I changed the carm_cm_up.sh script so that it requires fewer human interventions.  Rather than stopping and asking for things like "Press enter to confirm PRMI is locked", it checks for itself.  The sequence that we have in the up script works very reliably, so we don't need to babysit the first several steps anymore. 

Another innovation tonight that Q helped put in was servoing the CARM offset to get a certain arm power.  A failing of the script had been that depending on what the arm power was during transition over to sqrtInvTrans, the arm power was always different even if the digital offset value was the same.  So, now the script will servo (slowly!!) the offset such that the arm power goes to a preset value.

The biggest real IFO progress tonight was that I was able to actually measure the CARM and DARM loops (thanks ChrisW!), and so I discovered that even though we are using (TRX-TRY)/(TRX+TRY) for our IR DARM error signal, we needed to increase the digital gain for DARM as the CARM offset was reduced.  For ALS lock and DC trans diff up to arm powers of 3, we use the same ol' gain of 6.  However, between 3 - 6, we need a gain of 7.  Then, when we go to arm powers above 6 we need a gain of 7.5.  I was also measuring the CARM loop at each of these arm powers (4, 6, 7, 8, 9), but the gain of 4 that we use for sqrtInvTrans was still fine. 

So, the carm_cm_up script will do everything that it used to without any help (unless it fails to find IR resonance for ALS, or can't lock the PRMI, in which case it will ask for help), and then once it gets to these servo lines to slowly increase the arm power and increase the DARM gain, it will ask you to confirm before each step is taken.  The script should get you all the way to arm powers of 9, which is pretty much exactly 100pm according to Q's Mist plot that is posted.

The CARM and DARM loops (around the UGFs) don't seem to be appreciably changing shape as I increase the arm powers up to 9 (as long as I increase the DARM loop gain appropriately).  So, we may be able to go a little bit farther, but since we're at about 100pm, it might be time to look at whether we think REFL11 or REFLDC is going to be more promising in terms of loop stability for the rest of the way to resonance.

Here are some plots from this evening. 

First, the time I was able to get to and hold at arm powers of 9.  I have a striptool to show the long time trends, and then zooms of the lockloss.  I do not see any particular oscillations or anything that strikes me as the cause for the lockloss.  If anyone sees something, that would be helpful.

This next lockloss was interesting because the DARM started oscillating as soon as the normalization matrix elements were turned on for DARM on DC transmissions.  The script should be measuring values and putting in matrix elements that don't change the gain when they are turned on, but perhaps something didn't work as expected.  Anyhow, the arm powers were only 1ish at the time of lockloss.  There was some kind of glitch in the DARM_OUT (see 2nd plot below, and zoom in 3rd plot), but it doesn't seem to have caused the lockloss.