Rana suspicious. We had arms locked before pumpdown with beams on Transmon PDs. If they're off now, must be beams are far off on the mirrors. Try A2L to estimate spot positions before walkin the beams too far.

The misalignment wasn't as bad as I had intially feared; the spot was indeed pretty high on ETMX at first. Both transmon QPDs did need a reasonable amount of steering to center once the dither had centered the beam spots on the optics.

Arms, PRMI and DRMI have all been locked and dither aligned. All oplevs and transmon QPDs have been centered. All AS and REFL photodiodes have been centered. 

Green TM00 modes are seen in each arm; I'll do ALS recovery tomorrow. 

Good 8 hours

Rana came by and freed ITMX again. I think it shouldn't be a problem for me to free it if it happens again. 

In hopes of getting better SNR on the free swing spectra, we kicked all optics at around 7pm. The damping should come back on a little after midnight. ITMX did not get stuck after this kick. 

We moved the Acromag and its power supply to the X end, where we connected it to the diagnostic output of the NPRO controller. We renamed the channels to be descriptive of the pin outputs as described in the laser manual. We were able to recover readouts similar to those we found with a multimeter. 

We should figure out how to set up the channels on the front end machines: right now they are accessed through a tmux session running on pianosa. Once we are confident in the operation, we will make a box to contain the Acromag and wire connections and move the setup to connect to the PSL controller. 

Just a heads up, it looks like the damping came on at around 8:30pm. Not sure why. 

PMC was terribly misaligned. The PMCR camera seems to have drifted somewhat off target too, but I didn't touch it.

Realigned ITMX for the nth time today.

Finding ALSY beatnote was easy, ALSX eludes me. I did a rough one-point realignment on the X beat PD which is usually enough, but it's probably been long enough that near/far field alignmnet is neccesary. 

ALSY noise is mostly nominal, but there is a large 3Hz peak that is visible in the spot motion, and also modulates the beat amplitude by multiple dBs.

It looked to me that the ETMY oplev spot was moving too much, which led me to measure the oplev OLGs. There is some wierd inter-loop interference going on between OLPIT and OLYAW. With both on (whether OSEM damping is on or off, so input matrix shenanigans can't be to blame) there is a very shallow "notch" at around 4.5Hz, which leads to very little phase at 3Hz, and thus tons of control noise. Turning the OL loop not being measured off makes this dip go away, but the overall phase is still signfinicantly less than we should have. I'm not sure why. I'll just show the PIT plot, but things look pretty much the same for YAW. 

I did some more ETMX tests. Locked arm, raised the servo output limit to 15k, then increased the gain to make the loop unstable. I saw the SUS LSC signals go up to tens of thousands of counts when the unlock happened. I did this a dozen times or so, and every time the ETM settled in the same angular position according to the oplev.

Right now, another hysteresis script is running, misaliging in pitch and yaw. Amplitude 1V in each direction. So far, everything is stable after three on/off cycles.

With the WFS and OL, we never have figured out a good way to separate pit and yaw. Need to figure out a reference for up/down and then align everything to it: quad matrix + SUS output matrix

[Gautam, Johannes]

I scripted a series of YARM DC reflectivity measurements last night alternating between locked state and unlocked state (with ETMY misaligned) for measuring the after-vent armloss. The general procedure is based on elog 11810, but I'll also give a brief summary here.

• To measure the locked reflectivity the dither script is executed with a stop condition that depends on the rms values of its error signals.
• The dithering is stopped, and while the arm is locked the reflected power is recorded from both POX/POY DC and ASDC, as well as the mode cleaner transmission for normalization.
• The arm locking is switched off, and ETMY moved to is 'misaligned' position. This gets rid off unwanted mode flashes.
• In the unlocked state the same quantities are recorded.
• Rinse and repeat for a set number of times (for this run I set it to 100 and left the interferometer alone).

I did this back in June (but strangely never posted what I found, shame on me). What I found back then was a YARM loss of 237 ppm +/- 41 ppm and an XARM loss of 501 ppm +/- 105 ppm

Last night's data indicates a YARM loss of 143 ppm +/- 24 ppm after cleaning with first contact.

THIS IS STILL ASSUMING THAT THE MODE-MATCHING HASN'T CHANGED. We had however moved ETMY closer to ITMY during the vent by 19mm. Gautam and I had some trouble setting up the ALS to confirm the mode-matching, but we're in the process of recovering the XARM IR beat.

Some things I did last night:

I measured the X PDH OLG, and turned the gain down by ~6dB to bring the UGF back to 10kHz, ~50deg phase margin, 10dB gain margin. However, the error signal on the oscilloscope remained pretty ratty. Zooming in, it was dominated by glitches occuring at 120Hz. I went to hook up the SR785 to the control signal monitor to see what the spectrum of these glitches looked like, but weirdly enough connecting the SR785's input made the glitches go away. In fact, with one end of a BNC connector plugged into a floating SR785 input, touching the other end's shield to any of the BNC shields on the uPDH chassis made the glitches go away.

This suggested some ground loop shenanigans to me; everything in the little green PDH shelves is plugged into a power strip which is itself plugged into a power strip at the X end electronics rack, behind all of the sorensens. I tried plugging the power strip into some different places (including over by the chamber where the laser and green refl PD are powered), but nothing made the glitches go away. In fact, it often resulted in being unable to lock the PDH loop for unknown reasons. This remains unsolved.

