Here's the game plan for things that we need to do to get this IFO locked up. 

Red is for things that should be done today, or tomorrow if they don't get finished today (eg. laser mode hopping temperature check).  Orange is for things that will become red once the current red things are gone (eg. inferring the POP QPD gouy phase, and moving it to minimized PRM information).  Green is for things that we'd like to do, but aren't high priority (eg. X green mode matching).  Blue is for things that we should remember, but not plan on working on soon (eg. putting PZTs on the Yend table for green).

TODAY so far:

Q already did the tweak up of the PSL SHG crystal alignment.  HE SHOULD ELOG ABOUT THIS.  What was the final power of green that you got?  Do we have any record of a previous measurement to compare to?

Q helped me install PDA55s on each of the lasers (I did the ends, he did the PSL) so that we could do the mode hop temperature check.  For the Yend, I took the leakage transmission through the first Y1 steering mirror after the laser. This beam was dumped, so I replaced the dump with a PDA55. For the Xend, the equivalent mirrors are too close to the edge of the table, so I put in a spare Y1, and reflect most of the light to a beam dump.  The leakage transmission then goes to a PDA55.  Note that for both of these cases, no alignment of main laser path mirrors was touched, so we should just be able to remove them when we're through.  For the PSL, I believe that Q took the rejected light from one of the PBSes before the PMC.  He mentioned that he bumped something, so had to realign the beam into the PMC, but that he was able to get the transmission back up to 0.802, when we were seeing it in the mid 0.7's for the last several days.

The end temporary PDs are using the TRX / TRY cables, so we will be looking at the C1:LSC-TR[x,y] channels for the power of the end lasers.  The PSL's temporary PD is connected to the PMC REFL cable.  For the end PDs, since I had filter banks available, I shuttered the end lasers and removed the dark offset.  I then changed the gains to 1, so the values are in raw counts.  The usual transmission normalization gains are noted in one of the control room notebooks.

I did a slow ezcastep and ramped the temperature of all 3 lasers over about an hour.  I'll write a separate elog about how that went.

This afternoon Q helped me put in some temporary PDs for checking for any mode hopping behavior in our 3 main lasers. 

Q helped me install PDA55s on each of the lasers (I did the ends, he did the PSL) so that we could do the mode hop temperature check.  For the Yend, I took the leakage transmission through the first Y1 steering mirror after the laser. This beam was dumped, so I replaced the dump with a PDA55. For the Xend, the equivalent mirrors are too close to the edge of the table, so I put in a spare Y1, and reflect most of the light to a beam dump.  The leakage transmission then goes to a PDA55.  Note that for both of these cases, no alignment of main laser path mirrors was touched, so we should just be able to remove them when we're through.  For the PSL, I believe that Q took the rejected light from one of the PBSes before the PMC. 

The end temporary PDs are using the TRX / TRY cables, so we will be looking at the C1:LSC-TR[x,y] channels for the power of the end lasers.  The PSL's temporary PD is connected to the PMC REFL cable.  For the end PDs, since I had filter banks available, I shuttered the end lasers and removed the dark offset.  I then changed the gains to 1, so the values are in raw counts.  The usual transmission normalization gains are noted in one of the control room notebooks.

I did a slow ezcastep and ramped the temperature of all 3 lasers over about an hour.  Since we usually use the PSL around FSS slow slider value of zero, I swept that from -10 to +10.  Since we usually use the Xend laser at around 10,000 counts, I swept that from 0 to 20,000.  For the Yend laser, it is usually around -10,000 counts, so I swept it from -20,000 to 0.  ezcastep -s 0.2 C1:ALS-X_SLOW_SERVO2_OFFSET +1,20000 C1:ALS-Y_SLOW_SERVO2_OFFSET +1,20000 C1:PSL-FSS_SLOWDC +0.001,20000


I was looking for something kind of similar to what Koji saw when he did this kind of sweep for the old MOPA (elog #2008), but didn't see any power jumps that looked suspicious.

Here is the PSL:

The Xend:

And the Yend:

[Jenne, Rana]

* Decided that earlier mode hop scan won't give us the information that we were hoping for.  We need to think about where we can actually see the frequency change.  Can we use the IR beatnote that we will soon have to do this?  We'd only be able to scan one laser temp at a time, but that's okay.  Leave, say, the PSL temperature alone, and scan one of the end laser temps.  Using the PSL as the reference, we will be able to see if the frequency of the end laser goes crazy and jumpy as we pass through a certain temp.  Then, repeat while holding the end laser constant and scan the PSL.  Thoughts?

* Meditated on PSL oplev servo, but I need to make a Matlab script that can evaluate different loops according to a cost function based on elog 9690. 

* Aligned IFO to IR, then greens to arms (got back to 0.9 for GTRY, but only about 0.5 for GTRX, with the PSL green shutter closed).  Then aligned green beams on the PSL table, since the PSL green pointing had changed a bit from Q's crystal alignment tweak-up earlier today.  Beatnotes are nice and big (see elog 10381 - The Yarm is the larger beatnote, and the Xarm is the smaller one.)

* Was not able to lock ALS comm/diff and hold long enough to get both arms to IR resonance.  Also, saw that TRY's RIN was more than 50%(!!!).  We took a look, and there seems to be much more low frequency noise than there was when the spectrum in the control room was taken for the multicolor metrology paper:

* Tried to balance the ALS comm/diff input matrix, with not a lot of success.  First of all, it looks like the Xarm has overall about 10 times more noise!  We were exciting MC2 in position (~88 Hz, about 130 counts I think), and then looking at DARM_IN1 for the peak.  When DARM_IN1 was just one of the 2 ALS error signals (i.e. one matrix element set to zero), versus when both matrix elements were set to 1, we saw a factor of only about 3 in reduction of the peak height.  We were hoping to have better cancellation of this pure CARM signal in the DARM channel.  The Xarm green PDH loses lock every ~5 or 10 minutes, and when we relock it, this cancellation seems different, so we want to try again tomorrow when the ALS is locked on comm / diff, rather than just the free running ALS that we have now.  Although, if the balance of the input matrix changes lock-to-lock, we may need to consider redoing the green PSL table layout so we get a pure DARM beatnote signal like they have at the sites.

* We want to change how the watch script for ALS works, although this is a low-priority task.  Rather than looking at the control signal, we should maybe look at the sum of all the coil outputs, multiplied by a pendulum TF, and use that as a rough displacement sensor.  We want to be careful of pushing too hard at low frequencies, but we want to allow higher frequency actuation without having the watch script shut things down.

* Also, I should put on the to-do list the revamp of the ALS find IR resonance script.

(Updated as of 4pm)

 End PDH - good point, thanks.

ASC - Yes, this is so that we can use the POP QPD to feed back to the common ETMs after the CARM offset is already quite small.  We will not use POP DC QPD for PRC any more. 

Also, for future PRC ASC, I keep coming back to this in my head, but maybe it is less painful to install oplevs for PR2, PR3 than it would be to make an RF QPD.  Neither is going to be trivially easy.  But if we had sensors of the tip tilt motions, we could feed all of that back to the PRM to stabilize the PRC.

 Because of the limited table space inside?  That's the main reason I can think of that this method is hard.  Am I missing something?

