The test stand cleanroom was moved back into the VEA from the middle bay after the test stand re-build was completed. The work space and garbing/staging cleanrooms were moved into their nominal positions for the BSC-6 cartridge install. The test stand and work space cleanrooms are ready to be nested to clear the test stand for the ISI placement tomorrow.

Second vacuum, final inspection, and post-work FTIR sampling were completed in BSC-4 today. The crew got all the preparations completed to begin brushing in HAM-9 tomorrow.

Today, Travis, Giles, and Danny removed the remaining stock ends from the broken fibers on ITMY.  Then, with Jason's help they finished setting the UIM, PUM, and ITMy (6each) DOFs appropriately in preparation for fiber welding.  This included using the v-block refit with Doug's floating bearings.  Other weld equipment was checked over and calibrated in prep (new tweezer tips, etc.).  I used the DI N2 gun and the vacuum to do some further cleaning of the structure and the ITMy barrel.  I had to dry wipe the top of the barrel mid vacuum to get particulate to come free from the surface. In the end, I think the vacuum with small OD PTFE hose lightly touching the barrel surface did the best job there.

Numbers are being checked once more and we expect to be welding by tomorrow.

The Seismic Test Stand (stormy) has been updated to RCG 2.3.1

New mbuf, daqd, nds, awgtpman installed.  New IOP model installed with correct number of ADC/DAC parts to reflect actual installation.

Test stand is currently running with only the IOP running, user models to be built and installed as needed.

The high power laser (HPL) turned off at the weekend because the power watchdog was triggered. The system was running over a couple of day very stable, but on Saturday the output power started smoothly to decrease until the threshold for turning off the pump diodes was reached. The decrease was caused by setteling of the birefringence compensation lenses inside the oscillator as one can see by analyzing the signal at the DC channel of the photodiode downstream of the Brewster window (PDBP, misalignment of the birefringence compensation lenses corresponds to an increase of the voltage for this channel).
This effect is already known from the LLO system and the reference system as well: A couple of days after delivery the components start to settle and need to be tuned.

We realigned the corresponding lenses and and ended up with 185 W outside the laser box so far (205 W at the powermeter inside the expernal shutter). This is about 7 W less than we had directly after installation of the system and can potentially be improved.

Monday the ISI moved to the end station.  The Test Stand is now being rebuilt and may be ready for the ISI by day's end.
A few photos for your enjoyment:
* Yes the container does fit through the garage door.
* All secure ready for the 20 min trip at 7mph.
* We didn't even have to move any of Richard's racks!
* We did have to find a spot for the lid though,
* Before we could move the ISI from the Base.

Below please find a few pix of the ISI and its transition into Y-end VEA. 
DSC00316: The BSC transport container moving from the cleaning area into the VEA. Not much room to spare with racks in the way! ;-)
DSC00328: The transport container in the VEA with the roll-up door closed. Not much room here either.
DSC00348: The guys getting ready to pick the ISI. Note that the top of the transport container has been removed.
DSC00361: Many hands making light work of covering the bottom of the ISI after the pick but before the set-down.
DSC00368: The ISI and the top of the transport container sitting side-by side near the termination slab. There is just enough room for Mark D.'s foot in between.
The transport container was put back together, removed from Y-end, and returned to the Corner. With the transport container and the ISI out of the way, the pedestals of the test stand were returned to their proper locations in front of the roll-up door. The rest of the test stand will follow tomorrow. 

The wipe-down of BSC-4, which started this morning, was completed by the end of the day. That is a new speed record for the wipe-down of a BSC. The floor was re-installed in preparation for second vacuum and inspection tomorrow.

*Note: FTIR results of HAM-10 ICC came through today. (Please see reports below.) All post-work results, with one exception, were at or below detectable. The exception, the center of the chamber floor, will be re-sampled, wiped down again, and then sampled one more time when we are back in the chamber to pull the dust barrier.

