Caltech: Drever, Shawhan, Zweizig
     Florida: Klimenko
     LHO: Ito, Landry, Raab, Rahkola, Sigg
     Louisiana Tech: Zotov
     Michigan: Riles
     MIT: Fritschel, Shoemaker
     Syracuse: Penn
     U.T. Brownsville: Romano

Preliminary E6 Reports:

• Signal injection - P. Shawhan

Using software that he and Daniel had put together earlier in the fall, Peter tried injecting some inspiral chirps into the interferometer at Livingston. He chose a 2-hour period of relative quiet with good locking conditions. The signals were injected via the test mass actuation coils on the LLO 4K end masses. The chirps were 32 seconds long, with correction for the 1/f**2 response of the mass to the coil currents. Several amplitudes were tried, some strong enough to be audible on the control room speakers, others too weak to be seen by eye in the data stream. The louder chirps tended to knock the IFO out of lock because of limited dynamic range, given the f**2 weighting of currents. Alan Weinstein and Julien Sylvestre in the burst u.l. group have tried looking for some of the chirps with existing burst search code and found at least some of the chirps at the right times. The inspiral u.l. group hasn't yet tried the exercise. Peter did also try injecting a signal remotely at LHO from the LLO control room as a test of the software, but the IFO turned out to be unlocked at the time. David Shoemaker suggested verifying that the injection algorithm adequately accounts for frequency-dependent loop gain in the differential mode servo. There is interest from the stochastic u.l group in injecting correlated noise at the two sites during E7. Peter said the software would permit this, but some work will be required, because of the extended times spans. Injecting burst signals would be relatively easy, given contributed waveforms.

• Interferometer configurations - F. Raab
  The LIGO Lab has decided for E7 to go with a recombined (unrecycled) 4K at LLO, a recombined 4K at LHO, and a recycled 2K at LHO. The performance of the interferometers has been very fluid lately, with some recent and significant improvements in noise, especially from the mode cleaners. Work on better-diagonalized wave front sensing and on implementing the common mode servo feedback to the laser is underway on the LHO 2K. A power outage last week has left the LHO 4K mode cleaner with an apparently partly clipped beam, which is receiving great attention now. 
  
  
• Scientific monitoring shifts & investigations - KR
  The scientific monitoring shift slots are filled at LHO and very nearly filled at LLO. Volunteers for the remaining slots are solicited. Given that the E6 investigation teams were formed specifically to prepare for E7, KR proposed that the same teams and leaders continue related work on E7. No objections were raised.
  
  
• Scheduling E7 telecons - All
  After some discussion, it was decided to hold three pre-run telecons, each at 6:00 p.m. PST (8:00 p.m. CST) because of the increased night activity at both sites. The dates for the telecons are Wednesday December 19, Wednesday December 26, and Thursday December 27. KR will organize the 12/19 telecon and post the agenda / calling instructions. E7 investigators with special running condition requests should give notice at the 12/19 meeting. The 12/26 and 12/27 telecons will be inter-site and focussed on last-minute issues.
  

• General - J. Zweizig
  The new DMT version (2.0) was run during E6 and worked fine. The handling of frame tables of contents in data i/o dramatically reduced required CPU time per process.Some recent work on the burst u.l. group's "deep mine" of transients uncovered various bugs that have now been fixed. After the fixes the deep mine study (using deliberately lowered "glitch" thresholds) will be rerun. John is also working on the documentation for DMT 2.0. He asked that any updated DMT monitor code to be run during E7 be given to him no later than December 21, preferably earlier. He mentioned that monitor authors have been pretty good recently about getting updated code to him well before engineering runs. Fred urged that monitor authors provide more useful (e.g., visible) info to operators on shift and that documentation on the monitors  be upgraded. KR agreed that improvement is needed, promised to nag remiss authors before E7, and mentioned that Szabi Marka is working on a DMT status summary html page where persons on shift should go to get an overview.
  (Note by KR: Following this meeting, another telecon was arranged among Dave Barker, Szabi Marka, Rauha Rahkola, KR and John Zweizig to discuss implementing audible alarms for DMT monitors. Agreement was reached to use EPICS for the audible alert (requiring operator acknowledgement), but to use Szabi's html summary page to provide information on the meaning of the alarm. Szabi will produce a prototype of this system for E7, using a single EPICS alarm; Rauha will upgrade what Szabi develops, after E7, making more use of  EPICS.)
  

• Line noise (multi-taper method) & inter-channel correlation monitors - B. Allen, A. Ottewill (Adrian reporting by e-mail)

The line noise and correlation monitors will be run during E7. Adrian is working now on the LDAS implementation of the same algorithms.
 
• Line noise (quasi-monochromatic method) monitor - E. Daw, S. Klimenko (Sergey reporting)
  
  The line monitor is now integrated into the DMT process manager and has the same features (with minor improvements) as the private version run during E6, including the production of trend data.
  
  
• Band-limited / seismic noise monitors - E. Daw (not present)
 
• Bilinear cross-couplings & broad-band non-Gaussianity monitor - S. Penn

The bilinear noise monitor got a lot of use during E6, particularly by Nelson Christensen. The monitor now has an optimal windowing scheme that makes the plots more readable, less prone to fluctuations. With some experience, thresholds for certain artifacts will be set to define triggers. Nelson and Steve are following up on a suggestion by Stan Whitcomb to look at upconversion in the mode cleaner. Steve's next improvement will be providing storable output for the graphics, most likely postscript files.
 
• Lock transition and servo instability monitors - D. Chin, K. Riles (KR reporting)

Dave Chin has revised the lock loss monitor's html summary page to include livetime over several time intervals, including the last 10 minutes, and last hour. He is still having trouble with flakiness in the DMT viewer interface for ServoMon and will talk to John for guidance. The trouble doesn't occur with LockLoss, despite apparently identical interface code.
 
• Rayleigh behavior monitor (non-Gaussianity vs frequency) - S. Finn, G. Gonzalez, P. Sutton (not present)
 
• Power spectral transient monitor - S. Mohanty (not present, reported by e-mail)
  
  Still having trouble getting monitor to run online at Hanford. Consulting John for guidance.
 
• Transient identification & event catalog monitors - J. Sylvestre, R. Weiss (not present)
 
• Glitch monitor - M. Ito

The monitor now serves histograms of glitch amplitudes to the dmt viewer. Masahiro is working on an upgrade to allow config-file specification of individual channel thresholds. Natalia Zotov mentioned a problem she has run into with glitchmon where channels dominated by slowly varying sinusoids give unreliable glitch triggers because glitchmon averages over 1-second intervals. She will talk with Masahiro about a simple modification to glitchmon to avoid this problem. Ed Daw is working on something similar for another purpose.
 
• Magnetic field and seismic transient monitors - R. Frey, R. Rahkola (Rauha reporting)
  
  A magnetic field glitch monitor, based on Masahiro's glitchmon, is now serving histograms to the dmt viewer. A revised version of the quake monitor, one that allows setting of absolute channel thresholds, has been run under the old DMT version, but is untested with 2.0. Rauha mentioned a recent problem with accessing NFS-mounted disks at Hanford, which John will look into

A.O.B.

 
• Next  regular teleconference: Friday January 4 at 11:00 a.m. EST (8:00 PST).