Automated Optimization of the Damping and Control of the Suspended Optics at the 40m Interferometer
Sonia Buckley
Mentors: Dr. Rana Adhikari and Dr. Alan Weinstein
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a facility dedicated to the detection of cosmic gravitational waves and the measurement of these waves for scientific research. The sensitivity to gravitational waves depends strongly on the quality of the optic systems. Optics are suspended as pendula in order to isolate them from high frequency vibrations, and a suspension controller system is used to damp the pendulum modes. The suspended optics should be actively damped at resonance, without applied forces at the higher frequencies in the range of detectable gravitational waves. This project focuses on the optimization procedures for the damping and control of the suspended optics. It was based at the 40 m Prototype Laboratory at Caltech, a facility used to test and develop LIGO technology. Using Matlab programs and different tools and scripts for getting data from the main data acquisition system, a number of programs were written that optimize various aspects of the system. When run, these programs interact with the interferometer, exciting or changing the damping of the suspended optics in order to collect the data necessary for the optimization. The programs will be executed periodically in order to keep the system optimized as conditions change over time.
SoniaBuckley_Progress_report010807_2.pdf
27/08/07
Here are the three folders with a list and description of the scripts and functions that I wrote for the optimization. 
Found in folder /cvs/cds/caltech/users/sonia
../diagonalize_matrices
../set_Q_value
../MCL_optimization