Because the Staging Building quad test stand (X1) has very old electronics there has been some doubt as to whether the open light counts for OSEMs were comparable between it and the new hardware in the LVEA. The most conspicuous difference is that X1 has -v1 versions of the AA boards (D070081) which have a sign flip relative to the latest -v5. But they also have inputs with an impedance of only about 1K, which could conceivably have loaded the satellite amps and reduced the signal. And something in the X1 chain seems to saturate before the ADC because before the satellite amp gains were reduced, no OL counts below about -31500 were observed, even for BOSEMs that gave 32K on H2.

To test this we (Jeff B and I) remeasured on H2 six AOSEMs that had recently had their OL counts recorded as part of electronic noise testing on X1. Five were chosen at random but we made a point of including SN367 which had the largest OL observed so far at -30819.

We adapted the procedure for AOSEM noise testing in E1100860 to use the M2 channels on FMy because the cables for those positions were readily accessible. However we encountered various computing issues on cdsws10 and had to improvise at several points. MEDM wasn't working (whited-out fields) so we couldn't confirm the settings of offsets and filters, so we abandoned trying to take noise spectra. Partway through we started to see digital noise on M2-LR, so we ended up using only M2-LL. And shortly after that, tdsavg stopped working partway through, so we resorted to reading OL values from DataViewer. However we ending up with 6 usable readings. 

It turns out that the H2 values are almost identical to those on X1: about 0.8% +/- 0.3% high. And the OL for the "hottest" AOSEM is not significantly depressed on X1 relative to the others, so the safe range apparently extends as high as -30819. See attached results spreadsheet and printout.

This measurement could usefully be redone after the issues with cdsws10 are fixed to see if there is any effect on the noise spectra. (AOSEM SN367 had curiously low noise when measure on X1, which might be an artefact of running it close to the ceiling of the electronics.)

The aLOG currently sorts log entries by their original post date. Comments have no affect on this sort order.  This has the effect of hiding comments, since people who are following the head of the log can easily miss them as old log entries fall off page.

However, I believe that comments make previous posts relevant again.  If there was an option to sort log entries by the most recent date in the thread, then followers would be able to see newly relevant information as it comes in.

As long as threads continue to be grouped together when displayed, there shouldn't be any confusion about what log the comment is in regards to.

Last week, we performed cleanup of the debris from the fiber breakage on the ITMy main chain.  This was the order of the cleaning steps over a course of a few days:
Optics caps we on both HR and AR during steps unless stated otherwise.
1) Vacuumed the structure.
2) Blew the glass PUM and more of the structure top down with N2 deionizing (DI) gun.
This only removed roughly half of the particulate from the glass PUM.
3) Blew the ITMy barrel with DI gun in direction of AR to HR (cap and FC still on HR).
4) Blew the ITMy AR with DI gun.
Again, this only removed roughly half of the particulate on the surface, and was almost ineffective on the heavier EQ stop debris rings at the noon, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock positions.
5) Applied First Contact "bandaids" on these ring spots.
6) After letting them dry for an hour, we peeled them and found that most of the ring debris was removed.  There were some small (1mm) scratch-like features remaining at these locations.
7) Calum and I pains-takingly removed ~100 particles using ~25 dry Alpha q-tips which were still located within diameter-1" on the surface.  Blowing with DI during this seemed to help.  The q-tip technique we used was "dabbing" as advised by COC.
8) Applied FC starting in center of optic AR surface and moving outward (pix attached - thanks Calum and the new Lenova).

As Kyle reports there are some high pressures at the corner station (~1-2 e-7torr). The Mid Station pressures will slowly rise as the gas load travels down the tube. Pressures there should NOT go as high as 1e-7 torr.  There is one gauge at MIDY which has been disconnected since the BSC chamber was moved to the End Station. This is PT 210 (may be ignored).

Please call if you see anything unusual.

Note:  PT114, PT124, PT134 and PT144 will show "RED" as long as their pressures remain above 1 x 10-7 torr (probably most of the weekend).  

Great effort from Jim, Mitchell, Greg & Eric.

