group's maintaining various configurations of Mark Barton's suspension models (quad, triple, small and large).
• A new module of e2e, User Defined Primitive, is introduced.

COC study (Hiro)

• The loss due to surface figure (spatial wavelength > 5mm) was studied and was reported at the COC meeting.
• The major loss in the LIGO I arm comes from the a surface structure with characteristic length of several cm. Because the beam size on 4k ETM is 4.5cm, this surface structure causes loss of 20-30ppm. There is no clear structure on ITM mirrors, and this structure could be produced by the non uniformity of the coating. Although the 2k ETM has similar surface structure, the loss is small because the beam size on 2k ETM is 3.5cm. Because of this difference of the beam size between 2k and 4k IFO, the loss per arm is different by 20~30ppm. This can explain the difference of the recycling gain between H1 and H2.
• The AR reflectance of the LASTI mirror was studied to evaluate the coating uniformity. The non-uniformity is ~ 2% between the center and at 8cm away from the center. I am waiting for the actual AR coating design to get more quantitative conclusion. This can cause the kind of bumps on LIGO I ETM, and the limitation on the non uniformity needs to be studied.

Static IFO simulation (Hiro, Melody, Bruce)

• After using very large grid points, the power in the stable Michelson cavity could build up.  So, the preparation is done, and the actual physics study has started (to be discussed next week).
• Melody is evaluating the template building block library, released by Intel as an open source, which utilizes multi core system very efficiently. For a matrix multiplication with size of 128x128, the speed could be gained by factor 3. 
• Bruce merged the source codes of e2e by combining several branches for the release which has all the features and modifications.

CDS Prestabilized Laser

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

• We have received an accession number from the FDA for the 35-W laser. The number was granted but the product report has not been approved yet.  I received word this afternoon (Wednesday) that the laser has been released by the FDA for processing by customs and that the laser should be delivered to campus by tomorrow. [ For reference, a product report has to be submitted to the FDA each year for the same model laser whenever one is imported.  Otherwise a report has to be submitted with each laser, if there are any differences.  I have not found out from the FDA what constitutes a "difference".]

• The PSL Hazard Analysis was reviewed.  Many of the hazards listed were deemed to be superfluous and of too generic a nature.  I am re-writing the document.  Some inaccuracies about the PSL Laser Safety Plan will also be corrected.
• The 200-W functional prototype has been fired up.  The output power at the moment is 130 W for a pump power of 145 W per head.  There is a small problem with the crystal holder and the way that cooling water flows around the laser rod.  A modification to the old design that was intended to improve the cooling, resulted in an increased thermal lens in the laser rod compared to that with the old design.  The new fibre holders appear to work well.

Control and Data Systems

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