Rob, Johnnie
We made some progress on locking last night (Wed night), namely that we were able to handoff (briefly) the CARM-MCL path the REFL-DC error signal. We tried this because we suspect that the reason the PO-DC is not a good CARM error signal is because at low powers, the dc light level in the recycling cavity is dominated by the +f2 RF sideband. Thus, REFL-DC should work a bit better at low powers, which it did. It wasn't super stable, though, so this will require a bit of work to make the transition reliable & stable. The next things to work on include setting the AO path gain properly and possibly going to higher arm powers before handing off (thus increasing the discriminant).
Another thing we found is that the alignment scripts are not working in an ideal fashion. Running the alignment scripts for the two arms (XARM & YARM) leaves the Michelson badly misaligned, making it impossible to get good DRM alignment. This will have to be fixed. |