Last night, and again just now, I used the ./MC2_spot_[direction] scripts to center the MC2 spot on the trans QPD.  The MCWFS handled overall alignment to correct for the fact that the ratios in the script aren't perfect.  When I was finished, I ran the MC WFS relief script from the WFS screen.  Last night, and again today, things had drifted until the yaw spot was more than 0.5 counts off.

The instigator of this was that we were seeing ring-ups of ETMs during our ALS locks this evening.  We measured the ETMY violin resonance to be 624.10 Hz, and Rana found an elog saying that the ETMX was around 631 Hz, so we made a 2 notch filter and added it to FM4 of the LSC-SUS filter banks for both ETMs. 

For the ETMY resonance, we measured the frequency in the DARM spectrum, and when we looked at the FINE_PHASE_OUT channels, the resonance was only in the Yarm sensor.  So, we conclude that it is coming from ETMY.

Also in the realm of filter modules, the FM3 boost for CARM, DARM, XARM and YARM was changed from zero crossing to ramp with a 1sec ramp time.

I don't know why, but TRY has somehow gotten a 0.3 count offset in the last hour. 

Rana and I are witnesses for each other that neither of us has gone into the IFO room in the last several hours (and we're the only ones here).  For some reason though, the TRY PD now has a 0.3 count offset.  We have been doing some ALS locks, but we have not run the offset script in the last several hours.  Closing the green shutter doesn't change things, and we still see the offset when the MC loses lock, so it's not to do with the end or the PSL laser.  We haven't been in there, so there hasn't been a change in the room lights. 

I have added a few things to the ASS model, and the ASC sub-block, so that we can send POP QPD information down to the ETMs for CARM angular control after we've reduced the CARM offset and gotten some carrier buildup.  I did not remove our ability to actuate on PRM, so that we can still play with it in PRMIsb cases.

The input matrix has been expanded so that it can send signals to new CARM_YAW and CARM_PIT filter banks.  The corresponding filter banks have been created.  The output matrix was also expanded to take in the 2 new servo outputs, and so it can send signals to both ETMs, pitch and yaw.  I did not include any triggering logic for this new CARM situation, since I assume we'll just turn it on and off with our scripts.  (We haven't really been using the triggering capability of the PRM ASC either lately, although it's all still there).  I added the inputs and outputs of the CARM servos to the list of acquired channels.

The ASC sub-block:

I also modified the top level of the ASS model.  This was just a simple addition of summing nodes for the ETMs, similar to what was already in place for the PRM, so that we can send both the ASS dither alignment signals and the ASC servo control signals to the optics.

The ASS top level:

I also quickly modified the ASC screen to expose all of the new options:

The ASS model was compiled, and restarted.  As usual, this temporarily removes the biases on the input pointing tip tilts, but the pointing seems to have come back without any trouble.

 Not sure why, but Rana and I didn't see the super high Xarm noise with ALS that we reported last night (elog 10382).  

The in-loop ALS noise seems fine.  The out of loop measurement while the ALS is locked is a little tricky, since ALS hold the arms within the POX/POY linear ranges.  

Here is the in-loop noise:

The game plan graffle file is now in the 40m dropbox, so anyone can edit it.  Please just make sure to keep the date in the top right corner accurate.

Again unknown, but about 6 hours ago (so ~8am) the offset disappeared. 

Here's a 1-day trend:

 Here is a plot of last night's data with both the control and the error point on the same plot, in Volts.  Q is still working, so I don't have a calibration number yet to get these to Hz.

Note in the control spectrum that we have very significant 60Hz lines.  

EDIT:  I also added a new branch to the DCC Document Tree, and 2 leafs (one for each end).  Here's the ALS PDH servo branch: E1400350

It's not so impressive yet, but here's a plot that shows (a) Rana's guess for laser frequency noise, (b) The inferred in-loop version of that noise, (c) The CARM linewidth FWHM, translated to Hz.

For (b), I take the loop that Rana and I measured last night, and I assumed that it continued on forever as 1/f toward low frequency.  Then I do 1/(1+G) to get the closed loop version of the loop (which is a measurement with an artificial line tacked on the end), and multiply this with the laser freq noise, which is also totally artificial.

For (c), I do df/f = dL/L, with f = c/lambda_green, since the rest of the plot is meant to be in green frequency units.

This is my beginnings of trying to come up with a requirement for our green PDH boxes.  We weren't very clear in the MultiColor paper about the nitty-gritty details (obviously), but then Kiwamu didn't expand on those details in his thesis either.  He talks a lot more about the design considerations for the digital ALS loop, which isn't what I want today.  I will send him an email to see if he had any notes that didn't make it into his thesis.

 I calibrated the control signal from Volts to Hz using the rough PZT calibration of 5MHz/V for the Yend NPRO.  

For the error signal, Q said that the Yarm PDH peak-to-peak height was about a factor of 100 smaller than the Xarm, so I used a calibration of 1.9e7 Hz / V.

Then, from Q's Mist simulation including the high Xarm loss, and the plot that he posted in the control room, the CARM linewidth looks like it is about 2pm.  This is the number that I have included on today's plot.  Note though that yesterday I was using a linewidth of about 30pm, which I got from an Optical simulation about a year ago.  I do not know why these numbers come out an order of magnitude different!      The CARM linewidth is actually about 20 pm.  Both Q and I failed at reading log-x plots yesterday.  I have corrected this, and replotted.

Anyhow, here's the Yarm noise spectra calibrated plot:

I have emailed Kiwamu, but haven't heard back from him yet on what the original design considerations were, if he remembered us ever using a boost, etc.  What this looks like to me is that we need to do some serious work to get the noise down.  Maybe fixing the gain peaking and triggering the boost will get us most of the way there?

[Rana, Jenne, EricQ]

We did several things tonight.  First, a list (so I can remember them all), and then some details.

(1) Jiggled ETMY SUS cables, removed kicks.

(2) Locked X and Y ALS, looked at POX, POY as out of loop sensors.

(3) Measured stuff (?) at the Yend.

(4) Reconnected REFL DC to SR560.

(5) Attempted CARM offset reduction.

Item 1:

When Rana and I started locking this evening, we saw (as Q has been witnessing for a while now) the ETMY kick a lot.  However, it seemed to be kicking even more than usual.  Since Q had been down at the end station recabling things, we wondered if a SUS-related cable got bumped.  Rana went down to the end and pushed all the cables into their receptacles.  One of the last sets that he pushed was the satellite box.  We didn't have walkie-talkie communication, but the DC offset of the ETMY oplevs changed just a minute or two before he returned to the control room.  So, we guess that it was the satellite box cables that were loose.  Unfortunately, there is no clear way to strain relieve them, which is why they can so often be troublesome.  Anyhow, the ETMY hasn't kicked since.

Item 2:

We locked the arms with ALS.  We saw that the POX signal was about 20% of the full pk-pk height of the PDH signal, so it's mostly within the linear range, but not entirely.  It is what it is, however, and we took measurements assuming that it's okay.  I calibrated POX by putting an excitation onto ETMX, and matching the height of the peak in POX and BEATX_FINE_PHASE_OUT_HZ.

Q and Rana had also [remembered / put in / something] a digital readback for the end green PDH error point.  Q went down to the end and gave me a number of 2600 Hz/V for the err mon port of the PDH board, which is what is connected to the ADC.  With that and 20/2^16 V/cts, I had a calibration of 0.8 Hz/ct. 