As Gautam and Johannes observed, the X green beat was puny. By hooking up a fast scope directly to the beat PD output, I was able to fine tune the alignment to get a 80mVpp beat, which I think is substaintially bigger than what we used to have. (Is this plus the PDH gain changed really attributable to arm loss reduction? Hm)

However, the DFD I and Q outputs have intermittent glitches that are big enough to saturate the ADC when the whitening filters are on, even with 0dB whitening gain, which makes it hard to see any real ALS noise above a few tens of Hz or so. Turning off the whitening and cranking up the whitening gain still shows a reasonably elevated spectrum from the glitches. (I left a DTT instance with a spectrum on in on the desktop, but forgot to export...) The glitches are not uniformly spaced at 120Hz as in the PDH error signal. However, the transmitted green power also showed intermittant quick drops. This also remains unsolved for the time being. 

[gautam, johannes]

I started a script on Friday night to collect some data for a reflection armloss measurement of the XARM. Unfortunately there seemed to have been a hickup in some data transfer and some errors were produced, so we couldn't really trust the numbers.

Instead, we took a series of manual measurements today and made sure the interferometer is well behaved during the averaging process. I wrote up the math behind the measurement in the attached pdf.

The numbers we used for the calculations are the following:

• alpha = 91.2% from elog 6859 
• m1=0.179  and  m2=0.226 from elog 11745

While we average about 50 ppm +/-15 ppm for the XARM loss with a handful of samples, in a few instances the calculations actually yielded negative numbers, so there's a flaw in the way I'm collecting the data. There seems to be a ~3% drift in the signal level on the PO port on the order of minutes that does not show in the modecleaner transmission. The signals are somewhat small so we're closing the shutter over night to see if it could be an offset and will investigate further tomorrow. I went back and checked my data for the YARM, but that doesn't seem to be affected by it.

[ericq, gautam]

We poked around trying to figure out the X PDH situation. In brief, the glitchiness comes and goes, not sure what causes it. Tried temp servo on/off and flow bench fan on/off. Gautam placed a PD to pick off the pre-doubler AUX X IR light to see if there is some intermittant intensity fluctuation overnight. During non-glitchy times, ALSX noise profile doesn't look too crazy, but some new peak around 80Hz and somewhat elevated noise compared to historical levels above 100Hz. It's all coherent with the PDH control up there though, and still looks like smooth frequency noise...

NB: The IR intensity monitoring PD is temporarily using the high gain Transmon PD ADC channel, and is thus the source of the signal at C1:LSC-TRY_OUT_DQ. If you want to IR lock the X arm, you must change the transmon PD triggering to use the QPD.

[gautam, johannes]

We let the PSL shutter closed overnight and observed the POXDC, POYDC and ASDC offsets. While POY has small fluctuations compared to the signal level, POX is worse off, and the drifts we observed live in the DC reading are in the same ballpark as the offset fluctuations. The POXDC level also unexpectedly increased suddenly without the PSL shutter being opened, which we can't explain. The data we took using POXDC cannot be trusted.

Even the ASDC occasionally shows some fluctuations, which is concerning because the change in value rivals the difference between locked and misaligned state. It turns out that the green shutters were left open, but that should not really affect the detectors in question.

We obtained loss numbers by measuring the arm reflections on the ASDC port instead. LSCoffsets was run before the data-taking run. For each arm we misaligned the respective other ITM to the point that moving it no longer had an impact on the ASDC reading. By taking a few quick data points we conclude the following numbers:

XARM: 247 ppm +/- 12 ppm
YARM: 285 ppm +/- 13 ppm

This is not in good agreement with the POYDC value. The script is currently running for the YARM for better statistics, which will take a couple hours.

ITMX is misaligned for the purpose of this measurement, with the original values saved.

GV edit 5Oct2016: Forgot to mention here that Johannes marked the spot positions on the ITMs and ETMs (as viewed on the QUAD in the control room) with a sharpie to reflect the current "well aligned" state.

[ericq,gautam]

There are multiple methods by which the arm loss can be measured, including, but not limited to:

1. Cavity ringdown measurement
2. Monitoring IR arm transmission using ALS to scan the arm through multiple FSRs
3. Monitoring the reflected light from the ITM with and without a cavity (Johannes has posted the algebra here)

We found that the second method is extremely sensitive to errors in the ITM transmissivity. The first method was not an option for a while because the AOM (which serves as a fast shutter to cut the light to the cavity and thereby allow measurement of the cavity ringdown) was not installed. Johannes and Shubham have re-installed this so we may want to consider this method.

Most of the recent efforts have relied on the 3rd method, which itself is susceptible to many problems. As Yutaro found, there is something weird going on with ASDC which makes it perhaps not so reliable a sensor for this measurement (unfortunately, no one remembered to follow up on this during the vent, something we may come to regret...). He performed some checks and found that for the Y arm, POY is a suitable alternative sensor. However, the whitening gain was at 0dB for the measurements that Johannes recently performed (Yutaro does not mention what whitening gain he used, but presumably it was not 0). As a result, the standard deviation during the 10s averaging was such that the locked and misaligned readings had their 'fuzz' overlapping significantly. The situation is worse for POX DC - today, Eric checked that the POX DC and POY DC channels are indeed reporting what they claim, but we found little to no change in the POX DC level while misaligning the ITM - even after cranking the whitening gain up to 40!

