S3 and E11 Investigations:

• S3 Calibrations  (Mike Landry, Gaby Gonzalez, Brian O'Reilly, Patrick Sutton, Xavi Siemens)
  Gaby and Mike reported that the version 3 calibrations are now final and posted on the calibrations home page (Hurray!). The revised calibrations are notable for improved modelling of servo control loops, including non-ideal filter responses, and for improved tracking of gain variations (alpha/beta coefficients). The Calibration Review Committee has not signed off on this calibration release, but analysts should start using it. The posted calibration information includes frame files of the alpha/beta values. All of the calibration information, including matlab models and intermediate products, will soon be placed under CVS control.
  
  
• E11 Glitch investigations (Laura Cadonati, Erik Katsavounidis)
  Laura reported on an investigation by Lindy Blackburn of KleineWelle triggers seen in E11 data, in which he reran the program after applying version 1 DQ flag vetoes. As expected, better behavior is seen for the cleaner data, but a disturbing artifact is seen in certain H1 and H2 channels. The distribution in time-of-trigger (energy weighted) modulo 1 second shows 16 Hz periodicity in some channels and a very pronounced peak at zero for others (mich_ctrl, pob_q, prc_ctrl, and refl_Q for H1; BS optical levers for H2). The glitches are quite apparent in the filtered time domain, giving hope that they can be tracked down readily in the control room. Since the data conditioning is common to the time domain and the triggers, KR suggested verifying they can be seen in a DTT session with high-pass filtering.
  
  
• S3 Data Quality   (John Zweizig, Peter Shawhan, Keith Riles)
  John and Peter have resurrected their S3 scripts and programs for generating science mode segments and data quality statistics on those segments. The segments will be visible to the online astrophysical search analysis programs running under condor on Observatory Beowulf clusters..
  

M6 Recap (all)
Keith briefly summarized last weekend's M6 mini-run. L1 struggled to lock during most of the 48-hour run, which impeded some of the DMT monitor shakedown efforts, but the IFO finally cooperated during the last 12 hours of the run, allowing some useful evaluations. Bottom line on astrophysical FOM monitors: BurstMon in good shape, using EZCalibrate; StochMon in good shape without EZCalibrate, with EZCalibrate version imminent; PulsarMon not doing well at all on the online machines, despite appearing to work well in other environments. Spent part of the run resurrecting and updating scimon web pages, directories and reference files.

E12 Preparations:

• L1 status (Brian O'Reilly)
  Brian reported that L1 is now more stable than in M6 and is achieving lower noise. Commissioners will be noise hunting between now and Tuesday morning. A newly appreciated problem is backscatter of light from optical components on tables that do not receive HEPI actuation. As the ground moves w.r.t. the approximately inertial test masses, the backscattered light produces fringes that can be seen as glitches in AS_Q/DARM_ERR. Work is underway to commission more photodiodes to allow higher power. Only two PD's are used now. It is hope to commission 3-4 by the time of S4. There has been a data corruption problem indicated by checksum errors; the suspected culprit is in the reflective memory system. Alex Ivanov is trying to track down the problem.
  
  
• LHO running plans (Fred Raab)
  Lately H1 has been running in the 7-10 Mpc range, with H2 at 3.0-3.5 Mpc. If left unattended, the IFO typically has an 80% duty cycle. For E12, no operator owl shifts are planned and almost no scimon shifts. (Virginia Re, a visitor from GEO, has volunteered to go through the scimon checklists and report or fix problems.) LHO plans only minimal commissioning with much data taking. After some discussion, it was decided to arrange during owl shifts for LLO operators to monitor H1 / H2 IFO status and hit the "Go" button when an IFO falls out of lock and recovers to full power on its own. KR will talk with Dave Barker to see about setting this scheme upl Fred expects commissioners to work mainly on improving duty cycle rather than reducing noise between now and S4.
  
  
• Scimon shift schedule (Keith riles)
  KR posted a preliminary scimon schedule that had no owl shifts at LLO, but during the meeting received several more volunteer requests, enough to permit 24/7 scimonning, with lmore than half assigned to non-LLO scientists.
  
  
• Calibration (Mike Landry, Gaby Gonzalez, Brian O'Reilly, Patrick Sutton, Xavi Siemens)
  Mike reported that he, Greg Mendell, and Rick Savage have been remeasuring DC calibrations in preparation for E12 and expect to be in good shape by Tuesday. They don't plan another DC measurement until the end of S4. Brian reported that the autocalibrator seems to be working and will be run once per week in E12 and S4. E12 calibrations are expected to be ready by Tuesday. Fred reminded everyone that the old CARM_CTRL signal will be removed from the data for this run (no longer needed with new common mode feedback topology). The new GW channel DARM_ERR will take its place.
  
  
• Glitch investigations (Laura Cadonati, Erik Katsavounidis)
  Laura reported on the glitch group's plans for on-the-fly analysis of E12 data, in preparation for an end-of-run telecon on Feb 9 to assess whether to proceed with S4 on the nominal start date of Feb 22. Plans include looking at glitch triggers in the database, scanning loud inspiral events, exploring and AS_I veto, studying BurstMon trends with followup of loud triggers, and scanning of excess power triggers,  BlockNormal triggers, KleineWelle triggers, and airplane candidates.
  
