Weekly Report for Week Ending November 20, 2008

Past Weekly Reports

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LSC Issues (Reitze)

• Nothing to report this week.

LIGO Laboratory Administration (Lindquist)

STATUS OF LSC MOUs (Lloyd)

• Northwestern University was approved this reporting period.
• For complete listing of MOU status press here.

FINANCIAL SYSTEMS (Funaro, Oracion)

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

• For ACCOUNTS PAYABLE HISTORY Press Here.

>From: Karl Oracion <koracion@ligo.caltech.edu>>

• Completed FY2008 (PHY-0107417) LIGO Operations Report for October 2008 and posted report on the network.
• Completed FY2009 (PHY-0757058) LIGO Operations Report for October 2008 and posted report on the network.
• Sent out monthly reports for Visitor's program, Outreach program, University of Wisconsin award, Low Noise, I2U2 and 3 discretionary accounts.
• Prepared FY2008 encumbrance list through 10/31/08 and posted list on the network.
• Provided data/charts for FY2008(PHY-0107417) October 2008 EAC reports
• Currently working on budget realignment requested by project accounting to facilitate Oracle billing.
• Financial reports can be found at: http://docuserv.ligo.caltech.edu/~fireport. (For passwords contact Karl)

PROPOSALS and REPORTS (Lindquist)

• This is a rather brief weekly report since many of the Business Office personnel have been involved in the NSF Review or Advanced LIGO “Many Hands” meeting this week.

CHANGE REQUESTS (Lindquist)

• There are no open change requests.

HUMAN RESOURCES (Akutagawa)

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

• The next Staffing Committee meeting is scheduled for Monday, December 8th.
• A Staffing Committee meeting was held on Monday, November 10th.  The minutes and action items have been posted on the SC web page.
• All files for the Staffing Committee are up-to-date and posted on the SC web page.

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Quality/Safety (Tyler)

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

• Met with Advanced LIGO Safety and QA personnel, review/comment on presentation materials for Advanced LIGO “Many-Hands” Meeting.
• An initial version of a LIGO safety page was linked to the LIGO Internal Bulletin Board.

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Computer Security (Singer)

• Submitted final draft of privacy policy.
• Revised and finished paper for publication in the Proceedings of the New Security Paradigms Workshop

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

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

eLIGO

• The cause of the 28 Hz intensity noise problem related to the PSL wave plate rotator (which was reported earlier this month) was identified as the servo setting problem of the Newport motor controller. A better setting was found and propagated to H1 and H2 PSL and REFL wave plates.
• Transmon QPDs were found to saturate at about 7 W. For a short term "fix" trans impedance of QPDs were reduced by a factor of 4, but we are waiting for a delivery of proper mirrors to reduce the power on the QPDs.
• After the above mentioned change for transmon, and with higher WFS gain, we successfully brought the power up to 14.6 W using AS5 (noisier RF diode). Next step is to lock H1 to the OMC with this power level.
• Spiricon camera for beam splitter centering servo was found to saturate at about 7W. For a short term fix the iris of the camera was closed but it seems that we will need a better solution than this pretty soon.
• The first attempt to transform the ASC from WFS head basis to opto-mechanical mode basis has started.
• An analysis of scattering from ETM cage and/or the transmon telescope.

  Astrowatch (A. Mullavey)

• On Friday the inspiral range got above 8Mpc, the highest its been during the astrowatch run. It maintained this range over the weekend. We believe that this increase in range is due to an unusually low microseism of about 0.15um/s.
• On Monday night however, the microseism increased rapidly to above 1.5um/s. It took a day for it to quieten down and in this time we couldn't bring H2 up.
• This mixture of fortunes gave H2 a below average uptime of 51.8% and a science time of 22.8% over the last week.

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

General Operations (Rusyl Wooley):

• The main focus this week was to vent and open HAM6 for OMC repairs.  That work is complete and we are back under vacuum with all the valves open.