Eric then suggested deriving ASDC from the AS110 photodiode, where there is more light. This increased the SNR significantly - in a 10s averaging window, the fuzz is now about 10 ADC counts out of ~1500 (~<1%) as opposed to ~2counts out of 30 previously. We also set the gains of POX DC, POY DC and ASDC to 1 (they were 0.001,0.001 and 0.5 respectively, for reasons unknown).

I ran a quick measurement of the X arm loss with the new ASDC configuration, and got a number of 80 +/- 10 ppm (7 datapoints), which is wildly different from the ~250ppm number I got from last night's measurement with 70 datapoints. I was simultaneously recording the POX DC value, which yielded 40 +/- 10 ppm.

We also discovered another possible problem today - the spot on the AS camera has been looking rather square (clearly not round) since, I presume, closing up and realigning everything. By looking at the beam near the viewport on the AS table for various configurations of the ITM, we were able to confirm that whatever is causing this distortion is in the vacuum. By misaligning the ITM, we are able to recover a nice round spot on the AS camera. But after running the dither align script, we revert to this weirdly distorted state. While closing up, no checks were done to see how well centered we are on the OMs, and moreover, the DRMI has been locked since the vent I believe. It is not clear how much of an impact this will have on locking the IFO (we will know more after tonight). There is also the possibility of using the PZT mounted OMs to mitigate this problem, which would be ideal.

Long story short -

1. Some more thought needs to be put into the arm loss measurement. If we are successful in locking the IFO, the PRG would be a good indicator of the average arm loss.
2. There is some clipping, in vacuum, of the AS beam. It may be that we can fix this without venting, to be investigated.

GV Edit 8 Oct 2016: Going through some old elogs, I came across this useful reference for loss measurement. It doesn't talk about the reflection method (Method 3 in the list at the top of this elog), but suggests that cavity ringdown with the Trans PD yields the most precise numbers, and also allows for measuring T_ITM

This elog is meant to review some of the important changes made during the vent this summer - please add to this if I've forgotten something important. I will be adding this to the wiki page for a more permanent record shortly.

Vent objectives:

1. Clean ITMX, ITMY, ETMX, ETMY
2. Replace ETMX suspension cage, replace Al wire standoffs with Ruby (sapphire?) standoffs.
3. Shorten Y arm length by 20mm
4. Replace 40mm aperture baffles in ETM chambers with 50mm black glass baffles

Optics, OSEM and suspension status:

ITMX & ITMY

• ITMX and ITMY did not have any magnets broken off during the vent - all five OSEM coils for both were removed and the optic EQ stopped for F.C. cleaning.
• Both HR and AR faces were F.Ced, ~20mm dia area cleaned.
• The coils were re-inserted in an orientation as close to the original (as judged from photos), and the shadow sensor outputs were made as close to half their open values as possible, although in the process of aligning the arms, this may have changed
• OSEM filter existense was checked (to be updated)
• Shadow sensor open values were recorded (to be updated)
• Checked that tables were level before closing up
• The UL OSEM on ITMY was swapped for a short OSEM while investigating glitchy shadow sensor outputs. This made no difference. However, the original OSEM wasn't replaced. Short OSEM was used as we only had spare short OSEMs. Serial number (S/N 228) and open voltage value have been recorded, wiki page will be updated. Does this have something to do with the input matrix diagonalization weirdness we have been seeing recently?
• ITMX seems to be prone to getting stuck recently, reason unknown although I did notice the LL OSEM was kind of close to the magnet while inserting (but this magnet is not the one getting stuck, as we can see this clearly on the camera - the prime suspect is UL I believe)
• OL beam centering on in vacuum steering optics checked before closing up

ETMY

• UL, UR and LR magents broke off at various points, and so have been reglued
• No standoff replacement was done
• Re-suspension was done using newly arrived SOS wire
• Original OSEMs were inserted, orientations have changed somewhat from their previous configuration as we did considerable experimentation with the B-R peak minimization for this optic
• OSEM filter status, shadow sensor open voltage values to be updated.
• New wire suspension clamp made at machine shop is used, 5 in lb of torque used to tighten the clamp
• HR face cleaned with F.C.
• Optic + suspension towers air baked (separately) at 34C for curing of EP30
• Checked that tables were level before closing up
• 40mm O.D. black glass baffle replaced with 50mm O.D. baffle.
• Suspension cage was moved towards ITMY by 19mm (measured using a metal spacer) by sliding along stop marking the position of the tower.

ETMX

• Al wire standoffs <--> Ruby wire standoffs (this has changed the pitch frequency)
• All magnets were knocked off at some point, but were successfully reglued
• New SOS tower, new SOS wire, new wire clamp used
• OSEM filter status, shadow sensor open voltage values to be updated.
• OSEM orientation is close to horizontal for all 5 OSEMs
• Table leveling was checked before closing up.
• 40mm O.D. black glass baffle replaced with 50mm O.D. baffle.\

PRM

• Some issues with the OSEMs were noticed, and were traced down to the Al foil caps covering the back of the (short) OSEMs, which are there to minimize the scattererd 1064nm light interfering with the shadow sensor, shorting one of the OSEMs
• To mitigate this, all Al foil caps now have a thin piece of Kapton between foil and electrical contacts on rear of OSEM
• No OSEMs were removed from the suspension cage during this process, we tried to be as gentle as possible and don't believe the shadow sensor values changed during this work, suggesting we didn't disturb the coils (PRM wasn't EQ stopped either)

SRM

• The optic itself wasn't directly touched during the vent - but was EQ stopped as work was being done on ITMY
• It initially was NOT EQ stopped, and the shift in table level caused by moving ITMY cage to the edge of the table for F.C. cleaning caused the optic to naturally drift onto the EQ stops, leading to some confusion as to what happened to the shadow sensor outputs
• The problem was diagnosed and restoring ITMY to its original position made the OSEM signals come back to normal.