What we see in this plot is that the green end PDH is not the limiting noise for the POX out of loop measurement of the residual arm motion.  Also, in the multi-color metrology paper, Fig 7 (which is posted in the control room), we see at about a little over 1 Hz a ratio of about 4.5 between the residual motion and the AUX PDH error signal.  In today's plot, I see a ratio of about 20.  I infer from this that the green PDH for the Xarm is fine, and that we may want to re-look at the ALS digital loop, but we should leave the X PDH alone.

Here is the Xarm plot:

Q took the data for the Yarm plot, so hopefully he can give it to us in the morning.  What we did notice was that the noise was much worse for the Yarm.  This prompted Item 3, measuring the loop.

Item 3:

Q and Rana went down to the Yend and measured some things.  They came back, and said that they hadn't changed anything in analog while they were down there.  One thing that Q did note was that we have almost 90 degrees of phase margin (since it's a 1/f loop), and about 10 dB of gain margin, above the UGF.  So, we're in good shape for being able to try triggering the boost on the PDH box.  Q will give us more notes on this work, as well as plots, in the morning.

Item 4:

At some point, I remembered that Q and Gabriele had repurposed the SR560 that we had been using for the REFLDC input to the common mode board.  So, Q went and put it back, so that REFL DC goes into the SR560, and so does a DAC channel so that we can remotely set the offset.  The A-B output goes to the REFL11I whitening channel, since real REFL11I goes into the input of the CM board.  I think that today, the SR 560 was left at a gain of 1.

Item 5:

We decided to carry on and try to reduce the CARM offset some.  An annoyance is that the Yarm still has pretty significant low-frequency noise, but the idea is that if we can get over to the sqrtInvTrans signals, it will be fine.

So, we didn't get much farther than we had in the past, but it was nice to get there at all again.  I ran the carm_cm_up script (many times).  One of the times, all I wanted to do was see how much I could reduce the CARM offset.  CARM was on sqrtInvTrans, DARM was on ALS diff, and I was able to get the arm powers up to about 2.5.  I don't know why I lost lock.  The sqrtInv signals should be good until at least arm powers of 20 or so. 

I was able to see the REFL DC dip, but only a teensy tiny bit.  It went down by maybe 1 count.  Q suggested looking at how deep it could get while leaving CARM and DARM both on ALS, and setting both offsets to 0.  We were seeing arm flashes of about 50 counts, and REFL DC went from 0 to -800.  So, I wasn't seeing much of a REFL dip, but it was definitely there when I went to arm powers of 2ish.

We tried looking at different sqrtInv options for DARM, and haven't come to any real conclusion.  In the plot below, we are looking at a swept sine between DARM_IN1 (ALSdiff) and either MC_IN1 0.3*(sqrtInvX - sqrtInvY) or SRCL_IN1 (TRX - TRY / sqrt(TRX + TRY) ):

We have a few things to add to the to-do list:

* Put UGF servos for LSC loops in place.

* Implement UGF "servos" (per Koji's suggested method) for phase trackers.

* Write a lockloss script that is run by the ALS watch scripts - print a PDF of error and control signals for every lockloss, and save it somewhere.

* Fix up Ygreen modematching on the PSL table.  The X green spot is quite similar on the camera to the corresponding PSL green spot.  However the Y green spot is not at all the same as its PSL green spot. 

Slightly updated Game Plan.  Mostly, Q is continuing to check out the Xend PDH box saturation, and I am thinking on what our requirements are for ALS, and thus for the green PDH boxes.

Q put the X PDH box back, so that I could try locking, and remember which end is up after a week away.

I am unable to hold ALS comm/diff for any length of time. Only once today did I hold it through the FM3 boost turn-on.  So, I looked at the individual arms.

Xarm, even though it's the one that Q is seeing this saturation problem with, seems fine. 

Yarm however is having trouble holding lock for more than a few minutes at a time.  The green beam stays locked to the arm for ~infinity, so I'm not so worried about the PDH box right now.  If I look at the error and control points of the ALS digital servo, the Yarm is much more noisy above about 20 Hz.  Something that I might think of for this kind of mismatch at higher frequencies is poorly matched whitening / dewhitening, or none at all for the Yarm, however this doesn't look like that to me.  Based on the shape of the spectra, I don't think that we're running into ADC noise. For this plot, both arms are individually locked with ALS feeding back to the ETM, gain magnitude of 15 (Xarm gets a minus sign because of our temperature / beatnote moving direction convention), FMs 1,2,3,5,6 on.  Something that seems critical for getting the Yarm to have the FM3 boost without losing lock is having the SLOW temperature servos on for a little while so that the PZT output (as monitored on the temp servo screen) for the end lasers fluctuate around zero. Right now, both beatnotes are at about 62MHz, with an amplitude of about -31dBm.

I still need to do a somewhat more thorough investigation of what might be causing the Yarm locklosses.  Is the length-to-angle decoupling worse for ETMY than for ETMX?  Am I moving the arm length so far that the PZT can't follow within its actuation limits?  Does the Yend PDH box have a similar saturation to the Xend box, but somehow (a) worse, and (b) not as obvious so we didn't suspect it before? 

I need to put this plot into calibrated units, and also include the low frequency monitor that we have of the PDH error point (all of which are _DQ channels).

Things to do:

* Figure out Xend PDH box saturation issue.  Is Yend seeing same saturation in the variable gain amplifier?  We have 3 spares of these chips in the Plateau Tournant Bleu, if we need them. 

* Check Yarm ALS stability.  (NB:  The arms have been individually locked for the last 15 min or so while I've been writing, so maybe letting the slow servo settle is the key, and this is not something that needs work).

* Get CARM on DC Trans, DARM on AS55Q (after arm powers of about 1).  Can we see good REFL DC dip?  Should we try using just the transmission PD signal as the error signal for the CM board, if we aren't close enough to resonance to use REFL DC?

From EricQ's simulations reported in elog 10390, we want to transition from ALS comm to DC transmission signals around 500 pm.  However, around 100 pm, the DC transmission signals have a sign flip, so we don't want to have the ALS swing that close to the CARM resonance.  So.  We want to be at about 500 pm, and not touch 100 pm.  So, we don't want our peak ALS motion to go beyond ~400 pm.  Which means that we need to have less than about 40 pm in-loop RMS, to avoid hitting 400 pm.  This is an ALS requirement, but since the analog PDH box is what forces the end laser to follow the arm cavity, and thus give us information about the arm length fluctuations, the PDH residual noise is part of our sensor noise for the full ALS.  So, we need to have the PDH in-loop RMS be less than 40 pm, integrated from a few kHz down to at least 30 mHz. Recall that above the ALS UGF (of about 200 Hz), the sensor noise will be suppressed by 1/f, so we should take that into account when we are looking at the PDH error signal, before we calculate the RMS motion.

Q also measured the in-loop error signal with the current Yend PDH box in elog 10430, and it looks like most of the RMS is coming from a few hundred Hz.  I designed a hack to the PDH board boost that has a zero at about 2kHz, and a gain of 30 at DC, so that we will win by squishing all that RMS.  Also, it shouldn't be too aggressive, so we should be able to leave it on all the time, and still acquire lock of the green laser to the arm, without having to do triggering.

The board schematic is at DCC D1400294.  The boost is also called the "integrator stage", although it will no longer be a simple integrator.