Enhanced LIGO (Valera Frolov):

• The interferometer input power was increased to 16 W. The interferometer becomes unstable in the angular degrees of freedom supposedly due to the radiation pressure and possibly due to the change of the angular sensing matrix from the thermal effects in the test masses.
• The thermal compensation system has been tested by applying the central and annulus heating patterns to the input test masses and observing the effect on the sideband buildup in the recycling cavity. The initial test showed that one of the CO2 beams had not been aligned with the test mass. After the TCS laser beam was realigned it greatly helped keeping the interferometer locked at higher power levels.
• The WFS investigation at higher power is underway to increase the bandwidth of the angular control loops including measuring and decoupling the response of the reflected port sensors to the motion of the common degrees of freedom.
• The OMC optical bench was wedged into its earth quake stops during the transfer function measurement of the seismic isolation loops. The failure to detect the large motion and shut down the system was identified to be in the watchdog code. The code has been reworked and tested. The HAM6 chamber was vented and the optical bench was released. No significant damaged has been found so far. There was a small amount of white powder at the point of contact between the glass optical bench and the EQ stop which was easily wiped off. The testing is in progress to verify that the DC readout noise is not affected.

CDS Computing (Keith Thorne):

Sys-Admin:

• Restarted existing GRB alert system.
• Reported non-booting x4600 to Sun (awaiting visit from Sun support).
• Added MEDM, DAQ channel list updates to CDS subversion   DMT IOC is down again (problem with account permissions, IDs).

Commissioning Support:

• Fast ADC, EPICS changes for PSL upgrade (Peter King).
• Fast ADC changes for TCS upgrade (Phil Willems, Rupal Amin).
• Investigated changes to support WFS3 QPD use for beam centering (Valera Frolov).

Upgrades:

• Planned DMT upgrade installation in December (John Zweizig).
• Discussed Matlab changes to support NDS->NDS2 change (Josh Smith).

LLO Outreach

(Kathy Holt):

• Conducted 2 public tours during the week.  One tour on Friday with 18 visitors and one on Sat. also with 18 visitors for a total of 36.  24 of these visitors were from SLU and referred by their instructor,  John Thacker.  The other 9 were from a small church in Zachary.
• Conducted 1 teacher workshop from LSU/ MSP.  Total of 15 teachers participated in this workshop. Collected materials and activities for the Sally Ride Festival.
• Participated in 2 programs at the Sally Ride Science Festival.
• Conducted 3 School visits for a total of 133 - 5th graders from Copper Mill.  Surveys were received and after visit surveys were sent.  Copper Mill school visits will end the data collecting for Dr. Szechter's educational research.
• Worked with Marcia Carter, Board of Regents on reserving  two months for LaSip and LaGEAR UP teachers and teacher training for the 2009-2010 school year. Completed new activity for exhibit math and science connection.
• 3 Docents from Cohort 1 participated in School visits Downloaded data from public tours and school visits Created CD's of photos for teachers to take with them to the classroom and prepared photos for website.

(Amber Stuver):

• Completed the final mature draft of a LIGO Concept Inventory to use as an instrument to test the SEC's ability to resolve common physical misconceptions about gravity and waves.  This research will compliment and will be done in partnership with the educational research currently being conducted by Lisa Szechter from Tulane University.
• Gave control room tours to ~150 5th graders.

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 also Advanced LIGO

Controls and Data Systems (Bork)

See Advanced LIGO

40-Meter Interferometer (Adhikari)

Nothing to report this week.

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Thermal Noise Interferometer (Black)

• Nothing significant to report this week. Photothermal lasers are in for repair, and Akira is writing a paper.

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LASTI (Mittleman)

BSC-ISI

• We found the problem with the cross coupling between the controls loops has been found, it turns out that there was an error in the STS (stage one low frequency seismometer) matrix which converts from local to CM coordinates.
• We will go back and redo the controls to account for this in the future. For now Fabrice has made some performance/isolation plots which are posted on the Lasti ilog. These show good results below 10Hz, between 10 and 30Hz we still have to make some improvements.

