Detector Watch S6 V1

Mike Hewson
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Topic 194443

Well I thought I'd restart my commentary upon detector operations, after a long hiatus and now that the S6 run has begun in earnest. This is unofficial and represents my views and understanding alone, but please feel free to add to the thread anything of interest. I read the Hanford and Livingston online logs - which you can too if you like - as a guest. Just use the username 'reader' with password 'readonly' when selecting the detector log link.

To review : LIGO is in 'enhanced mode' now with some upgrades to the hardware leading to increased sensitivity by a factor of two over S5. That is it can hear spacetime disturbances twice as quiet or twice as distant. The interferometers are of Michelson/Morley design with Fabry Perot cavity power recycling. If one sends laser light in two mutually perpendicular directions then any phase difference upon return ( the photons start life in the laser in phase ) is/can be interpreted as a change in the length of one arm with respect to the other. This is the basis of the historic Michelson-Morley experiment which showed that the speed of light is a constant with regard to all ( inertial ) observers, buried the concept of the 'aether', and led the way to the Einstein's relativities. A Fabry Perot cavity is a type of 'trap' for photons, some 4km long in this case, where on average a photon will travel ~ 200 times ( if not absorbed ) and then be compared with a similar photon up the other arm. This increases the sensitivity of the instrument or effectively lengthens it. What actually happens is that by a fairly sophisticated feedback system the phase difference b/w the two arms is kept constant – by moving the mirrors - and the gravitational wave signal is derived from the inputs required to do this. This is referred to as the interferometer being in ‘lock’, but unfortunately there is a host of factors which will bump it out of that. The figure of interest is thus to what fraction of the time is the interferometer in this mode and thus are the signals reflecting the science of interest. You will see a mention of ‘segments’ which refers to periods of time into which the data is packaged – we will work on these lumps of data here at E@H later on.

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Mike Hewson
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Detector Watch S6 V1

The detectors seem to be getting up to speed after their first week. However ....

Hanford : had a bad night with a storm producing lightning and a power surge which knocked it out of science mode for most of the shift.

Quote:
After this lockloss we ran Patrick's script to make another attempt at 18Mpc. We had one data point as high as 18.32Mpc, but after a while we lost the ifo.


Mpc refers to 'Mega parsec' - parsec is a unit of measurement based upon triangulation, Mega being a million of them. So 18.32Mpc is a range estimate to a 'standard' event, and is another way of quoting the sensitivity of the detector. Meaning that instead of saying 'we can hear signals to this level' - we say 'a standard event could be heard out to this distance'

Quote:
There was a GRB during the shift, but we dropped out of lock a few minutes after we got the alarm.


This refers to Gamma Ray Burst alarm. The IFO's receive real-time notification from a largely space based network of satellites which do gamma ray astronomy. The idea is to attempt to correlate gamma ray burst reception with any putative gravitational wave signal. While the data is analysed later, a time stamp is effectively placed on the data segments. But for this particular GRB alarm we probably won't have any GW data.

Why would gamma rays and gravity waves correlate? Aha .... this is indeed interesting and it depends on what we think is going on out there. For instance one idea for a scenario of gamma ray production is radiation from the massive fireball of a supernova, and the mechanism that caused the supernova may also produce a decent thump in spacetime. One especially interesting question is which comes first - the gamma rays or the thump? The energies involved here are humungous, and we should be happy that it doesn't occur around here, as the electromagnetic radiation alone would wipe out any life from an enormous volume around it.

Livingston : are investigating the orientation of a mirror in the Thermal Control System ( TCS ) as a possible source of noise at certain frequencies.

Quote:
It seems that rotating the TCSY polarizer by 180dg, which should do nothing, does something, but it doesn't do anything particularly good


The TCS has a separate laser, one for each of the main mirrors in the interferometer. By heating the mirror in a particular pattern the shape of the mirror can be altered by tiny amounts and thus maintaining the focus of the central beam. The mirrors are 4km apart and the beam is only a few millimeters wide and the angular width to be aimed at ( ie. what one mirror looks like from the other ) is of the order of microradians - millionths of a fraction of a circle.

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) and at Hanford there was 'a nice looking badger sauntering around' .... :-)

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

tullio
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If you are interested in GRB

If you are interested in GRB go to grb.sonoma.edu, where all gamma-ray sources detected by Swift,Fermi, INTEGRAL, etc. are listed.