EDIT, JCD:  This cartoon is not correct for the non-boosted state, doesn't include effect of R16.

Okay, went back to the drawing board with Rana and Koji on PDH box stuff.

Currently (at least for the Yend), in the boost OFF state, we have an overall gain of about 50.  This is crazy big.  Also, the zero in the "transfer function stage" is around 1kHz, however our green cavity pole is (calculated) to be around 20 kHz.  Since these are supposed to cancel but they're not, we have a wide weird flat region in our loop TF.

So.  I calculated the changes to the TF stage that I'll need so that I have an increase of about 20 in DC gain, kept the pole at the same ~20Hz, but moved the zero way out to 18kHz.  I also calculated the changes needed for the integrator stage to make it effective at much higher frequency than it was designed for.  Now the pole is at 75 Hz, and the zero will be at 1.6kHz, and the high frequency gain will stay pretty close to the same with and without the boost.

Planned new TF stage:

Planned boost stage (with and without boost activated):

New boost stage only, so you can see the phase:

The schematic, modified to show my planned changes (which I will put in the DCC after I make the changes):

As EricQ mentioned in last night's elog, the modifications were made to the Yend (SN 17) uPDH board.

R31 became 49.9 Ohms, R30 became 45.3kOhm, R24 became 1.02k, R16 became 1k, a new flying resistor is tombstoned up against R24 and connected by purple wire to C6 and it is 20k.  C28 is 183nF and C6 is 100nF.  These numbers were used in Q's simulation last night.

[Rana, Jenne, EricQ]

* Too much gain overall on Yend box, needed attenuator on output to get lock.  Rethought gain allocation.  Resoldered board, installed, Ygreen locks nicely.  Error point and control point spectra, box TF and open loop TF data collected, to be plotted.

* Q replaced the Xend box, with a matching TF.

* Locked both arms individually, Yend has lots of low freq fluctuation, Xend has some.  Can't do out of loop measurement since we're going well beyond the range of the PDH signals (Yarm RIN is between 1/2 and 1.) Plot TRX and TRY spectra with ALS lock vs. IR lock to get an idea of what frequencies we have a problem with.

* Tried comm/diff locking anyway.  Works.  Used cm_up script to get CARM to sqrtInvTrans.  Went to powers of about 0.5 (hard to say really, because of fluctuations), put sine at 611.1 Hz, 200 cts onto ETMs (-1*x, +1*y), looked at TF between ALS diff and AS55Q.  Put that amount into the static power normalization spot for AS55.  In steps of 0.1, reduced ALSdiff input matrix elements and increased AS55->DARM element.  2 (3?) times was able to get to AS55Q for DARM.  Lost lock once unknown reason, while reducing CARM offset.  Lost lock once trying to turn on FM4 LSC boost for DARM.

TRX/TRY spectra:

I locked the arms with IR, and measured the beatnote spectra to get the out of loop noise for the PDH boxes. 

Unfortunately, we don't have a reference saved (that I can find), so we're going to have to compare to an elog of Koji's from a month ago.  I have created an out of loop ALS reference .xml file in the Templates/ALS folder.

As we can see from Koji's elog 10302, the Xarm seems to have stayed the same, but the Yarm seems to have increased by about an order of magnitude below 100 Hz.  :(

These are plots and notes from last week's PDH adventures. 

For the PDH servo box re-design, we wanted to think a little bit about what we actually wanted out of the box.

* We want the zero of the main transfer function to be at the same frequency as the cavity pole for green, which is about 18kHz.

* We want the boost to suppress noise at a few hundred Hz.  We don't need super-duper low-frequency boost, nor do we want it.  We'd like to leave the boost on all the time.

* Wanted to get rid of 10dB attenuator on PD input, so needed to lower the overall gain.

* We acknowledge that the gain of the raw error signal times the PZT response is very high, so no matter what, we will have to have a low-gain servo, even perhaps have the servo shape be less than unity gain.

---> We reduced the gain of the first amplification stage from a gain of 20 to a gain of 3.

---> Made the boost stage have a DC gain of 1.  Pole at 75 Hz and Zero at 1.6kHz to give suppression at a few hundred Hz.  Boost is *not* a pure integrator, so that we can leave it on.  (If we required triggering anyway, we would have made it a pure integrator).

---> In transfer function stage, put zero at 17.7kHz to match cavity pole.  Pole of servo was going to be at 20 Hz, but we wanted a little more gain, so we lowered it to 2 Hz.

Here is the final measured servo box transfer function for the Yend box (with an arbitrary gain knob setting):

Once installed, I set the gain knob for the Yend at 4.0, which gave an overall UGF of about 10kHz.  Then I measured the loop:

I also measured the error point and the control point, and compared them to Q's measurements in elog 10430.

In order to see what we might expect for a contribution to ALS noise, I looked at the error point spectra and lowpassed it with a pole at 200Hz.  I do this because the PDH error is like sensor noise for the ALS, but the ALS UGF is around 200 Hz, so noise at frequencies higher than that will be suppressed like 1/f.  So, I lowpass the error signal, then look at the RMS, and see that we should be pretty happy with our result. I include also the Xend error spectrum, as measured and reported by Q in elog 10460.

This afternoon, after Q and Manasa finished recovering from the activities of the morning, I aligned the IFO, and went to the Yend to touch up the alignment of the green to the arm.  I don't know if it was the alignment (I didn't do the PSL table), or I happened to have a good combination of laser temperatures, or what, but the Yend ALS noise was super good.  After that, the low frequency noise contribution is different lock-to-lock, and I haven't discerned a pattern yet.

One thing that we want to try is to get DARM to AS55 so that we're entirely off of ALS (assuming we've already gotten CARM to sqrtInvTrans).  However, according to Q's simulations, we have to get past arm power of a few before we are within the AS55 linewidth.  I have a DTT running showing me the phase between AS55 and ALSdiff as I reduce the CARM offset, but I haven't been able to get close enough to see the sign flip when CARM is on sqrtInvTrans.  If I just sweep through with both CARM and DARM on ALS, I see the sign flip.  I've tried a few different things, but I have not successfully gotten a transition to AS55 while the arm powers were above 1.  Empirically,  I think I want them at at least 3 or 4.

Koji suggested locking the DRMI rather than PRMI, to widen the AS55 linewidth, but I haven't tried that tonight.  Maybe tomorrow night.

I have made a ruidimentary lockloss plotting script, that I have put in ..../scripts/LSC/LockLossData, but I'm not satisfied with it yet.  Somehow it's not catching the lockloss, even though it's supposed to run when the ALS watch/down scripts run.  I'll need to look into this when I'm not so sleepy.

Q, can you please work on figuring out the phase tracker gain tracker?  It will be nice to have that functional so we don't have to fret about the phase tracker gains. 

Manasa, can you please estimate what kind of mode matching we have on the PSL table between the arm greens and the PSL green?  We *do not* want to touch any optics at this point.  Just stick in a power meter to see how much power we're getting from each beam, and then think about the peak height we see, and what that might tell us about our mode overlap.  If we determine it is total crap, we can think about measuring the beams that go either toward the camera, or the DC PDs, since neither of those paths require careful alignment, and they are already picked off from the main beatnote path.  But first, what is our current efficiency?  Yarm is first, then Xarm, since Yarm seems worse (peak height is larger for non-00 modes!)