Quad Prototype

• Investigation of stress in welds: we have begun stress polarimetry of butt-welds, overlap welds and fibers.  Video of the stress build up as load is applied is being analyzed to quantify the levels of stress reached before failure.  We have also begun more in depth measurements of strengths of fibers as a function of the heat used during pulling.  Fibers pulled at lower laser powers can have significantly lower breaking strengths and we wish to develop an approach that gives consistently high values.

SEI

• Andy and Myron have installed the first of the new support beams onto the X-end HAM. There should be some nice pictures on the Lasti ilog.

CIT Science Group (Weinstein)

_______________

Chad Hanna:

• I have been running the last two months of s5 and coordinating with the rest of the high mass group to try to have the last six months ready by the December LSC.

_______________

Antony Searle:

• Working on understanding some unexpected behavior of skymap code on inspiral and white noise burst injections.
• Working on real-time-pipeline-with-skymap to demonstrate S6 capability.
• Skymap C code walkthrough teleconference to get new contributors up to speed and prepare for review.
• Presented at NSF review.
• Reviewed an Honours thesis.

_______________

Amber L. Stuver:

• I spent some time bringing myself up to date on the state of the MDC review and fielded some questions about its application for a new user.
• Completed the final mature draft of a LIGO Concept Inventory to use as an instrument to test the SEC's ability to resolve common physical misconceptions about gravity and waves.  This research will compliment and will be done in partnership with the educational research currently being conducted by Lisa Szechter from Tulane University.
• Gave control room tours to ~150 5th graders.
• Traveled to and attended the APS Council Meeting in Dallas, TX.

_______________

Kent Blackburn for the Grid R&D Team:

GRID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

• Wrote agenda and led LIGO-Pegasus and OSG-VO-Group telecons.
• Wrote minutes for this telecon.
• Attended Inspiral, DASWG, OSG-Production and  OSG-VO-Group  telecons.
• Attended newly formed weekly Einstein@Home on the OSG telecon  to address concerns from the OSG Production/Facilities Team  about the scientific merits of the Einstein@Home jobs running  on the OSG.
• Update DASWG pages with new information regarding Einstein@Home  statistics .
• Worked with Kent to understand possible failure modes seen in  preempted jobs running on OSG sites that are ramping up jobs  from VOs with higher priority on the resources than LIGO. A  possibility is that when a large number of einstein@home jobs  are preempted, then compete for NSF resources needed to tar up  the current state of the job and are unable to finish the state  preservation in the ten minutes allowed by condor, resulting in  the kill signal (9) being issued.
• Set up a website for capturing statistics from Einstein@Home jobs  on the OSG:  http://www.aei.mpg.de/~engro/GEO600/statistics/OSG/statistics.html
• Began enhancing the Einstein@Home OSG engine to support Globus 2  sites on the OSG.
  • Developing a supporting perl library that encapsulates the needed Globus functionality
  • Adding support for manual file staging using gsiftp and gsiscp as    needed by Globus Toolkit 2.

EINSTEN@HOME ON THE OSG ACTIVITIES

• UCSDT2 code deployment successful from GK and WN.
• UCSDT2  job deployment fail RC 255, trouble shooting in progress.
• CMS sites issue trouble shooting: nfs too busy for application to tar up files in time before job is killed?
• GOC tickets opened for ws-gram fail at GLOW, OCI_NSF.

BINARY INSPIRAL ON THE LDG AND OSG ACTIVITIES

• Tested new pegasus-get-sites at cit, RCAC, CIT_CMS_T2, ready to    tag Pegasus version.
• ihope high mass search, successful run at cit via Pegasus:
  • 874000000-874010000, or 8 hours

OPEN SCIENCE GRID INTEGRATION TESTBED

• Attended two day Open Science Grid Site Administrator's workshop  at SLAC.