SR3

• Was cleaned by drag wiping both front and back faces

SR2/PR2/PR3/BS/OMs

• These optics were NOT intentionally touched during this vent
• The alignment on the OMs was not checked before close-up

Other checks/changes

• OL beams were checked on in-vacuum input and output steering mirrors to make sure none were close to clipping
• Insides of viewport windows were checked for general cleanliness, given that we have found the outside of some of these to be rather dirty. Insides of viewports checked were deemed clean enough.
• Steve has installed a new vacuum guage to provide a more realiable pressure readout. 
• We forgot to investigate the weird behaviour of the AS beam that Yutaro and Koji identified in November. In any case, looks like the clipping of the AS beam is worse now. We will have to try and fix this using the PZT mounted OMs, and if not, we may have to consider venting again

Summary of characterization tasks to be done:

1. Mode matching into the Y arm cavity given the arm length change
2. HOM content in transmitted IR light from Y arm given the arm length change (Finesse models suggest that the 2f second order HOM resonance may have moved closer to the 00 resonance)
3. Arm loss measurement
4. Suspension diagonalization
5. Check the Qs of the optics eigenmodes - should indicate if any of our magnets, reglued or otherwise, are a little loose

I did a quick survey of the drive electronics for the PZT OM mirrors today. The hope is that we can correct for the clipping observed in the AS beam by using OM4 (in the BS/PRM chamber) and OM5 (in the OMC chamber).

Here is a summary of my findings.

• Schematic for (what I assume is) the driver unit (located in the short electronics rack by the OMC chamber/AS table) can be found here
• This is not hooked up to any HV power supply. There is a (short) cable on the back that is labelled '150V' but it isn't connected to anything. There are a bunch of 150V KEPCO power supplies in 1X1, looks like we will have to lay out some cable to power the unit
• The driver is also not connected to any fast front end machine or slow machine - according to the schematic, we can use J4, which is a Dsub 9 connector on the front panel, to supply drive signals to the two PZTs X and Y axes. Presumably, we can use this + some function generator/DC power supply to drive the PZTs. I have fashioned a cable using a Dsub9 connector and some BNC connectors for this purpose.

I hope these have the correct in-vacuum connections. We also have to hope that the clipping is downstream of OM4 for us to be able to do anything about it using the PZT mirrors. 

[Lydia, Johannes]

Johannes acquired a crate to contain the Acromag setup and wiring, and installed a rail along the bottom panel so that the ADC units will be oriented vertically with the ehternet ports facing up. We briefly talkes about what the layout should be, and are thinking of using 2 rails, one for ADCs and one for DACs. We want to design a generic front panel to accept 25 pin D-Sub inputs and maybe also BNCs, which we can use for all the Acromag crates. 

I got the epics session for the acromag to run on c1iscex and was able to access the channel values using caget on donatella. However, I get the following warning: 

cas warning: Using dynamically assigned TCP port 48154,
cas warning: but now two or more servers share the same UDP port.
cas warning: Depending on your IP kernel this server may not be
cas warning: reachable with UDP unicast (a host's IP in EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST)

It seems like there might be a way to assign a port for each unit, if this is a problem. 

Also, c1iscex doens't have tmux; what's the best way to run the modbusApp and then detach? Right now I just left an epics session running in an open terminal. 

Plans:

• Deisgn crate connections and interior layout. Set up front panel to accept desired connections. 
• Set up the crate with the Acromag XT1221 reading the diagnostic info from the X end NPRO in the X end rack.
• Figure out how many of each type we need to replace c1auxex functionality, and order them.
• Generate appropriate EPICS db files for acromag based on slow machine channels.
• Add necessary units to X end Acromag crate and read in the same inputs as c1auxex. 
• Set up everything else to look for c1auxex channels from Acromag instead. (Not sure about nuances of this step: should we name the channels something different at first? How to find everything that relies on c1auxex? Must be careful with SUS channel connections.)
•  Determine number of units needed to replace all slow machines, and order thm. Likewise assemble as many crates as necessary with the right connections. 
• Once we are confident that the replacement is complete and fully functional, disconnect c1auxex and repeat process for other slow machines. 

[Gautam Koji]

We engaged the HV driver to the output port PZTs, hoping to mitigate the AS port clipping. Basically, the range of the PZT is not enough to make the beam look clean. Also, our observation suggested there are possible multiple clipping in the chamber. We need another vent to make the things clearly right. Eric came in the lab and preparing the IFO for it.

1. Before the test, the test masses have been aligned with the dither servo.

2. We looked at the beam shape on the AS camera with a single bounce beam. We confirmed that the beam is hard-clipped at the upper and left sides of the beam on the video display. This clipping is not happening outside of the chamber.

3. We brought an HV power supply to the short OMC rack. There is a power supply cable with two spades. The red and black wires are +150V and GND respectively.

4. The voltage of +/-10V was applied on each of the four PZT drive inputs. We found that the motion of the beam on the camera is tiny and in any case, we could not improve the beam shape.

5. We wondered that if we are observing ANY improvement of the clipping. For this purpose, we aligned AS110 sensor every time we gave the misalignment with the PZTs. Basically, we are at the alignment to have the best power we can get. We thought this was weird.

