Some more words about the ISS -> OSEM measurement:

The calibration of the OSEMs have been done so that these channels are each in units of microns. The SIDE channel has the lower noise floor because Valera increased the analog gain by 5x some time ago and compensated with lower digital gain.

The peak heights in the plot are:

UL   0.85

LL   0.78

UR   0.61

LR   0.45

S    0.27

So that tells us that the coupling is not uniform, but mostly coming in from the left side (which side is the the SIDE OSEM on?).

Jenne and I discussed what to do to mitigate this in the loops. Before we vent to fix the scattering (by putting some covers around the OSEMs perhaps), we want to try to tailor the OSEM damping loops to reduce their strength and increase the strength of the OL loops at the frequencies where we saw the bulk of the instability last time.

Jenne is optimizing OL loops now, and I'm working on OSEM tweaking. My aim is to lower the overall loop gains by ~3-5x and compensate that by putting in some low Q, resonant gain at the pendulum modes as we did for eLIGO. We did it here at the 40m several years ago, but had some troubles due to some resulting instability in the MC WFS loops.

In parallel, Steve is brainstorming some OSEM shields and I am asking around LIGO for some AC OSEM Satellite modules.