 Q has pointed out that we expect a sign flip in the AS55 signal for DARM as we reduce the CARM offset in the PRFPMI case.  Koji also mentioned that the SRC will help broaden the DARM linewidth.  I wanted to check and think about these things with my Optickle simulation.  Q is working on confirming my results with Mist.

The simulation situation:  

* The demod phase for AS55 is set in the MICH-only case so that the MICH signal is maximized in the Q-phase.  I do not change the demod phase at all in these simulations.

* Cavity lengths (arms, recycling cavities) are the measured lengths.

* I look at AS55 I and Q as DARM sensors (i.e. I'm doing DARM sweeps) as a function of CARM offset, for both PRFPMI and DRFPMI cases.

Spoiler alert!  Conclusions:

* In the PRFPMI case, the DARM signal shows up with approximately equal strength in the I and Q phases, so we suffer only about a factor of 2 if we do not re-optimize the demod angle for AS55.

* In the DRFPMI case, the DARM signal is a factor of 1,000 smaller in the Q-phase than the I-phase, which means that the ideal demod phase angle has moved by about 90 degrees from the MICH-only case.  We must either use the I-phase signal or change the demod phase by 90 degrees in order to acquire lock.

* In the PRFPMI case, there is a sign flip for DARM on the AS55 PD around 100pm, so we don't want to use AS55 for DARM until we are well inside 50pm, and aren't going to fluctuate out of that range.

* In the DRFPMI case, there is no such sign flip, at least out to 1nm, so we can use AS55 for DARM as soon as we see a viable signal.  This is super awesome. The caveat is that the gain changes significantly as we reduce the CARM offset, so we either need a UGF servo (eventually) or careful watching (for now).

* The AS55 linear(-ish) range is much broader in the dual recycled case, which is yet another reason why getting DARM on AS55 will be easier for DRFPMI.

Why didn't we do it already?

* To put the SRM QPD back, we'd also have to move Steve/EricG's laser.  Since I had other things to do, I left the setup for tonight, but I think I will want it for tomorrow night.

* Monday night (and tonight) we can pretty reliably get DARM onto AS55Q for the PRFPMI case, and I don't know what the cause has been for my locklosses, so I thought I'd try to figure that out first.  

Plots!

First up, the current transition we've been trying to handle, PRFPMI DARM to AS55Q.   I also plot AS55I, and we see that the signals are roughly the same magnitude (the x axis isn't the same between these plots! sorry), so we aren't screwed if we don't change the demod phase angle.  We'll be better off once we can do a re-optimization, but this is assuming we are stuck (at first) with our MICH-only demod phase angle.

Next up, the same plots, but for the DRFPMI case.  Note here that there is a factor of about 1000 in the y-axis scales, and also that there is no switch in the sign of the zero-crossing slope for the I-phase.

And here is the same data (DRFPMI case), but zoomed out for the Q-phase, so you can see the craziness of this phase.  Again, this is much smaller than the signals in the I-phase, so I'm not too worried.

Game plan:

* Steve leaves the SRM oplev back in its nominal location (we can worry about aligning the mirror, and aligning the beam on the PD, but please put it back approximately where it came from).

* Try DRMI + 2 arm locking, which I don't think we have ever actually done before.  Hopefully there won't be any tricks, and we can get to an equivalent place and successfully get DARM to AS55.  

* .... Keep going?

 I hereby confess to having a secret script.  But it is secret no longer!

It's a "goLock" script, and it is now in the path from any terminal.  It kills any open medm sessions (to clean up desktops), and then opens a palette of screens that I find useful.  It also starts up the CARM and DARM ALS watch scripts, and the toggle shutter scripts.  It then leaves the terminal in .../scripts/PRFPMI/ , which is where the carm_cm_up.sh script that we've been using lives.

I also made tonight a "goHome" script, but all that one does so far is set the LSC mode to OFF.  The other thing that this could / should do is restore all optics so we don't have hysteresis problems.

Also, also, my "new" misalign / restore scripts had a bug, in that they were always switching oplevs for the PRM, no matter what optic was requested.  This sometimes caused the PRM oplev to be engaged while the optic was misaligned, so the PRM would get rung up.  This has been fixed.

[Jenne, EricQ]

No major progress today.  

I fixed a bug in my lockloss script that was asking it to start gathering data just after the lockloss, rather than some seconds beforehand.  Ooops.  Anyhow, with this handy-dandy plotting, I still don't know why we are losing lock when we have PRMI on REFL33, CARM on sqrtInvTrans, and DARM on AS55.  I don't see any oscillations, just the arm power drops off, and a moment later the POP power drops.  

For example, here is one of the best states we got to tonight.  Data for this is in ..../scripts/LSC/LocklossData/1094369700 .  You can re-create the plot by going to ..../scripts/LSC/LocklossData/  and doing ./PlotLockloss.py 1094369700 .  We had set the triggers for the trans PD/QPD such that we were using the QPD transmission signals the whole time (above trans of 0.2).  We saw that the noise at high frequency during low transmission powers for sqrtInvTrans as an error signal was higher using the QPDs than with the Thorlabs PDs, but that both cases are below the noise for ALS.  The arm powers were pretty steady above 3 for the last bit of this lock stretch.  I lost lock while trying to transition DARM over to AS55Q.  CARM was on sqrtInvTrans(QPDs), PRMI on REFL33 I&Q as usual.

Other things from this evening:

* When I was starting, I saw that when I locked the PRMI, the PRM was oscillating in pitch. Oscillation only happened when PRM pitch oplev was on.  I'm not sure what could have changed to make the oplev loop unstable, but the gain was 7.0, and now I have left it at 5.0.

* I recentered the PRM and ITMY oplevs.

* Plugged in the Yend PDH error monitor and pzt output monitors, since I forgot them last week.  Hopefully this will allow the Yend SLOW servo to work, and keep us away from the limits of the PZT range.

Steve and EricG are moving their oplev test for aLIGO over to the SP table, so that we can have the SRM optical lever back.  

I have pulled out an Ontrak PSM2-10 position sensor and accompanying driver for the sensor.  This, like the POP QPD, has BNC outputs that we can take straight to the ADC.

In the c1pem model I have created 3 new filter modules:  C1:PEM-OLTEST_X, C1:PEM-OLTEST_Y, and C1:PEM-OLTEST_SUM.  I built, installed and restarted the model, and also restarted the daqd process on the frame builder.  On the AA breakout board on the 1X7 rack, these correspond to:

BNC # 29 = OLTEST_X

BNC # 30 = OLTEST_Y

BNC # 31 = OLTEST_SUM

By putting 1Vpp, 0.1Hz into each of these channels one at a time, I see on StripTool that they correspond as I expect.

Everything should be plug-and-play at this point, as soon as Steve is ready with the hardware.

Sitting down to work on the IFO, I couldn't lock the Yarm.  I looked at the error signal as well as the transmission on Dataviewer, as usual, and saw that the POY error signal was almost non-existant. 

Since there was work on the POY table today (Steve removed the oplev test setup, elog 10489 and Q centered the SRM oplev after doing SRMI alignment, no elog yet), I went out to have a look at the table. 