GRID MANAGEMENT

• Wrote draft recommendation to CompComm as chair of the SCAT sub-  committee to address secure web services and interactions with  users' browsers.
• Wrote up a set of reserve slides on the Open Science Grid and its  utilization by LIGO for the NSF review in the event that any questions  on this subject came up this year.
• Reviewed a job description for an OSG Production Coordinator (a newly  identified position in the OSG) and circulated the job description to  the LSC CompComm. Attended first day of NSF review where such questions  were most likely to come up.
• Reviewed a draft partnership agreement between the Open Science Grid  and the United Kingdom's National Grid Service. This partnership is  also being worked in person at the SC08 conference.
• Worked on the OSG Year 3 NSF Budget Sheet in preparation for having  the Caltech Office of Sponsored Research and Caltech PMA Office approve  the Year 3 Statement of Work necessary to start the flow of funds to  Caltech from University of Wisconsin Madison. Met with Julie to work  through what was needed by PMA.
• Reviewed a new OSG Certificate Authority Policy which has significant  revisions from the previously approved policy. Gave feedback to the  OSG Security Officer that authored the changes and put it on the agenda  for discussion at this week's SCAT telecon.
• Reviewed several documents distributed by the OSG Executive Director  addressing this next OSG Joint DOE/NSF review in January. These will  be discussed further at this Friday's OSG Executive Board Meeting,  which I will be attending via EVO.
• Organized and conducted the second OSG All-Hands Program Committee  planning meeting. Developed a rough draft of the meeting schedule  and circulated to committee. Wrote letters of invitation to ATLAS  and CMS offering to support a joint workshop with both communities  as part of the agenda.
• Supported the usual steady stream of user requests for DOEGrids  certificates and LDG user accounts.

_______________

Joseph Betzwieser:

• Discovered a mistake in the segment lists for the 2nd year of S5 SFT production.  I have been generating a new list, verifying it is right, documenting it, and trying to figure out what went wrong in the first list's generation.

_______________

Diego Fazi:

• Kept trying to solve the banksim issue - Kept working on the chi-square veto for PTF

_______________

Cristina Valeria Torres:

• Presented our LIGO SEC workshop at Sally Ride Science Festival this past weekend.
• Integrating on-the-fly SNR estimates of tracksearch triggers to circumvent memory limits on scanning arbitrarily large time frequency representation scanning.

_______________

Igor Yakushin:

• In order to be able to test S6 online pipeline, wrote a script to simulate data transfer from sites to the central location. It creates symbolic links to S5 JW1 h(t) frames with the same rate as they would be written to disk during the real run.
• Working on coherent WaveBurst online pipeline:
  • Implemented a very simple scheduler that queues a job whenever a new 60+2*8 seconds of triple coincidence Science data is available at the central location. Later I plan to implement more   sophisticated scheduler that allows for job segments overlapping to speed up the online pipeline, to make sure that no triggers are lost at job boundaries and all the available Science data is utilized given the fact that the online version of the coherent WaveBurst requires minimum 76 seconds of data per job.
  • Debugging the job launcher part of the pipeline.
• Continue testing sky position reconstruction part of the coherent WaveBurst.

_______________

Gregory Mendell:

• I am working with the CW group on recently identified issues with some SFTs from the 2nd year of S5.
• I met by telecon with some members of the CW group to discuss Fscan work, and I am assisting members of the group with this effort.

_______________

Kipp Cannon:

• Inspiral upper limit work w/ Collin Capano.
• s4 cosmic string review.
• s4 ring-down review (Lisa Goggin visiting Caltech this week).
• Telecons:  s4 cosmic string, inspiral, inspiral code, daswg.

_______________

Anand Sengupta:

• Following up poorly reconstructed HW injections.
• Updating the S5 HW Injection page.
• Debugging code to study overlaps of spin and EOBNR templates.

Laboratory Computing (Anderson)

LDAS Software Systems (Maros)

• Efforts continue to try and provide an RPM distribution of lsync.
• On ldas-cit, the diskcache was observed returning information for a directory on a system that had become unresponsive instead of removing that information. Work has been done to address this issue (PR#3341).
• System testing was done using version 1.11.28 of LDAS. No action has been taken to address the lsync failures or the regression test failures. All other tests completed as expected.