6. Then we moved the AS port spot with the ITMX. We could clearly make the spot more round. However, this reduced the power at the AS port reduced by ~15%. When the beam was further clipped, the power went down again. Basically, the initial alignment gave us the max power we could get. As the max power was given with the clipped beam, we get confused and feel safer to check the situation with the chambers open.

During this investigation, we moved the AS port opitcs and the AS camera. So they are not too precise reference of the alignment. The PZT HV setup has been removed.

- checked all jam nuts

- checked all viewports are covered

- turned oplev servos off

- took pictures of medm screens: sus summs, aligned oplev centering, IFO& MC alignment biases and vac configuration

- checked particle counts

- checked crane operational safety

- closed V1, VM1, annuloses

- opened VV1  and vented with Airgas brand, Industrial Grade Nitrogen [ 99.99% ] to 25 Torr

- switched over to Airgas brand compressed air, Alphagas " AI UZ300 "  with Total Hydro Carbon 0.1 PPM

I did the following today to prepare for taking the doors off tomorrow.

• Locked MC at low power
  • low power autolocker used during the last vent isn't working so well now
  • so I manually locked the IMC - locks are holding for ~30 mins and MC transmission was maximized by tweaking MC1 and MC2 alignments. The transmission is now ~1150 which is what I remember it being from the last vent
  • I had to restart c1aux to run LSCoffsets
• Aligned arms to green using bias sliders on IFO align
  • X green transmission is ~0.4 and Y green transmission is ~0.5 which is what I remember it being before this vent
• Removed ND filters from end Transmon QPDs since there is so little light now
• Locked Y arm, ran the dither
  • Some tip tilt beam walking was required before any flashes were seen
  • I had to tweak the LSC gain for this to work
  • TRY is ~0.3 - in the previous vent, in air low power locking yielded TRY of ~0.6 but the 50-50 BS that splits the light between the high gain PD and the QPD was removed back then so these numbers are consistent
• Tried locking X arm
  • For some reason, I can't get the triggering to work well - the trigger in monitor channel (LSC-XARM_TRIG_IN) and LSC-TRX_OUT_DQ are not the same, should they not be?
  • Tried using both QPD and high gain PD to lock, no luck. I also checked the error signal for DC offsets and that the demod phase was okay
  • In any case, there are TRX flashes of ~0.3 as well, this plus the reasonable green transmission makes me think the X arm alignment is alright
• All the oplev spots are on their QPDs in the +/- 100 range. I didn't bother centering them for now

I am leaving all shutters closed overnight.

So I think we are ready to take the doors off at 8am tomorrow morning, unless anyone thinks there are any further checks to be done first.

Vent objectives:

1. Fix AS beam clipping issues (elog1, elog2)
2. Look into the green scatter situation (elog)

Should we look to do anything else now? One thing that comes to mind is should we install ITM baffles? Or would this be more invasive than necessary for this vent?

Steve reported to me that he was unable to ssh into the control room machines from the laptops at the Xend and near the vacuum rack. The problem was with pianosa being frozen up. I did a manual reboot of pianosa and was able to ssh into it from both laptops just now.

[steve,ericq,gautam]

We re-checked IMC locking, arm alignments (we were able to lock and dither align both arms today, and also made the michelson spot look reasonable on the camera) and made sure that the AS and REFL spots were in the camera ballpark. We then proceeded to remove the heavy doors off ITMY and BS/PRM chambers. We also quickly made sure that it is possible to remove the side door of the OMC chamber with the current crane configuration, but have left it on for now.

The hunt for clipping now begins.

[steve,ericq,gautam]

In the afternoon, we took the heavy door off the OMC chamber as well, such that we could trace the AS beam all the way out to the AP table. 

In summary, we determined the following today:

1. Beam is centered on SRM, as judged by placing the SOS iris on the tower
    
2. Beam is a little off on OM1 in yaw, but still >2 beam diameters away from the edge of the steering optic, pitch is pretty good
   
3. Beam is okay on OM2 
4. Beam is okay on OM3 - but beam from OM3 to OM4 is perilously close to clipping on the green steering mirror between these two steering optics (see CAD drawing). We think this is where whatever effect of the SR2 hysteresis shows up first.
   
5. Beam is a little low and a little to the left on OM4 (the first PZTJena mirror)
6. Beam is well clear of other optics in the BS PRM chamber on the way from OM4 to OM5 in the OMC chamber
7. Beam is a little low and a little to the left of OM5 in the OMC chamber. This is the second PZTJena mirror. We are approximately 1 beam diameter away from clipping on this 1" optic
   Link to IMG_2289.JPG
8. Beam is off center on OMPO-OMMTSM partially transmissive optic, but because this is a 2" optic, the room for error is much more
   Link to IMG_2294.JPG
9. Beam is well clear of optics on OMC table on the way from OMPO-OMMTSM to OM6, the final steering mirror bringing the AS beam out onto the table
10. Beam is low and to the left on OM6. It is pretty bad here, we are < 1 beam diameter away from clipping on this optic, this along with the near miss on the BS/PRM chamber are the two most precarious positions we noticed today, consistent with the hypothesis in this elog that there could be multiple in vacuum clipping points
    Link to IMG_2306.JPG
11. Beam clears the mirror just before the window pretty confortably (see photo, CAD drawing). But this mirror is not being used for anything useful at the moment. More importantly, there is some reflection off the window back onto this mirror frame which is then scattering and creating some ghost beams, so this could explain the anomalous ASDC behaviour Koji and Yutaro saw. In any case, I would favour removing this mirror since it is serving no purpose at the moment.
    Link to IMG_2310.JPG

Attachment #5 is extracted from the 40m CAD drawing which was last updated in 2012. It shows the beam path for the output beam from the BS all the way to the table (you may need to zoom in to see some labels. The drawing may not be accurate for the OMC chamber but it does show all the relevant optics approximately in their current positions.

