Physical Environment Monitor (PEM)

1-24-08

Today Rana, Tobin and I discussed setting up PEM sensors to measure acoustic, seismic, magnetic and RF ambience and find how/if it affects the interferometer in terms of noise. One task related to this project is the fixing/building of a weather station to measure atmospheric status (barometric pressure, humidity, rainfall, wind speed). Alan told me that there was a box on the wall that has serial port output, which was reverse engineered for use on one of the VME crates. It stopped working around five years ago, for reasons unknown.

Once the PEM system is set up, an adaptive filter (that neural network stuff that Keegan did last summer) could be employed to cancel out some of the noise from these sources.

To Do:

• Find sensors suitable for picking up noise (microphones, magnetometers, RF antennas, accelerometers), possibly guided by whatever is at Hanford/Livingston
• Figure out the best places to put the sensors in/on/around the interferometer
• Get data from these sources (i.e., use a DAQ channel for each of them, make some kind of amplifier for the RF antennas or magnetometers)

Sensor Ideas:

• The magnetometer could be a bunch of Hall effect probes. I am not sure yet whether measuring variation in the direction of the magnetic field here will be important--how big would this change be, anyway? What level of sensitivity should I aim for? What level of sensitivity is achievable with a Hall probe? Looks like I'll need to hit up the library or something.