LDAS System Administration (Anderson)

Caltech

(Phil Ehrens)

• Various small auth-comm related tasks.
• Assisted with release tasks for new dcc/docdb.
• Working on major rewrite of Travel Request Application webform.
• Various small certificate related tasks.
• Various user support tasks.
• Removed cpu 2 memory dimms from cluster node 321 after machine began rebooting itself continuously with no pertinent logs. This machine had been running stably with Samsung memory installed on September 3.
• Enhanced Kerberos keytab distribution webtools to create sensible, easily parsible logs.

MIT

(Fred Donovan)

• Re-did smart/raid monitoring scripts using sqlite; set up rdist for cluster.

Livingston

(Igor Yakushin)

• Condor 7.1.4 DAGMan binaries were installed on ldas-grid and ldas-pcdev1.

(Doug Lormand)

• Since last Wednesday I have brought 11 out of 18 nodes back online.
• Five of the nodes had stuck power switches.
• Four of the nodes had memory stick failures.
• One node had a bad network cable, I ran a replacement.
• Another node had no net connection, I switched its connection with a node whose motherboard looks bad.
• Node 210 is listed as down but it is actually working, but it has no connection either, I'm debating whether to switch it with another node.
• Of the remaining six nodes, One has a disk failure.
• Five look like their motherboards have failed.
• I installed Solaris 10 on our old dataserver using the zfs filesystem.  I have two disks mirrored for the operating system. The remaining three disks I set up as a raidz1.

Hanford

(Greg Mendell)

• There was a RAID box issue last weekend that stopped I/O to the new framebuilder's /frames filesystem between Nov 15 2008 08:58 PST and Nov 17 2008 15:21 PST. I worked with Dave Barker and Dan Kozak to resolve this, and have filled in the gaps in the data from the backup framebuilder.  This should be caught up by tomorrow, Nov. 21.
• Maintenance work was done on the HVAC system in the LDAS room at LHO.
• I am still working to arrange the move of the LDAS tape library system.

General Computing (Wallace)

MIT

(Fred)

• Some purchasing issues (specs).
• Helping find inventory (for property office).
• ilog work.
• Some more work on backup monitoring scripts (nagios an xp backups).
• Disk work on Ken's machine.
• Dovecot zombie processes cleaned up.

Livingston

(Dwayne)

• Work on parts management database.
• Assistance for meetings at CIT.
• Presentation at CIT for AdvLIGO all hands meeting.

Hanford

(Larry)

• Working on a couple of maintenance contract items.
• Worked on new user accounts.

(Mike)

• Setup a new user accounts.
• Continued work on releasing expired ip numbers on DHCP server.
• Working the mail server clearing out trapped spam.

Caltech

(Veronica)

• Support of the NSF Review meeting.
• Working on the ligo.caltech.edu redevelopment issues.
• Usual amount of updates/maintenance of the LIGO and LSC websites and web applications.  User support on webdevelopment subjects.

(Melody)

• Migrated the docdb software onto a new server.   Made sure that features still worked. Minor software updates because of the server change.
• Code modifications to fix the Document Notification and signoff features in DocDB.
• Made a few more user interface changes (wordings) for the DCC.
• Created a Help page for DocDB.

(Larry)

• Worked a number of procurement items. Misc. h/w purchases have been made along with a computer order. Renewed the local matlab license. It should be arriving soon. Cleared up some Primavera licensing issues and renewed the licenses. P-card reconciliation work. Still a few more items to clean-up from last months.
• Most of this week was spent supporting the different meetings taking place here on campus. Also, assisting in logistics for the up-coming LSC meeting.
• Helped a couple of users cleanup their local machines to get them running efficiently again.
• Some minor assistance to both DCC groups. Modifications for support some minor requests on the old system and some testing on the new system.
• Work on new user accounts.
• Data transfers. Moved a number of monthly backups to the new tape system. Just a few more to compress and get them moved. Restored a couple of files from the disk backup system for different people. Definitely, faster than the old tape system.
• Regular handling of user requests.