There was nothing occluding the POY beam, which I traced back to the edge of the table.  The beam looked nice and round, so I decided that wasn't it.  I jiggled the PD cables, and lo and behold, the POY RF out cable almost came off in my hand it was so loose.  My suspicion is that whomever was the last to put the POY RF out back didn't tighten the cable and then the work today jiggled the cable loose.  I tightened the cable, and by the time I was back to the control room the arm was locked and Koji was already running the alignment scripts.

Koji and Manasa did some work on the PSL green situation today (Koji is still writing that log post up), but I just measured the Yarm out of loop sensitivity, and WOAH. 

The beat is -11.5dBm at 42.8 MHz.  Koji said the sweet spot is around 30 MHz.  The out of loop sensitivity is 400 Hz RMS!  Something to note is that the Y beatnote still has a 20dB amplifier before going to the beatbox, but the X does not.  We had been worried about saturation issues with the X, so we took out the amplifier.  However, I might put it back if we win big like this.

Recall from elog 10462 that I had saved a reference of the out of loop noise for both X and Y, but Y was much noisier than X.  The references below are from that elog, and the new Y is in dark blue. (Edit, 9:18pm, updated plot measuring down to 0.01Hz.  This is the new reference on the ALS_outOfLoop_Ref.xml template).

EDIT:  (Don't worry, I'm going to measure X too, but right now the beam overlap on the camera is not good, as if something drifted after Koji and Manasa closed up the PSL table)

Touched up the alignment for X on the PSL table.  Current beatnotes are:  [Y, -13.5 dBm, 74.1 MHz], [X, -22 dBm, 13.9 MHz].  Red is the current X out of loop, and I've saved it as the new X reference on the template.

The sum vs. pitch and yaw signals for the SRM QPD weren't making sense to me - centering on the PD lowered the sum, etc.  So, I had a look at the SRM oplev setup. 

The beam going in to the chamber looked fine, but the beam coming out was weird, like it was being clipped, or diffracted off of a sharp edge.  The beam was spread out in yaw over almost 1cm as seen by eye.  I looked into the vacuum window, and the beam was sitting on the edge of one of the in-vac steering optics.  So, I adjusted the yaw of the beam-launching optic on the out of vac table so that I was roughly centered on both of the in-vac SRM steering mirrors.  This required moving the first out of vac mirror for the SRM oplev path on the way to the QPD to move a small amount to one side, since the beam was near-ish the edge of the optic.  I then centered the beam on the oplev (I had the SRM roughly aligned already). 

Now the SRM oplev makes more sense to me.  I have turned on FMs 1, 2, 5, 9 to match ITMY's loop shape.  I have set the gains to -10 for pitch and +10 for yaw, to make the upper UGF about 6 Hz.

No breakthroughs tonight. 

DRMI didn't want to lock with either the recipe that we used a year ago (elog 9116) or that was used in May (elog 9968).  Being lazy and sleepy, I chickened out and went back to PRFPMI locking. 

Many attempts, I'll highlight 2 here.

(1) I had done the CARM -> sqrtInvTrans transition, and reduced the CARM offset to arm powers of about 7, and lost lock.  I don't remember now if I was trying to transition DARM to AS55, or if I was just prepping (measuring error signal ratio and relative sign).

(2) I stopped the carm_cm_up script just before it wanted to do the CARM -> sqrtInvTrans transition, and stayed with CARM and DARM both on ALS.  I got to reasonably high powers, and was measuring the error signal ratios I needed for CARM -> REFL DC and DARM -> AS55.  Things were too noisy to get good coherence for the DARM coefficient, but I thought I was in good shape to transition CARM to REFL DC (which looks like REFL11I, since REFLDC goes to the CM board, and the OUT2 of that board is used to monitor the input to the board. )  Anyhow, I set the offset such that it matched my current CARM offset value, and started the transition, but lost lock about halfway through.  CARM started ringing up here, and I think that's what caused this lockloss.  Could have been the CARM peak, which I wasn't considering / remembering at the time.

Daytime activity for Thurs:  Lock DRMI, maybe first on 1f signals, but then also on 3f signals.

 Tonight I worked on DRMI locking.  

I think the reason the May2014 DRMI recipe wasn't working for me is because I wasn't including the REFL11 -> SRCL element.  I had left it out because (a) I didn't think we should need it and (b) REFL11 is going through the CM board.  

Tonight, I flipped the switch on the CM screen so that OUT2 was seeing REFL11I, not REFLDC, so I had REFL11 in the usual place.  I reset the demod phase, since we had left it at zero for CM stuff. 

Setting demod phases for PRMI:

I locked PRMI on sideband, REFL 33 I&Q and drove PRM.  REFL55 was at 55deg, and I changed it to 33deg to minimize the peak in the Q-phase.  REFL11 was a 0deg, and I set it to 17deg.  I also checked the AS55 phase in the MICH-only case, and changed it from 14.75deg to 24.75 deg.

The May 2014 recipe (elog 9968) calls for adding 25 degrees to the REFL55 phase, so I put REFL55 at 58deg for DRMI locking.

After that, using the parameters in the May2014 recipe, the DRMI just locked.  Awesome!

I checked the demod phases with DRMI lock.  REFL11 stays at 17 degrees.  If I actuate the SRM, I get the largest peak in the I-phase of REFL55 with a phase of -143deg, but the acquisition is best with phase around 55deg.  [Note, as Q points out, I wonder if SRCL is mostly locked with REFL11I for some magical reason, which is why it didn't matter so much that I put a sign flip into REFL55...I wonder if fixing our macroscopic length offset in SRCL will fix this].  I also changed the REFL165 phase from -155.5deg to +145deg.

By looking at transfer functions at an excitation frequency, I expected that I should be able to hold SRCL and MICH on REFL165, with matrix elements -0.085 for REFL165I->SRCL and -0.23 for REFL165Q->MICH.  I was not able to acquire with these values, nor was I able to ramp the matrix elements while keeping lock.

So, I tried moving PRCL to REFL33I, which did work.  I used 1.245*REFL33I->PRCL, but left SRCL and MICH on REFL55 I&Q, with the REFL11I->SRCL element also there. This is where I started trying to get rid of the REFL11I element, but couldn't maintain lock most times, and could never acquire lock without it.

Next up, checking the MICH->SRCL coupling due to the output matrix.  I did as Koji did in elog 8816 , but first I copied the notches in FM10 of MICH over to PRCL and SRCL (old notch freqs were SRCL=566.1Hz, PRCL=675.1Hz, now they're all 475.1Hz).  I drove BS, and checked that the PRM element minimized the peak in REFL33I, the PRCL error signal.  I also added an SRM element to reduce the peak in REFL55I, the SRCL error signal.  I ended up with 0.5*BS, -0.284*PRM, -1.5*SRM for MICH drive, and unity in the PRM and SRM elements for PRCL and SRCL, respectively.

I measured the SRCL open loop gain, and the UGF was pretty low, so I increased the SRCL gain from 0.2 to 0.5 to make the UGF be around 70Hz.  I measured PRCL and MICH also, and they matched their references.

I worked a little bit on trying to remove REFL11 from the SRCL error signal, but didn't get anywhere.  I'm leaving the IFO to Q for the rest of the night.