EQ will put up photos from the ITMY and BS/PRM chambers.

Plan for Monday: Reconfirm all the findings from today immediately after running the dither alignment so that we can be sure that the ITMs are well-aligned. Then start at OM1 and steer the beam out of the chambers, centering the beam as best as possible given other constraints on all the optics sequentially. All shutters are closed for the weekend, though I left the SOS iris in the chamber...

Here is the link to the Picasa album with a bunch of photos from the OMC chamber prior to us making any changes inside it - there are also some photos in there of the AS beam path inside the OMC chamber...

[ericq, lydia, gautam]

IMC realignment, Arm dither alignment

• We started today by re-locking the PMC (required a c1psl restart), re-locking the IMC and then locking the arms
• While trying to dither align the arms, I could only get the Y arm transmission to a maximum of ~0.09, while we are more used to something like 0.3 when the arm is well aligned this vent
• As it turns out, Y arm was probably locked to an HOM, as a result of some minor drift in the ITMY optical table leveling due to the SOS tower aperture being left in over the weekend

ITMY chamber

• We then resolved to start at the ITMY chamber, and re-confirm that the beam is indeed centered on the SRM by means of the above-mentioned aperture
• Initially, there was considerable yaw misalignment on the aperture, probably due to the table level drifting because of the additional weight of the aperture
• As soon as I removed the aperture, eric was able to re-dither-align the arms and their transmission went back up to the usual level of ~0.3 we are used to this vent
• We quickly re-inserted the aperture and confirmed that the beam was indeed centered on the SRM
• Then we removed the aperture from the chamber and set about inspecting the beam position on OM1
• While the beam position wasn't terribly bad, we reasoned that we may as well do as good a job as we can now - so OM1 was moved ~0.5 in such that the beam through the SRM is now well centered on OM1 (see Attachment #1 for a CAD drawing of the ITMY table layout and the direction in which OM1 was moved)
  
• Naturally this affected the beam position on OM2 - I re-centered the beam on OM2 by first coarsely rotating OM1 about the post it is mounted on, and then with the knobs on the mount. The beam is now well centered on OM2
• We then went about checking the table leveling and found that the leveling had drifted substantially - I re-levelled the table by moving some of the weights around, but this has to be re-checked before closing up... 

BS/PRM chamber

• The beam from OM2 was easily located in the BS/PRM chamber - it required minor yaw adjustment on OM2 to center the beam on OM3
• Once the beam was centered on OM3, minor pitch and yaw adjustments on the OM3 mount were required to center the beam on OM4
• The beam path from OM3 to OM4, and OM4 to the edge of the BS/PRM chamber towards the OMC chamber was checked. There is now good clearance (>2 beam diameters) between the beam from OM4 to the OMC chamber, and the green steering mirror in the path, which was one of the prime clipping candidates identified on Friday

OMC chamber

• First, the beam was centered on OM5 by minor tweaking of the pitch and yaw knobs on OM4 (see Attachment #2)
• Next, we set about removing the unused mirror just prior to the window on the AP table (see Attachment #3). PSL shutter was closed for this stage of work, in order to minimize the chance of staring directly into the input beam!
• Unfortunately, we neglected checking the table leveling prior to removing the optic. A check after removing the optic suggested that the table wasn't level - this isn't so easy to check as the table is really crowded, and we can only really check near the edges of the table (see Attachment #3). But placing the level near the edge introduces an unknown amount of additional tilt due to its weight. We tried to minimize these effects by using the small spirit level, which confirmed that the table was indeed misaligned
• To mitigate this, we placed a rectangular weight (clean) around the region where the removed mirror used to sit (see Attachment #3). Approximately half the block extends over the edge of the table, but it is bolted down. The leveling still isn't perfect - but we don't want to be too invasive on this table (see next bullet point). Since there are no suspended optics on this table, I think the leveling isn't as critical as on the other tables. We will take another pass at this tomorrow but I think we are in a good enough state right now. 
• All this must have bumped the table quite a bit, because when we attempted re-locking the IMC, we noticed substantial misalignment. We should of course have anticipated this because the mirror launching the input beam into the IMC, and also MMT2 launching the beam into the arms, sits on this table! After exploring the alignment space of the IMC for a while, eric was able to re-lock the IMC and recover nominal transmission levels of ~1200 counts. 
• We then re-locked the arms (needed some tip-tilt tweaking) and ran the dither again, setting us up for the final alignment onto OM6
• OM5 pitch and yaw knobs were used to center the beam on OM6 - the resulting beam spot on OMPO-OMMTSM and OM6 are shown in Attachment #4 and Attachment #5 respectively. The centering on OMPO-OMMTSM isn't spectacular, but I wanted to avoid moving this optic if possible. Moreover, we don't really need the beam to follow this path (see last bullet in this section)
• Beam path in the OMC chamber (OM5 --> OMPO-OMMTSM --> OM6 --> window was checked and no significant danger of clipping was found
• Beam makes it cleanly through the window onto the AP table. We tweaked the pitch and yaw knobs on OM6 to center the beam on the first in-air pick off mirror steering the AS beam on the AP table. The beam is now visible on the camera, and looks clean, no hint of clipping
• As a check, I wondered where the beam into the OMC is actually going. Turns out that as things stand, it is hitting the copper housing (see Attachment #6, it's had to get a good shot because of the crowded table...). While this isn't critical, perhaps we can avoid this extra scatter by dumping this beam?
• Alternatively, we could just bypass OMPO-OMMTSM altogether - so rotate OM5 in-situ such that we steer the beam directly onto OM6. This way, we avoid throwing away half (?) the light in the AS beam. If this is the direction we want to take, it should be easy enough to make the change tomorrow

In summary...