Mike Hewson
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Now I'd have to admit the

Now I'd have to admit the detail that you can see in the logs is terrific. For all you fiddlers and faddlers out there these interferometers would be paradise to work on. Always something to fix or adjust or check or test or record or report on ...... :-)

Livingston : The thermal control system ( TCS ) is a result of the fact that the main laser used for the interferometers has to hit the centre of the mirrors. Otherwise the light won't go back along the 4km it came from. At about 10W of laser power, plus that we are keeping the photons recirculating ( aka Fabry-Perot ), then this will heat the mirrors. But at their centres where the beam hits. This distorts the shape of the mirror and if not corrected would cause aiming problems, loss of focus etc.... The solution is not to cool the centre of the mirror but to heat the area surrounding instead. Neat huh? :-)

So near the end mirrors there is a side window ( vacuum inside, normal air outside ) through which one can shine yet another laser. The pattern of light from that is like a donut/torus and aimed so that it hits the mirror in the vacuum space. So if done carefully this would result in uniform heating of the mirrors and thus maintaining the good shape for the return of the photons back to the corner station. ( The main interferometer beam heats the center while the TCS heats the outer ).

Now as the main beam laser power has been increased in S6 from S5 ( 7W up to 14W, nominal ) then this requires a corresponding adjustment to the TCS lasers. But the TCS laser can not only heat the mirrors! Any variation in the light by the TCS onto the main mirror could thus affect it's motion - photons have momentum, light has pressure - and effectively inject a signal into the device.

They've tracked down a noise signal to one of the TCS mirrors - in the 'Y' arm of Livingston - and have deduced that the mounting ( part of the TCS that is ) is the probable cause. So to that end they had to firm up the mounting of that mirror ....

The caption is 'Got clamps? After we added four more clamps'

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) And it helped that they could compare with similiar arrangements for the TCS mirrors on the Hanford IFO ....

( edit ) Sorry, TCS is properly known as Thermal Compensation System, and here's a neat diagram of the same ( for Advanced LIGO, but you get the idea ):

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Mike Hewson
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I know I've covered some of

I know I've covered some of this stuff in the dim/distant past, but I'll review it for recent attendees.

The operation of the interferometers is associated with a massive monitoring system that covers all aspects of the day to day, shift to shift, happenings. If there's a device or component it will have a setting, an input, an output ....... something .... which is worth recording. That is not only useful on a realtime basis but also for later review. So those involved in LIGO can access this data, in addition to the 'science' data, for whatever purpose.

Now the logs contain what are called Figures Of Merit which are summary plots ( usually ) that reveal the overall performance of the interferometer. These are automatically generated by programmed scripts for inclusion into the logs. One of these scripts is called 'RoboSciFom' which I guess means 'robotic science figure of merit'. Check this one out from Livingston :

There's no science data in this picture per se. It indicates the 'response' of the interferometer at the time it was recorded. Think, for a moment, of the interferometer as an aerial or antenna just like a radio or TV one. You could measure the capability of such an antenna by how well it will pick up a given signal, and for various reasons this capability will depend on the frequency of the signal you are trying to listen to. Thus it is so for the interferometers, as they are gravity wave aerials.

This diagram shows several curves. The greeny-brown dotted one which dips downwards from the left to a minimum and then steadily rises to the right is the predicted ability of the interferometer based upon it's design. It's the theoretical best performance, if you like, calculated from principles, models and engineering.

Quote:
What's that old saying? 'Behind every good scientist is a better engineer' ... :-):-)


What is indicated on the left sided vertical axis is a measure of the spacetime strain - how much in particular is the variation from 'flatness' that a wave is producing. This is in powers of ten ( hence is called a logarithmic scale ), and the lower we can go on that the better - the quieter will be the signal we can hear. The horizontal scale is also logarithmic and refers to received gravity wave frequency.

So at the minimum of the curve, around 200 Hz indicated by the red loop, is the 'sweet spot' where the 'hearing' of the interferometer is the best. If any of you have had formal hearing tests ( headphones on, press the button when you hear a sound .... ) then it is quite similiar to a curve you may have seen. Except that the sense of the vertical axis is reversed and better hearing is represented toward the top.

The part of this curve from the left axis down to the kink indicated at the blue loop is determined by the 'gravity gradient', which we really can't change much on this planet. You have to go into space to improve the hearing down that lower end of frequencies - indeed that is where LISA will be.

The part between the blue and the red loops is due to all manner of vibrations that can 'invade' the interferometer from the outside. This includes just about anything you can think of which is noisy or energetic in some way and covers lawnmowers to ocean tides. There has been a huge effort to diminish this by enclosing the working parts of the interferometer within structures that isolate that sort of energy.

