Alex, Gautam and Steve,

Single mode fiber 50m long is layed out into cable tray that is attached to the beam tube of the Y arm.

It goes from ETMY to PSL enclosure. It is protected at both ends with " clear- pvc, slit corrugated loom tubing " 1.5" ID

The fiber is not protected between 1Y1 and 1Y4

 Installed 0.5" ID 10 ft long protective tubing at the PSL end of the  ETMY fiber this morning. Here I had to cable tie a bunch of cables at the east side of the PSL enclosure.

They were hanging off the table blocking space were the sliding doors move.

 At the ETMX end of the X-arm fiber received the same protective tubing.

ETMY optical table top was grounded to the ETMY chamber through 1 Mohms this morning. I  also strain releifed relieved a few cables that were pulling on components directly.

There are 4 oscilloscopes left on the AP optical table top.... It's only 25 lbs... Do not leave anything on the optical table tops!

Alex and Steve,

Old halogen chamber illuminator cabling disconnected and potenciometer board removed at 1Y1 in order to give room for pd calibration fibre set up.

 Pumpdown 75, vacuum normal condition at day 144

Keven and Steve,

The 3 cranes tested and  wiped off as preparation for upcoming vent.

Thanks for the good preparation.  IFO pressure P1=20 Torr

 The 40m IFO has reached  atmospher in 5 hours. It is ready to open chamber condition. The RGA is pumped with the maglev.

P1 pirani gauge is contact dependent as you see it on the linear plot It will be replaced during this vent.

The venting speed was 2-4 Torr / min

Atm2 shows how the BS is sensing the venting air cylinder changes. 

The 4th cylinder of instrument  grade air  bump is overlapping with our janitor working at the BS chamber.

 Jenne, Annalisa & Steve

 Manasa, Eric, Evan, Koji and Steve,

Access connector removed in order to complete alignment. Light aluminum with acetate windows AC installed.

Sujan got 40m specific basic safety training this morning.

We have been using Air Liquide Instrument Grade Air for venting the 40m vacuum envelope. It is no longer available.

The replacement is Alphagas 1, total hydrocarbon <0.1% ppm

LINK TO Alphagaz

Air Liquide > ALPHAGAZ™ Specifications

ALPHAGAZ™ Specifications

Because each analytical application is sensitive to critical impurities that can affect your results, tests in our research center and analyzer manufacturers' studies confirm that the main impurities are moisture, oxygen and hydrocarbons.

Based on these critical impurities, Air Liquide has developed ALPHAGAZ™ brand with a Maximum Impurity Level (H₂O, O₂, C_nH_m).

• The Maximum Impurity Level is the same across the whole product range. This constitutes a guarantee of quality with regard to major critical impurities and contamination tracers. ALPHAGAZ™ 2 offers an even greater guarantee in terms of purity (CO, CO₂, H₂).
• The Minimum Total Purity is a prerequisite for product quality, but we do not stop there: Air Liquide selects and controls its gas sources by defining specifications regarding impurities that are critical for your analysis or application.

 We closed the chambers last night with heavy doors and reopened it today.

 RGA background at day 12 of this vent . The maglev is pumping on the rga through VM2

 The pumpdown has started at 8:38am

Manasa was here to confirm good alignment of the IFO

Inner jam nuts of AC bellow were torqued to 45 ft/lbs and   door nuts were check on opened chambers.

Annulos were roughed down to 500 mTorr

Oplev servos turned off, PSL and green shutters closed before pumpdown started

 IFO  P1=1mT PSL shutter is opened

 Cold cathode gauge CC1 -h (horizontal) just coming on 9.2e-5 Torr

P2 is the fore line pressure of the maglev. One can see the 4 Torr load during switching over to turbo pumping.

CC4  5e-9 Torr is the performance of the maglev pumping on the RGA only.

The annuloses are not pumped  now.  They are closed off to see how much outgassing plus leak they have.

Configuration: vacuum normal, annuloses not  pumped

Condition: normal

Precondition: 14 days at atm, IOO chamber north door was taken off as a new entrance, the ETMX chamber was not opened.

What is new in the vacuum system: new P1 pirani gauge, gold plated clean allen wrench and ..........what else was dropped?

Note: the wireless laptop did not fail once all day yesterday. I want to give credit to the person who is responsible for this.

 TP2's fore line - dry pump replaced at performance level 600 mTorr after 10,377 hrs of continuous operation.

Where are the foreline pressure gauges? These values are not on the vac.medm screen.

The new tip seal dry pump lowered the small turbo foreline pressure 10x

TP2fl after 2 day of pumping 65mTorr

 1, Vacuum envelope grounds must be connected all times!  After door removal reconnect both cables immediately.

 2, The crane folding had a new issue of getting cut as picture shows.

 3, Too much oplev light is scattered. This picture was taken just before we put on the heavy door.

 4, We were unprepared to hold the smaller side chamber door 29" od of the IOC

 5, Silicon bronze 1/2-13 nuts for chamber doors will be replaced. They are not smooth turning.

 Sorrensen ps ouput of +15V at rack 1X9 was current limited to 10.3V @ 2A

Increased threshold to 2.1A  and the voltage is up to 14.7V

Our fluorecent lights became obsolete.  We'll have change fixtures over to some more energy efficient one. Do you have any recommendation regarding to less noise performer unit?