  
• Hardware injections (Peter Shawhan, Vuk Mandic, Szabi Marka)
  Peter reported that they plan to test the mechanics of four injection types during E12: inspiral, burst, pulsars, and stochastic. There are new inspiral waveforms and some new pulsar injection code to be tested. Also, there will be an attempt to inject stochastic signal simultaneously on L1 and Allegro, using a web page for exchanging raw waveform information. The group requests three 2-hour injection slots during E12. They may want to run pulsars for more than 12 hours. Erik wondered whether there would be any injected waveforms that include an inspiral with a burst at the end. Peter said that Patrick Brady and Steve Fairhurst would visit LLO during the weekend to assist with injections. He thought they has such a waveform to try. Gaby confirmed that such a waveform is available. Fred suggested that it would be good to test injections on H1 and H2, to make sure old infrastructure still works. Peter agreed that would be a good idea and will arrange for the tests. For E12/S4 the calibration lines will be injected on DARM_CTRL, and signal injections will be on ETMX_EXC. KR asked whether the RDS should include both ETMX_EXC_DAQ and ETMY_EXC_DAQ or only ETMX_EXC_DAQ. Peter said that only the X channel was needed. There is no plan to inject on the Y arm. KR asked Peter to propose an injections schedule for consideration early next week.
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• Timing stability (Szabi Marka, Daniel Sigg)
  Szabi reported that timing signals at LLO are in good shape again at LLO, following his visit last week. Fred mentioned that LHO has been seeing atomic clock warning messages recently. Szabi said he look into it.
  
  
• PEM injections (Robert Schofield, Josh Dalrymple)
  Robert and Josh hope to verify that magnetic and acoustic couplings are no worse now than in S3 at LHO and LLO, respectively. Robert has been monitoring couplings at LHO and expects no surprises, but the situation at LLO is not yet known. Josh wants to start injections early in E12 and expects to need four hours.. KR asked Josh to propose a schedule for consideration along with signal injections. Unfortunately, some accelerometers at LLO are not connected. Fred mentioned a new environmental coupling site at LHO. Noise on the thermal compensation system (TCS) laser intensity shows up visibly in the AS_Q spectrum with a 1/f shape up to 500 Hz from heating of the ITM's. It is easy to magnify noise in AS_Q by a factor of 10 by disturbing the TCS laser. He suggested that glitch hunters pay attention to the TCS power channel.
  
  
• Reduced data set generation (Greg Mendell, Isabel Leonor)
  Isabel and Greg are sorting through a variety of requests for new channels in Level 1 and Level 3 RDS frames. Not all channels (old and new) are present in the current data streams. So some iteration has been necessary. Greg mentioned that it should be possible to exchange Level 3 RDS frames between the sites. KR asked Daniel whether the new fast channels for looking at strain at the FSR and 2xFSR frequencies should be included in the real-time S3 for immediate distribution over the network. Daniel pointed out that only H1 channels are commissionied at the moment and suggested waiting until after the S4 run to create a special L3 RDS with those channels.
  
  
• Data Quality (John Zweizig, Peter Shawhan, Keith Riles)
  John is dusting off his S3 segment statistics infrastructure. He has added new DMT alarms on microphone channels and now keeps track of microphone trigger counts.
  Peter's conlog-driven segment generation scripts now trim off the last two seconds of science segments, since there is a 1-2 second delay for conlog receiving notification of state vector changes.
  

DMT Software Status:

• John Zweizig: Infrastructure status (hardware & software at LLO)
  John and others moved several DMT machines at LLO into racks immediately before the M6 run, and to everyone's relief, everything went smoothly. He has moved Szabi's SPI page software into the ops directory so that others can make modifications when needed. The WatchDawg monitor has been modified to use config files and will run on all online DMT machines. The web emulator of the DMT viewer has been repaired. KR wondered if the DMT data dropouts at LLO are understood yet. John said he does not understand it, but has been investigating it. KR reported that most (but not all) new DMT trends are visible with data viewer and ligo_viewer; he will work with Ashfaq Khan in the next few days to get the remaining channels visible.
  
  
• Patrick Sutton: Calibration infrastructure
  No update.
  
  
• John Whelan / Mark Cenac / Brian O'Reilly: StochMon
  Joh reported that the new StochMon with EasyCalibrate compiles and runs on fortress. It will be tried at Livingston shortly.
  
  
• Ken Ganezer: seis_blrms
  Ken reported that the November 2004 version of the program has been running since that time at both sites and recording DMT data dropouts that correlate strongly with SenseMonitor dropouts. A new version is being tested that suppresses potential filters ringdowns for three minutes after each dropout.
  
  
• Sergey Klimenko: BurstMon
  Sergey reported that the BurstMon version running at LLO was updated a few days before the M6 run and seems to be working well. KR asked about a hang that occurred late Sunday night during M6. JohnZ said he suspected that the monitor was hanging after resumption of science mode data after a long hiatus. Sergey said he has a new version of BurstMon for E12 testing that reports several new figures of merit: the frequency of the loudest recent cluster and the cluster's SNR (recent means within the last 1-minute time stride), along with the rate (Hz) of clusters with N or pixels.
  
  
• Giovanni Santostasi: PulsarMon
  No report.
  
  
• Rauha Rahkola: SuspensionMon
  SuspensionMon trends are now visible at LLO after some config file changes on the frame builder machine.
  

• Next detchar telecon: Friday February 11 at 1:30 p.m. EST (E12 recap and S4 preparations)