We put BSC6 ISI in the storage container to transport to EndY.

First Lesson--The ISI Cover with the hole in the top, well that hole doesn't open quite enough to get around the mounting pads that attach the lift fixture to the ISI--see first image.
So we elected to take this cover off and just use the Crane debris catch cover--see second image.
This works pretty well but the holes are just a little small to open up enough to go around the pad--I wanted to make sure we were not pinching any cloth under the lifter.  So we'll just move the ISI with the Crane Catch in place and when the lifter comes off, we'll put the full ISI cover back on.
So next image is the 3Pt Lifter being bolted into place.  Next we see where the fabrication/QC was poor.  See Image 4, where the weldment of the lifter is not flat relative to each other.  The three very flat pads on top of our very flat keel top don't mate up very well to the lifter pads.  This really needs to be addressed as the pad was no where near metal to metal.  We'll take this to a shop and have all the pads surfaced to the same plane.
Using the 12.5ton load cell, the tri-lifter weighed 400lbs; it weighed 440 on the 1.25ton load cell.  This may suggest the load cells need calibrating.  When we picked the ISI we read 7630lbs.  Less the 400 of the lifter we have 7230.  I believe this is about 770lbs less than we expected.  So the discrepancies scale, ~10% low on the big load cell.
A poor reality of the 3pt lifter design, it doesn't hang lever for a level pick of a balanced load.  The fifth image shows how the lifter hung after we adjusted it to hoist the ISI level.  With the current weight distribution, this ISI should be very well balanced.  And this out of level hang of the lifter actually puts its lift point in the center--it all hangs together, so to speak.
OK, so the ISI is on the BSC Storage Base and we remove the lifter.  Lots of debris on the debris catch from adjusting the lifter etc, we pulled the Debris Catch Cover off and reinstalled the ISI cover.  We then added a BSC Dome Tall cover (no hole in top).  So now we have two C3 layers--this is all done in the clean room and now we roll it out--See sixth image.
Finally we pick the lid up and onto the Base.  A little N2 for good measure and we are ready to go outside.  When we get in the garage, we'll add a tarp and shes ready for the road trip.
Again, thanks to the crew for working through lunch to get this completed.

We worked on the BSC-4 dome today. Removal of the conflat, assessment, wipe down of welds, a light vacuum and restoration of the conflat all took place before lunch. There was one troublesome spot: please see picture below and note the beautiful grass-green color. The spot did not come of with an isopropanol wipe so John advised using a stainless steel brush on the spot and then some acetone. This seems to have worked well: please see second picture below. We took an FTIR of the spot and will post results when they arrive.

All OPERATORS please note:

Since there are no longer interferometer components in the two Mid stations we will typically be able to tolerate much larger temperature deviations. Therefore, we have disabled the chillers and the chilled water pumps for these two buildings. The alarm handler will need some attention as a result.

thanks

After optimizing the injection locked laser system on Monday, we operated it also over night. We will keep the external shutter closed at the times nobody is inside the LAE, so that the light is dumped on a power meter inside the oscillator box, until the flow watchdog for the external power heads is installed. The power and flow watchdogs for the laser are already working.
The path towards the high power PMC is aligned and we are currently working on the alignment of the ISS AOM. When this is finished we can increase the power in this path as well (at the moment the light is dumped on at a variable attenuation unit that is placed directly outside the high power oscillator box).
During calibration of the Diagnostic Breadboard (DBB) we figured out that one PZT used for the autoalignment to the modecleaner is broken. So we had to replace that with a spare one and starting the calibration all over. Currently we are still in that process so that the DBB is not operational at this time.

The crew did not get into BSC-4 until after lunch due to a couple of factors. However, first vacuum, bellows clean-up, and support tube fiber removal were completed today. Since tomorrow is a short day (due to aLIGO 1st anniversary lunch), we'll work on the dome and should be able to finish it. We'll start wipe down next week.

Attached are plots of dust counts > .5 microns. The dust monitor in the H1 diode room (LVEA location 6) needs to be reset.