Now the gentle slope from the red loop across to the right side is determined by the quantum mechanical nature of photons - a thing called 'shot noise'. I liken it to Melbourne trams. You're waiting at the tram stop for quite a while with no arrivals ( despite the timetable! ), and then all of a sudden 6 turn up at once. Hmmmmm ..... sound familiar? Well photons tend to do that : fluctuate around some average power and this type of variation affects higher frequencies more than lower.

The grey curve which is generally following the design curve is what ( on average ) was the best achieved for the S5 run. I'll talk about the spikes on that curve later.

As for the other coloured curves, well I guess you'd suspect all is not well at the time this snapshot was taken .... and you'd be right! This does not represent a 'locked' interferometer and it isn't taking science data. For whatever technical reasons/troubles the interferometer is 'deaf' at this point. So anyone looking at this FOM will immediately conclude that all is not well.

More later ...... :-)

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) Here you go, a much better 'audiogram' to compare and contrast :

Where you'll note the blue curve is mostly under the best S5 performance, that is better, especially at the high frequency end.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Dan G.
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Hello Mike, Can you remind

Hello Mike,

Can you remind me what the goal inspiral range is for eLIGO? I've noted in the eLOGs that inspiral range is often quite low, like in the 9Mpc area.

Dan

Quote:

Well I thought I'd restart my commentary upon detector operations, after a long hiatus and now that the S6 run has begun in earnest. This is unofficial and represents my views and understanding alone, but please feel free to add to the thread anything of interest. I read the Hanford and Livingston online logs - which you can too if you like - as a guest. Just use the username 'reader' with password 'readonly' when selecting the detector log link.

To review : LIGO is in 'enhanced mode' now with some upgrades to the hardware leading to increased sensitivity by a factor of two over S5. That is it can hear spacetime disturbances twice as quiet or twice as distant. The interferometers are of Michelson/Morley design with Fabry Perot cavity power recycling. If one sends laser light in two mutually perpendicular directions then any phase difference upon return ( the photons start life in the laser in phase ) is/can be interpreted as a change in the length of one arm with respect to the other. This is the basis of the historic Michelson-Morley experiment which showed that the speed of light is a constant with regard to all ( inertial ) observers, buried the concept of the 'aether', and led the way to the Einstein's relativities. A Fabry Perot cavity is a type of 'trap' for photons, some 4km long in this case, where on average a photon will travel ~ 200 times ( if not absorbed ) and then be compared with a similar photon up the other arm. This increases the sensitivity of the instrument or effectively lengthens it. What actually happens is that by a fairly sophisticated feedback system the phase difference b/w the two arms is kept constant – by moving the mirrors - and the gravitational wave signal is derived from the inputs required to do this. This is referred to as the interferometer being in ‘lock’, but unfortunately there is a host of factors which will bump it out of that. The figure of interest is thus to what fraction of the time is the interferometer in this mode and thus are the signals reflecting the science of interest. You will see a mention of ‘segments’ which refers to periods of time into which the data is packaged – we will work on these lumps of data here at E@H later on.

Cheers, Mike.


Mike Hewson
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RE: Can you remind me what

Message 93749 in response to message 93748

Quote:
Can you remind me what the goal inspiral range is for eLIGO? I've noted in the eLOGs that inspiral range is often quite low, like in the 9Mpc area.


Yeah, it's not off to a good start is it? Should be ~ 30 Mpc for the standard 1.4/1.4 ( solar mass ) NS pair inspiral in enhanced LIGO. S3 - S5 was ~ 14 Mpc on a good day, for the 4km arms ( 7 Mpc for H2 ) ..... :-0 [ aim for advanced LIGO is ~ 200 Mpc ]

I've been catching up reading the logs today ( busy w/end in real life ) and at Hanford at least there is a host of problems with several apparent threads/issues that don't seem to be connected. I'll get back on this but it looks like trouble with the Wave Front Sensor(s) may be responsible. WFS is essentially is a check on beam alignment, but it interacts with the Output Mode Cleaner apparently. The OMC is a method of excluding photons that have travelled in the interferometer but aren't sufficiently coherent with the main beam.

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) Mind you, I'm not sure how much/many of the features of eLIGO are in place yet .....

( edit ) Here's a document which outlines the expectations for the LIGO phases.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Mike Hewson
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For Hanford ( looking at the

For Hanford ( looking at the last five days ) problems have been:

- earthquakes
- nearby road works on an adjacent public highway ( near the end of the Y arm to the southwest )
- a herd of elk ?? :-)
- high winds
- 'Segment #106 died at 19:08 when someone led a tow truck on site to pick up a car from the LSB. Red, four-door coupe with a black bra. You know who you are.'