We may go this direction of LED fluorecent lamps ?

Eric and Steve,

 We removed Wilcoxon Accelerometer PS and Amplifier unit under the BS optical tabel yesterday. The six cabels going to DAQ  were labeled and left in place. Gain setting were 100, except channel 3 was 10.

The ~ 40 m long 2 sets of 3 cables were very happy to get their kinks out. Especially the set going just south of ITMX optical  table.

We have to take better care of these cables! Your data will be useless this way.

 Based on the facts above I reconnected VC1 and VC2 valves.  State recognition is working.  Ion pumps are turned off and their gate valves are disabled. 

We learned that even with closed off gate valves while at atmosphere  ion pumps outgass hydrocarbons at 1e-6 Torr level.  We have not used them for this reason in the passed 9 rears.

I need help with implementing V1 interlock triggered by Maglev failure signal  and-or P2 pressure.

MEDM screen agrees with vacuum rack signs.

ETMX sus damping restored

Masayuki Nakano, a student of Seiji's from ICRR / U Tokyo, is visiting us here at the 40m lab for the next couple months.

He received 40m specific basic safety training this morning.

We can not leave cables connected like this. This is a burned toast award.

 Shutter moved, no more clipping.

Pick-off mirror 2" replaced by 1" one. Laseroptik HR 532nm, incident angle 30-45 degrees, AR 532 nm

Green REFL PD moved to 4" close to pick-off mirror. Pd being close to pick-off does not separate multiple reflections on it. I'll replace Laseroptic mirror with Al one. It is not easy to find.

 Hole cut into side wall for doubler oven cable to exit.

 Beam trap for Pd refl is in place. Cabeling is ti·died up.

 Laseroptic 1" mirror is replaced by Al 1" mirror. Problem remains the same. This diffraction patter has to be coming from the Faraday.

  Atm1, good separation when Pd is far 

  Atm2, bad separation when Pd is close 

 The extra high post 3.375"  for PZT is ready. We also have 2 more 2" green Laseroptik mirrors. I'm ready to swap them in.

The  75 mm  focal length  lens  was placed in front of the green REFL PD yesterday.

 Fred Goldbar of KoneCranes will come 7:30am Wednesday, September 4 to look at this issue.

It is changed to Thursday morning.

 Valve configuration: Vacuum Normal

pd76-m-d23

I cleaned up around MC2 and 1Y1 area this morning.

ETMY NPRO moved from the side to the center of the low shelf. Thorlab catalog " as spacer " removed after lunch.

The Lightwave Controller values: LT 40.4C,  LTEC +0.1V,  T 41.041C,  Pwr 239 mW,  Adj 0,  DC 1.82A,  DPM  0.0V,  Neon OFF,  Ldon OFF,  Display 5,  DT 21.0C,  Dtec +1.0V

 B grade Nobel is awarded.

                                  If cables could dream?

This skill should be  mandatory for LIGOX graduates.

 ~Vancuver, Canada earthquakes: magnitude 6,  5  and more shaking

I think the crane repair guy accidentally  stepped on the  BSC support beam.

PRM side is not coming down.

 [Fred Goldbar, Mike Gerfen, Dennis Coyne and Steve]

We inspected the hinge, 1.25" cross pin and I-beams. It is hard to explain what is  causing the folding I-beam corner to jam against the main I-beam.

To limit the motion of the folding I-beam  cross pin bushing will be added. This will take a week to complete.

 KoneCrane contact John McDaniel (562) 903 - 1371,

Wednesday, September 18,  folding I-beam will be removed.  KoneCrane will start working at 7:30am and they should be out by 12:30pm

 Friday,  September 20, reinstalling machined hinge on the I-beam. Same timing schedule as Wednesday.

 TP3 foreline's dry pump is getting noisier and noisier.  Turbo TP3 is pumping on the annulos. The foreline pressure is 7.2 mTorr and it is not degrading. It was swapped in March 5, 2013

The seal is very good, but the bearing is dying.

 The drypump is replaced at 95,781 hrs on TP3 controller time. The foreline pressure is 30 mTorr and dropping.

 It is 13 mTorr after 17 hours of pumping.

 Finally we reached 1.0e-5 Torr, cc1 (h) at day 41. There must be a leak or cold cathode gauge is not reading correctly. The gauge is new. It should not take this long.

All chamber annulos pressures are normal.

 The folding beam removed as shown. Two man supporting it while I hammering it out. Pin was dry and it gulled into supporting hinges.

The rotating hinge will be machined and bushing will be added with Zerk fitting or similar. This will allow lubrication in the future.

 see elog #9111

Local m3.8 eq shakes PRM lose.

Ottavia, Rossa  and Pianosa are running out of storage  space.

I'm working on it.

Atm1,  The folding arm is back on with 0.1" misalignment at no load in the trolly's way. The other side of the I beam is 0.02" higher than the main beam.. New bushing and pin were greased up  with Krytox before installation.

The axial Zerk 1/8" pipe in the pin upper end can not take any fitting. There is no room. It is taped off.

This gap comes down to ~ 1/16" at fully extended arm with 225 lbs load at the end of it.

The present plan is to grind down the  the misalignment of 0.1"  for a slow-loaded trolly.

Steve Baker of Konacranes will be back to grind down this ridge and load test at 500 lbs on Tuesday,  OCT  1, 2013