(Mike)

• Rebooted all NTSRV's installing critical updates. The updates did break one of the servers that host the LIGO roster. I did manage to get this service back up and running. There are still some other issues with this server that I’m still working on.
• ADVLIGO: I have Primavera 6-SP2 running on a 64bit OS. I still have some more work on the server-side and then now have the client side to configure and start testing with Primavera users.
• Helped setup/monitor NSF review and ADVLIGO meetings.
• Setup some new user accounts.
• Other onsite/phone user support, plus other misc sysadmin tasks.

(Christian)

• Irene Baldon - Dead hard-drive. Restored files from backup image to Irene's laptop.
• Dwight Carter - reconfigured 2Brightsparks backup software on Dwight's laptop.
• Mary kurts - laptop Battery issues. Updated Bios on laptop but Mary is still having problem. Calling Dell support to see if the laptop is still under warranty.
• Larry Mike and I setup Clearone system with Evo for the NSF review.
• Riccardo Desalvo - Data acquisition card is getting memory errors. The workstation is about 5 years old and needs to be replace.
• Other misc.: Continued onsite software/phone support.

Advanced LIGO and Supporting R&D (Shoemaker)

Advanced LIGO Management

• Advanced LIGO was reviewed by the NSF on the 19 November. The feedback from the committee was very positive and enthusiastic.
• There was a meeting of many of the Advanced LIGO team members at Caltech, with significant remote participation, on 20 November. Recordings were made of the EVO stream; this and the presentation slides will shortly be available. Please refer to the AdL Wiki.

Advanced LIGO Systems

• Busy with reviews and team meeting.

Modeling and Simulation

From: Hiroaki Yamamoto hiro@ligo.caltech.edu

• Busy with reviews and team meeting.

Safety

From: David Nolting   dnolting@ligo-la.caltech.edu

• Presented, with QC, a presentation on the FMEA. process at the “many hands” meeting on 11/20/08 at CIT.
• Reviewing Triple Suspension PDR.
• Participated in the NSF Review at CIT.

Quality Assurance

From: Mick Flanigan flanigan_m@ligo-wa.caltech.edu

• Busy with reviews and team meeting.

Facilities Modifications and Preparations

From: John Worden <worden_j@ligo-wa.caltech.edu>

• Busy with reviews and team meeting.

Seismic Isolation

From: Ken Mason kmason@ligo.mit.edu

• Busy with reviews and team meeting. A meeting on BSC ISI design issues is to be held 21 November at Caltech.

Suspensions

From: "Greenhalgh, RJS (Justin)" <justin.greenhalgh@stfc.ac.uk>

• ALUK held its latest Project Management Committee on 19 Nov 2008 (See LIGO-M080390-00-K). A brief activity summary follows:
  • RAL: Contract let for FM/BS manufacture. Parts relevant to EQ stops being held up as far as possible. FEA of tablecloth has yielded results which are being assessed. FEA of combined FM/ITM structure is done and results are being written up.
• Quad OJEU process status as follows:
  • Machined items - Deliveries to RAL continue.
  • Weldments - Continue to liaise closely with manufacturer; current issue is ensuring that RGA testing is being done to LIGO requirements.
  • Blade springs - Material has arrived. Blade manufacture has started.
• Glasgow: Decision to delay full glass hang has been ratified and the implications worked through. UK work on the procurement of the glass masses is complete and the costs have been finalised, leading to a request for use of UK working allowance. Preparations are in hand for the glass hang with wires on 12th January 2009. Remaining effort is directed towards design and procurement of modified ears for use with fibres, and of prisms.
• Birmingham/Strathclyde: OSEM manufacturing ongoing. Specs for all quad electronics now complete and manufacture of test stand (first production units) is well underway – target date for first deliveries to US is early December. Main production run for electronics is gearing up. Designs for triple electronics being agreed. VM damper prototype target delivery early December. ESD production started.
• Overall: steady progress on production of parts and completing remaining design tasks.