To sum up, here is the set of parameters that worked for DRMI locking.  (These are saved as the template on the IFO Config screen.):

DEMOD PHASES:

REFL11:  17 deg

REFL33: 140.5 deg (not changed tonight)

REFL55: 58 deg  (58deg for DRMI, 33deg for PRMI)

REFL165: 145 deg

AS55: 24.75 deg

INPUT MATRIX

MICH = 0.15 * REFL55Q

PRCL = 1.245 * REFL33I

SRCL = -0.09 * REFL11I + 1.0 * REFL55I

DOF Triggers

MICH, PRCL, SRCL all on POP22I, 50:10

GAINS

MICH = 1.0

PRCL = -0.02

SRCL = 0.5

FM triggers 

MICH:  35:2, 2 sec delay, FM 2, 3, 6, 9

PRCL:  35:2, 0.5 sec delay, FM 2, 3, 6, 9

SRCL:  35:2, 5 sec delay, FM 3, 6, 9  (always lose lock trying to engage FM2).

OUTPUT MATRIX

MICH = 0.5 * BS +  (-0.284)*PRM + (-1.5)*SRM

PRCL = 1*PRM

SRCL = 1*SRM

During the Sim meeting today, I added parts to the ASS model so that we can also dither the BS and minimize the power at AS. 

ASS screen has been updated. 

Model changes required a new sender from LSC for ASDC, so both LSC and ASS were compiled, installed and restarted.  Also on LSC, I added AS110 I&Q to DQ channels, since we haven't been recording them in the past.

I have done a quick trial in MICH-only lock, and it seems to work.  Gain of 10 for both Pit and Yaw servos. 

I tried a bunch of times to reduce my CARM offset so I could jump to REFLDC digitally, but I think I'm maybe being a little ambitious with the arm power I'm trying to get to.

I have modified the carm_cm_up script so that it does my new procedure.  Everything is the same through locking the PRCL and MICH on 3f.  Then it reduces the CARM offset to 1.5 nm.  This is where we *used* to transition to sqrtInvTrans.  Now I have it going a bit farther to 0.5 nm, and arm powers of about 1 before doing that transition.  Also, before it transitions it lowers the CARM gain and engages the 1kHz lowpass in FM9.  A gain of about 4 is fine to keep the gain peaking in the CARM loop to only about 10dB, and sets a UGF of 100Hz which is the peak of the phase bubble with the lowpass engaged. 

Once I got to this point (several times tonight), I turned on CARM and DARM oscillations and looked at the transfer functions between (CARM and REFLDC) and (DARM and AS55Q). I have 2 DTT templates setup for this, in /users/Templates/PRFPMI.  These templates assume that you have your new DARM signal (AS55) going to SRCL_IN1 and your new CARM signal (REFLDC, which is actually REFL11I coming through the CM board) going to MC_IN1. 

I'm not sure why I'm losing lock. I don't see anything terribly telling on the time series plots, in particular none of the loops look like they are oscillating.  Here is one of the better examples from this evening:

Other notes:

* I realigned the Xgreen on the PSL table (again) to maximize the beatnote amplitude.  Y was fine, but X was very poorly overlapped on the camera.

* I put the SR785 back by the LSC rack and plugged it into the CM board for transfer functions.  Didn't take any tonight.

* We have a small wishlist for scripting things:  (1) DRMI restore script should reset REFL11 to "normal" REFL11.  (2) CARM/DARM acquisition restore script should reset REFL11 to REFLDC.  (3) CARM/DARM acquisition restore should also set PRMI parameters (as Q noted last week).

Steve asked about calibrating the QPD, so I set up some new epics records so that we can have calibrated versions of the QPD output.

The new channels are called C1:ASC-TESTQPD_Y_Calc and C1:ASC-TESTQPD_X_Calc for pitch and yaw, respectively.

Details:

 * I modified /cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1iscaux/QPD.db to add 2 new channels.  Since we are currently plugged into the IPPOS channels, I didn't want to modify the units of IPPOS, which is why I created new channels.  The new channels are just the IPPOS normalized X and Y channels, multiplied by a calibration factor.  Steve has already done a rough calibration for his setup, so I used those numbers (0.15 urad/ct for pitch and 0.25 urad/ct for yaw). 

* Rebooted c1iscaux.  This required adding it to chiara's /etc/hosts file.

* Added the channels to the /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/chans/daq/C0EDCU.ini file so that the channels would appear in dataviewer.

* Restarted the framebuilder daqd process.

How to modify the calibration:

1) On a control room workstation, cd /cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1iscaux to get to the right folder.  (Note that this is still in the old cvs/cds place, *not* the new opt/rtcds place)

2)  open the epics database file by typing sudo emacs QPD.db.  Since this is a protected file, you need to use the "sudo" command, and will have to type in the usual controls password. 

3)  Find the "records" that have the channel names C1:ASC-TESTQPD_Y_Calc and C1:ASC-TESTQPD_X_Calc by scrolling down.  (Right now they are on lines #550 and #561 of the text file).

4) For each of these 2 records, modify the calibration in the line that says something like field(CALC,"(A*0.25)").  In this example, the current calibration is 0.25 urad/oldCount.  Change the number to the new value.

5) Save the file.  If you followed the procedure in step2 and used the emacs program and you can't use the mouse, do the following:  Hold down the "ctrl" key.  Keeping ctrl pushed down, push the "x" key.  Still keeping ctrl pushed down, push the "s" key. 

6) Close the file.  If you followed the procedure in step2 and used the emacs program and you can't use the mouse, do the following:  Hold down the "ctrl" key.  Keeping ctrl pushed down, push the "x" key.  Still keeping ctrl pushed down, push the "c" key. 

7) Reboot the slow computer called c1iscaux.  You should be able to do this remotely by typing telnet c1iscaux, and then typing reboot.  If that doesn't work, you may have to go into the IFO room and power cycle the crate by turning the key.  This computer is in 1Y3, near the bottom.

8) Check that you can see your channels - you should be finished now!

For steps 3 and 4, here is a screenshot of the lines in the text file:

Tonight was a night of trying to engage the AO path.  The idea was to sit at arm powers of a few on sqrtInvTrans for CARM and ALS for DARM, and try to increase the gain for REFLDC->AO path.

No exciting nit-picky details in locking procedure.  Mostly it was just a night of trying many times. 

The biggest thing that Q and I found tonight was that the 2-pin lemo cable connecting the CM board's SERVO OUT to the MC board's IN2 is shitty.  The symptom that led to this investigation was that I could increase the AO path gain arbitrarily, and have no change in the measured analog CM loop transfer function. We checked that the CM board servo out spit out signals that were roughly what we expected based on our ~2kHz excitation.  However, if we look at digitized signals from the MC board, the noise level was very high, with loads of 60Hz lines, and a teensy-tiny signal peak.  We put a small drive directly into the MC board and could see that, so we determined that the cable is bad.  We have unplugged the white 2-pin lemo, and ran a long BNC cable between the 2 boards.  Tomorrow we need to make a new 2-pin lemo cable so that we can have the lower noise differential drive signal.

After putting in the temporary cable, we do see an excitation sent to the CM board showing up after the MC board.  For this monitoring, the MC_L cable to the ADC has been borrowed, so instead of being the OUT1, the regular length signal, MC_L is currently the OUT2 monitor right after the board inputs. 

At some point in the evening, around 1:15am, ETMX started exhibiting the annoying behavior of wandering off sometimes.  I went in and pushed on the SUS cables to the satellite box, and I think it has helped, although I still saw the drift at least once after the cable-squishing.