The WFS thing seems to be solved - meaning there is a method to manipulate a device that points the interferometer ( differential arm length ) output to a photo detector. There are several models/languages used to describe light : waves/particles etc. This can be confusing as one may not be sure what feature of light is being referred to. So while we have photodetectors which at an atomic level count individual photons ( quanta, lumps, particles ) why are we talking of wave fronts? The full horror/description is quantum mechanical. However :

- imagine if I have a source of light at some single point in space. It emits photons.
- let's say each photon is of an exact single frequency ( not actually possible to say that, as per Heisenberg, but forgive me )
- if I catch these photons at some other specific point in space I will find they all have the same 'phase'. You can think of phase as a 'wave' property. If I move my detector forward and backward with respect to the source this phase will change.
- if I move around the source, but staying a constant distance from it, the photons will all be caught with the same phase too.
- I can then define some 2D surface in 3D space over which all photons measured on it will have some single phase value. Let me call this surface a wave front. If I chose a different phase value I can define some other surface likewise. So a wavefront is a surface of constant phase. For a single point source in this example the surface will be a sphere/shell. For other arrangements it will be determined by the geometry of the device that the light traverses.

Quote:
A reasonable intuitive analogy would be a blast wave from high explosive, if you look at it with high speed photography. Or those wind tunnel pictures with the shock fronts coming off the shape being tested.


Now phase of itself is not measurable. Physical experiments can only define phase differences. We start all the photons in the interferometer within a single laser - so they all have identical phase from the get go. When they are re-combined at output, having traversed separate paths ( the interferometer arms ) they are then compared. The WFS ensures we are 'looking' at the right surface for this purpose. The beams have width ( not much admittedly ) and there can be a spread in phase across the face/cross-section of them.

Also the interferometer is a 'null' device, so we want the arms adjusted so that the photons from the respective arms return with 'opposite' phase. This has the effect of reducing the chance ( quantum mechanics alas ) of detection of a photon to zero. Probably. :-)

Quote:
To be really QM 'pure', I'd have to say that 'really' each photon to a degree travels up and back both arms 'simultaneously'. But this is one of those 'if a tree falls in a forest .....' type issues. :-)


Anyhows, the upshot is that unless these considerations are addressed then the desired level of sensitivity won't occur. The better the WFS functions the greater will be the inspiral range. LIGO really does approach quantum limitations ....

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) Actually because eLIGO is using a slightly off-null configuration, then the 'dark' port is not quite completely dark. A slight change in differential path length will cause a nearly linear change in light output. This is the 'DC' mode as distinct from the RF or 'dithering' mode used in S5 and earlier.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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Another FOM worth looking at

Another FOM worth looking at is this one ( from Livingston ) :

Alas, 'state vector' makes it sound more mathematical than it is. It is simply a numerical system for classifying the readiness of the interferometers ( and I don't think they've updated the legend for the vertical axis ). So during this 12 hour period the Livingston IFO was well locked and collecting science data, whereas Hanford is up and down. The stepwise increments indicate progression of the interferometer configuration towards locking. Here's the inspiral range for that time which reflects this :

So while Hanford was up for a shorter time, it had the greater range when it was. What is really preferred of course apart from long locked stretches per se, is coincident stretches for both IFO's. That way when ( Yeah! ) a signal arrives we could well get two 'views' of it. This is a key feature for the project, not only can one have greater confidence in the fact of a detection with several interferometers ( and let's not forget Virgo data which is in our analysis pipelines as we speak ) but also the possibility of 'triangulation' from separated detection sites. That way one raises the chances of a correlation with other astronomy modes.

What I reckon would be real cool would be ( near ) simultaneous detections of a supernova, say, by : LIGO, electromagnetic astronomy modes and a neutrino detector!! See SN1987A ...... :-)

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) I think you'd need four interferometers to localise in the sky, range included. Since they are as yet undetected then GW strength at source can only be estimated from other considerations. This is sort of but not quite equivalent to the intrinsic brightness of stars where we have plenty of examples around to calibrate some scale of luminosity. I think the GW perturbation subsides like inverse distance once you are outside of the nearby space of the source system. If you could be sure of source strength and the propagation decay of the strength then only three detectors ( all being well technically ) could give a unique solution back to the origin of the wave. You see, a single detector doesn't 'point' well due to it's angular variation of antenna response. It only varies by about a factor of two over most incident directions.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

tullio
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There was no WEB in 1987. In

There was no WEB in 1987. In the Amaldi biography which can be found at LIGO/Scientific collaboration/Amaldi Conference there is a bibliography listing publications on the 1987 supernova event (#185,#188,#190) but they are not online. All we need is a supernova in our Galaxy, it's long overdue.
Tullio

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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To understand much of what

To understand much of what happens at the interferometers the idea of resonance needs discussion. Resonance is a general concept in physics and fortunately we usually have an intuitive/everyday idea of what it means.