From Janeen Romie and Norna Robertson
(romie_j@ligo-la.caltech.edu, nroberts@ligo.caltech.edu)

Operations Work

HAM Suspensions for Advanced & Enhanced LIGO

• The nickel plated blades were picked up from the vendor. The smaller, older blades required a chemical cleaning and a bit of scrubbing with a nylon ScotchBrite pad prior to plating. There are some marks under the plating. One is most surely a fingerprint from the worker who took the blade from the bath and put it into the bin for the heat treatment. Work is ongoing to characterize them, but preliminarily, they are still springs. One of Ken Mason's big SEI blades was nickel plated, and looks the best of the bunch by far.  It is the newest of the bunch, having been manufactured in the last year or so. The smaller blades were all manufactured between 2000 and 2002.
• We held an internal drawing review of the large triple on Monday to go over the work completed and the work that still needs to be done. Many of the parts and assemblies had to be input freshly into Solidworks in the last few months. Derek is preparing a DCN package for the many parts that are ready for fabrication.
• Suspensions personnel supported LLO folks in finding the problem with the hung-up LLO OMC SUS. HAM ISI shaking caused some of the vertical stops to wind down and hold the OMC bench stationary. Jam nuts were adjusted correctly and the chamber was closed today.

BSC Suspensions for Advanced LIGO:

• Joe O'Dell circulated the BS response document as it stands now. He highlighted critical actions from the review.
• SUS folks are coordinating with LLO facilities people to make sure that the training session, tentatively scheduled for the end of January, will not interfere with the  facilities modifications that will happen from December through March.

Project-Funded Activities

• Norna attended meeting with Mary and Dwight on how to interpret and extract info from various documents to prepare performance reports.
• Janeen and Norna worked with Dwight and Mary on three ACRs: ACR for adding optical tables, ACR to move SUS clean & bake to FMP, and ACR for value engineering of LIGO 1 OSEM parts. It was decided that for the latter the best way forward was to extract all LIGO 1 OSEM work from the various areas where they currently appear (HAM triples, BSCs, aux optics) and set up a new account just for these items.
• Janeen & Betsy discussed the optical tables needed for both sites and have tentatively decided that one table will be different at LHO compared to the layout of tables at LLO

Core Optics

From: GariLynn Billingsley <Billingsley_G@ligo.caltech.edu>

Project

• The Procurement wiki has been updated with the polishing procurement plan/evaluation criteria.  There are links to the specifications and drawings.  These have been checked but not signed off as of today.  Rudy has generated a sample contract which is being populated with relevant information about the polishing procurement.

Development

• We have a sample that was used as a first run of the gold coating process.  This is an ideal candidate on which to try various cleaning and abrasion tests.  It does have significant markings since the vendor used it for similar purposes, we will carefully document the current condition.
• Samples finished by three different polishing techniques have been sent off to be coated.  This is an investigation into the effects of surface preparation on coating

Auxiliary Optics

From:   Michael Smith <smith@ligo.caltech.edu>

• Busy with reviews and team meeting.

Input Optics

From: Rodica Martin <rmartin@phys.ufl.edu>

ELIGO Commissioning (LLO)

• Measured trend of WFS sensitivity to the ETM, ITM, and RM as function of power. Found TCSx was misaligned on ITM. Working on tuning WFS3 yaw loop. (Kate)

ALIGO Design

• We calculated new ROC values for the folded and non-folded MC curved mirrors by checking the higher order mode transmissions. Based upon these values, ROC values for the pre-mode matching mirrors have been calculated for a range of values. (Muzammil)
• Determined max and min bounds for PMMT1 to PMMT2 distance (straight IFO). Completing substrate drawings for procurement. Made preliminary HAM8 layout (with 5 SOSs), and investigating a 4 SOS layout. Reviewing SUS PDR. (Luke)
• Work on electronics design for discrete quadrant photodiodes/wavefront sensors. Work on parallel modulation MZ experiment. Continued investigation of absorption in Advanced LIGO modulator RTP crystals.
• Updated calculations for specular reflections from the crystals of the Faraday isolator for the most recent ROC values of the PMMTs. (Rodica)

ALIGO Acquisition

• Working on finalizing the bid package for polishing the first batch of optics. Updated polishing specifications for the most recent ROC determined by the layout change. Detailed final checks of the polishing specifications for the first batch of optics intended for RFQ submission in the next days. Writing DCN for IO substrates and updating IO Schedule Progress for November. (Rodica)

Prestabilized Laser

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

Operations

• In gathering material for laser safety training, I have almost completed the Rockwell Laser Industries laser safety training package.  This is the course currently used at LLO to bring people up to the basic level.  The exposure to a couple of approaches has been enlightening.

