Hidden in Nakano-kun's previous entries was that the phase margin of the X-Arm was only 9 degrees!! This extremely close to instability and makes for huge gain peaking. The feedback loop is increasing noise above 100 Hz rather than suppress. After some tweaks of the LSC filters we got a much more stable loop/.

So we today started to examine the sources of phase lag in the arm cavity sweeps. There were a few unfortunate choices in the XARM LSC filter bank which we tuned to get less delay.

Then I wrote a bunch of detail about how that worked, but the ELOG ate my entry because it couldn't handle converting my error signal noise plot into a thumbnail. Then it crashed and I restarted it. We also have now propagated the changes to the Y arm by copy/paste the filters and the result there is pretty much the same: low phase margin is now 38 deg phase margin. Noise is less bad.