Other than that, it has just been many trials.

The best was one where I was holding the arm powers around 4, and got the CM board's AO gain to -8 dB and the MC board's IN2 AO gain to -4 dB. I lost lock trying to increase the CM board gain to -7 dB. 

I took several transfer functions, and used Q's nifty "SRmeasure" script to gather data, and Q made a plot to see the progress.

TF progress plots:

Time series of that lockloss:

I don't know yet if the polarity of the CM board should be plus or minus.  This series was taken with "minus".  But,  since the phase looked opposite of Q's single arm CM board checkout from several months ago, we did a few trials with the polarity switched to "plus".  I thought we weren't getting as high of AO path gains, so I switched back to "minus", but the last few trials didn't get even as far as the plus trials did.  So, I still don't know which sign we want.

[Q, Jenne]

We pulled the old 2-pin lemo cable after I had a look at the connectors.  When I unscrewed the connector on the MC side, one of the wires came off.  I suspect that it was still hanging on a bit, but my torquing it finally killed it. 

We pulled the cable with the idea of resoldering the connectors, but there are at least 2 places where the cable has been squished enough that the shielding or the inner wires are exposed.  These places aren't near enough the ends to just cut the cable short.

Downs doesn't have a spool of shielded twisted single-pair cable, so Todd is going to get me the part number for the cable they use, and I've asked Steve to order it tomorrow. 

For now, we will continue using the BNC cable that we installed last night - I don't think it's worth resoldering and putting in a crappy 2-pin lemo cable that we'll just throw out in a week.

Back in May I looked at all the glitches that happen when we change the AO gain slider on the CM board - see elog 9938.   I wonder if the MC IN2 gain slider has the same issues.  I think I'll look at this this afternoon. Maybe we can set the CM board gain someplace, and just use the MC IN2 slider (if it's not as glitchy) for the delicate part where we're just about to cross unity, and then later we can again use the CM board's AO gain.

EDIT:  Yes, the glitches on the CM board AO path are *much* bigger, and more frequent.  Interestingly, the biggest glitches were every 4 dB.  When I went from -29 to -28, again from -25 to -24, -21 to -20, etc.  I saw the largest glitches on the MC IN2 slider going -29 to -28 and -17 to -16, but if there were small glitches at other transitions, they didn't hit my trigger levels.  I think next time I try engaging the AO path I'll try to do the delicate stuff by upping the MC IN2 gain rather than the CM board AO gain.

[Steve, EricQ, Jenne]

ITMY and BS heavy doors are off, light doors are on.  Q is aligning the IFO.

 I was bad and forgot to elog this yesterday (bad grad student!), but I setup a laser pointer to show us where the POY beam is. 

To do this, I removed the tiny mirror that sends the beam to the POY RF PD (so we do not have POY to lock the Yarm right now.  I think Q has successfully been using AS).  The laser pointer goes through 2 temporary steering mirrors, then passes through the place that the tiny mirror usually sits, and then travels along the POY path into the vacuum system.  The idea here is that we should be able to adjust the laser pointer and the temp steering mirrors, and not touch any of the actual POY mirrors, but still get the green beam to go all the way to ITMY.  Yesterday I confirmed that the laser pointer was hitting the in-vac POY pickoff mirror, and today Q and Manasa are doing final adjustment to get the beam all the way to the ITM. 

[Zach, Jenne, Steve]

This work happened on Tuesday.  Bad Jenne for forgetting to elog it!

Zach brought the 40m's seismometers back (one Guralp and one T-240).  We have set the seismometers on their slabs.  Also, we ran the T240 cable from 1X5 over to the vertex slab.  Also, also, Zach and Steve mounted the T-240 readout box in the 1X5 rack.  We have not yet hooked it up to power, although there are fused power blocks available on that rack. 

So, the T-240 box needs power, and then we need to connect the seismometers to their respective boxes.  Also, we need to run medium-short BNC cables from the T-240 readout box to the PEM AA board over in 1X7.

As per other slow computers, which Chris figured out in elog 10189, I added all the rest of the slow computers to Chiara's /etc/hosts file, so that they would come up when Manasa went and keyed the crates. 

Computers that were already there:

• c1auxex
• c1psl
• c1iscaux

Computers that I added today:

• c1susaux
• c1auxey
• c1iscaux2
• c1pem1
• c1aux
• c1iool0
• c1vac1

Manasa keyed all of these crates *except* for the vac computer, since Steve said that the vacuum system is up and running fine.

No exciting progress today.  I did PSL green alignment for the Yarm, although I now think that the Xarm green needs realigning too.

Also, I was foiled for a while by ETMX jumping around.  I think it's because the adapter board on the Xend rack didn't have any strain relief.  So, I zip tied the heavy cable in a few places so that it's no longer pulling on the connector.  Hopefully we won't see ETMX misbehaving as often now, so we won't have to go squish cables as often.

I put a little script into ...../scripts/Admin that will check the fullness of Chiara's disk.  We only have the mailx program installed on Nodus, so for now it runs on Nodus and sends and email when the chiara disk that nodus mounts is more than 97% full.

As part of trying to determine whether we require the AO path for lock acquisition, or if we can survive on just digital loops, I looked at the noise suppression that we can get with a digital loop.

I took a spectrum of POX, and calibrated it using a line driving ETMX to match the ALSX_FINE_PHASE_OUT_HZ channel, and then I converted green Hz to meters. 

I then undid the LSC loop that was engaged at the time (XARM FMs 1,2,3,4,5,8 and the pendulum plant), to infer the free running arm motion. 

I also applied the ALS filters (CARM FMs 1,2,3,5,6) and the pendulum plant to the free running noise to infer what we expect we could do with the current digital CARM filters assuming we were not sensor noise limited.

In the figure, we see that the free running arm displacement is inferred to be about 0.4 micrometers RMS.  The in-loop POX signal is 0.4 picometers RMS, which (although it's in-loop, so we're not really that quiet) is already better than 1/10th the coupled cavity linewidth.  Also, the CARM filters that we use for the ALS lock, and also the sqrtInvTrans lock are able to get us down to about 1 pm RMS, although that is not including sensor noise issues. 

For reference, here are the open loop gains for the LSC filters+pendulum and ALS filters+pendulum that we're currently using.  The overall gain of these loops have been set so the UGF is 150Hz.

It seems to me that as long as our sensors are good enough, we should be able to keep the arm motion down to less than 1/10th or 1/20th the coupled cavity linewidth with only the digital system.  So, we should think about working on that rather than focusing on engaging the AO path for a while.

Other thoughts from talking with Rana earlier:

• Is it possible to suppress CARM motion enough that we can use just a digital loop?  Can we do without the AO path?  What would said digital loop have to look like?
• Q points out that there is a zero in the relative transfer function between CARM to transmission, and CARM to REFLDC.  Is that zero invertible?
• We should look at some limits, like saturation limits.  How much will we need to actuate?
• Rana is looking at making a more detailed CARM loop model in simulink to see if we can stay stable throughout our CARM offset reduction journey.

Also, Q and I squished on the suspension connectors earlier tonight.  MC2 was going wonky, which we feared might be because we were in that area working on Chiara earlier.  Then, after squishing the MC connectors, the PRM started misbehaving, so we went and gave all the corner suspension connectors another squish.  No suspension glitching problems since then.