Project

• The DAQ channels for the intensity stabilisation servo were hooked up. Two slow channels to monitor the master oscillator and power amplifier output were also wired into the cross connect.  A new EPICS records database for the laser was installed on l1psl.
• Measurements of the dark current of some photodiodes were completed. The better ones have a dark current of less than 1nA with a bias of +5V. The best one measured has a dark current of 0.3nA with a +5V bias.  Next up will be to measure the current noise at low frequencies.
• Some cost estimates for the Laser Area Enclosure were requested from clean room companies.

Control and Data Systems

From: Vern Sandberg <sandberg@ligo-wa.caltech.edu>

AdvLigo Project

• Site CDS test stand document written and distributed, primarily to those involved in last DAQ review. I will probably present it at the next CDS meeting (Dec. 3), in hope of then placing orders.
• Working on document which addresses the detailed software design for the ADC/DAC drivers, which focuses on issues of synchronization and timing, along with appropriate diagnostics. Hope to get this out shortly after Thanksgiving for comment, with a presentation at the Dec. 17 CDS meeting.
• Full WindRiver package of the realtime Linux OS is now in hand. Alex is busy trying to figure out how to work it, as it now includes all of the higher level WR tools.

Related R&D

• DC power prototype unit under test at LHO. I'm hoping we can get the results doc together in time for a presentation at the Dec. 10 CDS meeting.
• Timing system for 40m lab should be arriving week of Dec. 8. Jay is working the details of providing an interface between the timing slave units (TSU) and the ADC/DAC modules. It is essentially a daughter board for the TSU, which converts their existing header connectors to something which can tie directly into the ADC/DAC modules.

Observatories

LHO:

• Tested and confirmed operation and latency of the OMC hardware and software based shutters used to protect the sensing photodiodes.  The measured latencies, the time delays from loss of interferometer lock to deflection of light in OMC cavity, were 0.6 msec for the hardware shutter and ~2.0 msec for the software shutter (with the low pass modifications to the tip-tilt mirrors' coil drivers).
• Worked on resolutions of the awg stability and protection from h1 traffic.
• Installed  a version of conlog to watch ISI channels.
• Built a CentOS box for the new "serial over ethernet" capabilities. This should improve the operation of our motor controllers and older systems that use RS-232/442 serial communications protocols.

LLO:

• Restarted existing GRB alert system.
• Fast ADC, EPICS changes for PSL upgrade, Fast ADC changes for TCS upgrade
• Investigated changes to support WFS3 QPD use for beam centering

Sub-System Reports

TCS:

• LLO:TCS X arm chassis was not delivering the power needed for the electronics and found out the power supply was current limited. TCS ISS electronics boards needed modifications.  ADC channels for TCSY all show input-referred noise is 1.1 nV/rtHz. The preamps have a large enough offset that the Epics channels they interface will saturate. The preamp gain was reduced by a factor of 2 to bring the Epics channel out of saturation. The gain was made up in the AC-coupled fast channels in the TCS ISS Board.

AdvLigo ISC:

• A prototype I&Q demodulator has been constructed.  Testing shows the unit performs beautifully from 20 MHz beyond 100 MHz, however the mixers used are exhibiting VSWR issues at 9 MHz.  We have an alternate mixer on order from Minicircuits that has better low frequency VSWR performance.
• We have completed a design for the advanced LIGO RFPD that works with the optical spectrum as predicted in the ISC CDR.  Now this design is being realized in circuit form for prototype testing.  It's quite complex, unfortunately.

AdvLIGO Reliability:

• We designed and built a soft start inrush current limiting circuit for advanced LIGO high reliability electronics.  This circuit is part of an effort to collect building blocks that can be used for special applications in the future of LIGO.

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For additional information about this report, contact Albert Lazzarini