• AS beam has been centered on all steering optics (OM1 through OM6)
• Table leveling has been checked on ITMY and OMC chambers - this will be re-checked prior to closing up
• Green-scatter issue has to be investigated, should be fairly quick..
• In the interest of neatness, we may want to install a couple of beam dumps - one to catch the back-reflection off the window in the OMC chamber, and the other for the beam going to the OMC (unless we decide to swivel OM5 and bypass the OMC section altogether, in which case the latter is superfluous)

C1SUSAUX re-booting

• Not really related to this work, but we couldn't run the MC relief script due to c1susaux being unresponsive
• I re-started c1susaux (taking care to follow the instructions in this elog to avoid getting ITMX stuck)
• Afterwards, I was able to re-lock the IMC, recover nominal transmission of ~1200 counts. I then ran the MC relief servo
• All shutters have been closed for the night

[ericq, lydia, gautam]

• We started today by checking leveling of ITMY table, all was okay on that front after the adjustment done yesterday. Before closing up, we will have detailed pictures of the current in vacuum layout
• We then checked centering on OMs 1 and 2 (after having dither aligned the arms), nothing had drifted significantly from yesterday and we are still well centered on both these OMs
• We then moved to the BS/PRM chamber and checked the leveling, even though nothing was touched on this table. Like in the OMC chamber, it is difficult to check the leveling here because of layout constraints, but I verified that the table was pretty close to being level using the small (clean) spirit level in two perpendicular directions
• Beam centering was checked on OMs 3 and 4 and verified to be okay. Clearance of beam from OM4 towards the OMC chamber was checked at two potential clipping points - near the green steering mirror and near tip-tilt 2. Clearance at both locations was deemed satisfactory so we moved onto the OMC chamber
• We decided to go ahead and rotate OM5 to send the beam directly to OM6 and bypass the partially transmissive mirror meant to send part of the AS beam to the OMC
• In order to accommodate the new path, I had to remove a razor beam dump on the OMC setup, and translate OM5 back a little (see Attachment #1), but we have tried to maintain ~45 degree AOI on both OMs 5 and 6
• Beam was centered on OM6 by adjusting the position of OM5. We initially fiddled around with the pitch and yaw knobs of OM4 to try and center the beam on OM5, but it was decided that it was better just to move OM5 rather than mess around on the BS/PRM chamber and introduce potential additional scatter/clipping
• OMC table leveling was checked and verified to not have been significantly affected by todays work
• It was necessary to loosen the fork and rotate OM6 to extract the AS beam from the vacuum chambers onto the AP table
• AS beam is now on the camera, and looks nice and round, no evidence of any clipping. Some centering on in air lenses and mirrors on the AP table remains to be done. We are now pretty well centered on all 6 OMs and should have more power at the AS port given that we are now getting light previously routed to the OMC out as well. A quantitative measure of how much more light we have now will have to be done after pumping down and turning the PSL power back up
• I didn't see any evidence of back-scattered light from the window even though there were hints of this previously (sadly the same can't be said about the green). I will check once again tomorrow, but this doesn't look like a major problem at the moment

Lydia and I investigated the extra green beam situation. Here are our findings.

1. There appears to be 3 ghost beams in addition to the main beam. These ghosts appeared when we locked the X green and Y green individually, which lead us to conclude that whatever is causing this behaviour is located downstream of the periscope on the BS/PRM chamber
   Link to greenGhosts.JPG
2. I then went into the BS/PRM chamber and investigated the spot on the lower periscope mirror. It isn't perfectly centered, but it isn't close to clipping on any edge, and the beam leaving the upper mirror on the periscope looks clean as well (only the X-arm green was used for this, and subsequent checks). The periscope mirror looks a bit dusty and scatters rather a lot which isn't ideal...
   Link to IMG_3322.JPG
3. There are two steering mirrors on the IMC table which we do not have access to this vent. But I looked at the beam coming into the OMC chamber and it looks fine, no ghosts are visible when letting the main beam pass through a hole in one of our large clean IR viewing cards - and the angular separation of these ghosts seen on the PSL table suggests that we would see these ghosts if they exist prior to the OMC chamber on the card...
4. The beam hits the final steering mirror which sends it out onto the PSL table on the OMC chamber cleanly - the spot leaving the mirror looks clean. However, there are two reflections from the two surfaces of the window that come back into the OMC chamber. Space constraints did not permit me to check what surfaces these scatter off and make it back out to the PSL table as ghosts, but this can be checked again tomorrow.
   Link to IMG_3326.JPG

I can't think of an easy fix for this - the layout on the OMC chamber is pretty crowded, and potential places to install a beam dump are close to the AS and IMC REFL beam paths (see Attachment #1). Perhaps Steve can suggest the best, least invasive way to do this. I will also try and nail down more accurately the origin of these spots tomorrow.