Imagine a box of some sort. Let's call it black, meaning that we can't/don't/won't look inside to see it's internals. Also suppose there is a hole in the side into which we can throw energy, and out of which we can sense what comes back. After some experimenting we notice that if we throw certain types of energy into the box, then we get back larger amounts of energy than otherwise. Clearly there is something going on in the box that reflects or returns what we gave it on certain occasions. This behaviour is the guts of resonance ..... and there are other definitions too.

Set the Wayback Machine Mr Peabody : Imagine sitting with Galileo in church, both your minds wandering from the sermon. Watch the swinging of the candle holders that are attached to the high roof by ropes. Back and forth. Back and forth. Quite regular, which you can attest to by timing with respect to your own pulse. Presumably the swinging motion is generated by drafts of air up there, and this gives a characteristic frequency for the motion. On analysis it seems that the length of the rope is the main determinant of that frequency, with the strength of gravity also. This is typical of resonance - a physical length/size and a force strength.

Now get a really good singer and a really good grand piano. Open the lid and have the singer put out a strong pure note into the open top. The piano will respond with vibration of the string corresponding to the same frequency of the note sung. Which string responds will depend on it's length and tension. Experiment with different sung notes. You'll notice it won't likely be just one string, there will be some lesser response from several strings on each occasion. However for a given sung note those other strings will have some fraction or multiple frequency to which they would have been the main responder. In other words there is harmony.

Back to the present day. I'm going to be an annoying salesman. I will knock on your front door once every 12 hours. You wisely don't answer, but I keep persisting. How could you characterise this behaviour mathematically? Well you could rightly say that the frequency of my knocking is once per 12 hours. But you could also say it is once per day too, as every day at a given time I will knock ( just ignore the in between ones ). In fact for all you know there might be two annoying door-knockers each turning up once per day for a go at it, but we alternate our turns and keep synchronised at 12 hours apart. There is also a sense in which my rhythm is 6 hourly, but at half strength, as I could be turning up every 6 hours but only actually knocking on the door every second time.

I'm attempting to give a sense of the idea of what is called up-conversion ( multiple of a frequency ) and down-conversion ( fraction of a frequency ). This pretty well happens, whether you intend it or not, for all resonant phenomena. Jupiter is a good example of this. This planet has been labeled the Hoover of the solar system. It just clears the little bits of garbage out and collects the rest. So if an asteroid has the (mis)fortune to return to more-or-less the same orbital place & time as Jupiter they will interact. Might is Right in this situation. In time the asteroid will be either flicked out of the solar system to never return, be gobbled up, or transitioned to a new orbit that will 'park' it out of resonance with Jupiter's orbit. We are lucky to have a Jupiter about to do this for us.

Back to LIGO. The interferometers are exceedingly complicated. Energy wise you can think of them like those black boxes above. Some boxes are next to others. Some boxes are inside others. The boxes interact. Some we want to resonate. Some we don't. And all are getting jiggled by the outside world, or by their own inevitable internal energies. We want to find the jiggles that are due to specific astronomical events far and away. It is those jiggles that are the quietest of them all, which we want to enhance ( via resonance over those 4km 'cavities' ) in a reliable way. Even though we have yet to hit the exact mark on that, the operations so far have improved/refined understanding of the resonances that are inherent in the design of the machine. Now let's look again at this FOM :


Focus on the grey curve, which is a reference curve derived from the best S5 experience. The spikes in that curve, rising very much above the greeny-brown dashed ( design spec ) curve, are where the interferometer resonates - and this is largely due to it's design ( boxes & boxes .... ) and inevitable interactions with it's environment ( like the electricity power supply frequency ).

One particularly interesting point is that Advanced LIGO is going to have the ability to shift some resonances of the machine and thus 'tune' the hearing. While not eliminating the energy from the configuration all together, one can 'park' the energy elsewhere in the spectrum. Currently some modeling based upon the knowledge of the inteferometer has allowed effectively 'smoothing' of the spikes, that is assuming what would have happened had the resonance not been there.

( Sorry for the long post - it's a hard area )

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

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