Light doors are back on for the night. I re-ran the dithers, and centered the oplevs for all the test-masses + BS. I am leaving the PSL shutter closed for the night

Tilted viewports installed in horizontal position. Atm2

[ericq, lydia, steve, gautam]

• We aligned the arms, and centered the in-air AS beam onto the PDs and camera
• Misaligned the ITMs in a controlled ramp, observed ASDC level, didn't see any strange features
• We can misalign the ITMs by +/- 100urad in yaw and not see any change in the ASDC level (i.e. no clipping). We think this is reasonable and it is unlikely that we will have to deal with such large misalignments. We also scanned a much larger range of ITM misalignments (approximately +/-1mrad), and saw no strange features in the ASDC levels as was noted in this elog - we used both the signal from the AS110 PD which had better SNR and also the AS55 PD. We take this to be a good sign, and will conduct further diagnostics once we are back at high power.
• Opened up all light doors, checked centering on all 6 OM mirrors again, these were deemed to be satisfactory 
• To solve the green scattering issue, we installed a 1in wide glass piece (~7inches tall) mounted on the edge of the OMC table to catch the reflection off the window (see Attachment #1) - this catches most of the ghost beams on the PSL table, there is one that remains directly above the beam which originates at the periscope in the BS/PRM chamber (see Attachment #2) but we decided to deal with this ghost on the PSL table rather than fiddle around in the vacuum and possibly make something else worse
  Link to IMG_2332.JPG
  Link to IMG_2364.JPG
• Re-aligned arms, ran the dither, and then aligned the PRM and SRM - we saw nice round DRMI flashes on the cameras
• Took lots of pictures in the chamber, put heavy doors back on. Test mass Oplev spots looked reasonably well centered, I re-centerd PRM and SRM spots in their aligned states, and then misaligned both
• The window from the OMC chamber to the AS table looked clean enough to not warrant a cleaning..
• PSL shutter is closed for now. I will check beam alignment, center Oplevs, and realign the green in the evening. Plan is to pump down first thing tomorrow morning

AS beam on OM1

Link to IMG_2337.JPG

AS beam on OM2

I didn't manage to get a picture of the beam on OM5 because it is difficult to hold a card in front of it and simultaneously take a photo, but I did verify the centering...

It remains to update the CAD diagram to reflect the new AS beam path - there are also a number of optics/other in-vacuum pieces I noticed in the BS/PRM and OMC chambers which are not in the drawings, but I should have enough photos handy to fix this.  

Here is the link to the Picasa album with a bunch of photos from the OMC, BS/PRM and ITMY chambers prior to putting the heavy doors back on...

SRM satellite box has been removed for diagnostics by Rana. I centered the SRM Oplev prior to removing this, and I also turned off the watchdog and set the OSEM bias voltages to 0 before pulling the box out (the PIT and YAW bias values in the save files were accurate). Other Oplevs were centered after dither-aligning the arms (see Attachment #8, ignore SRM). Green was aligned to the arms in order to maximize green transmission (GTRX ~0.45, GTRY ~0.5, but transmission isn't centered on cameras).

I don't think I have missed out on any further checks, so unless anyone thinks otherwise, I think we are ready for Steve to start the pumpdown tomorrow morning.

These old specs are not so bad. But we now want to get replacements for the TRX and TRY and PSL viewports that are R <0.1% at 532 and 1064 nm.

I don't know of any issues with keeping BK-7 as the substrate.

The pressure on the newly installed gauge on the X arm was 6E-5 torr when I came in today evening, so I decided to start the recovery process.

1. I first tried working at low power. I was able to lock the IMC as well as the arms. But the dither alignment didn't work so well. So I decided to go to nominal PSL power.
2. I first changed the 2" HR mirror that is used to send all the MC REFL light to the MC REFL PD in low power operation with a 10% BS. I then roughly aligned the beam onto the PD using the tiny steering mirror. At this point, I also re-installed the ND filters on the end Transmon QPDs and also the CCD at the Y end.
3. I then rotated the waveplate (the second one from the PSL aperture) until I maximized the power as measured just before the PSL shutter with a power meter. I then re-aligned the PMC to maximize transmission. After both these steps, we currently have 1.09W of IR light going into the IMC
4. I then re-aligned MC REFL onto the PD (~90mW of light comes through to the PD) and maximized the DC output using an oscilloscope. I then reverted the Autolocker to the nominal version from the low power variant that has been running on megatron during the vent (although we never really used it). The autolocker worked well and I was able to lock the IMC without much trouble. I tweaked the alignment sliders for the IMC optics, but wasn't able to improve the transmission much. It is ~14600 cts right now, which is normal I think
5. I then centered the beams onto the WFS QPDs, ran the WFSoffsets script after turning the inputs to the WFS servos off, and ran the relief script as well - I didn't try anything further with the IMC
6. I then tried to lock the arms - I first used the green to align the test-masses. Once I was able to lock to a green 00-mode, I saw strong IR flashes and so I was able to lock the Y arm. I then ran the dither. Next, I did the same for the X arm. Even though I ran LSCoffsets before beginning work tonight, the Y arm transmission after maximization is ~5, and that for the X arm is ~2.5. I refrained from running the normalization scripts in case I am missing something here, but the mode itself is clearly visible on the cameras and is a 00-mode.
   GV edit 21Oct2016: For the Y-arm, the discrepancy was down to TRY being derived from the high gain PD as opposed to the QPD. Switching these and running the dither, TRY now maxes out at around 1.0. For TRX, the problem was that I did not install one of the ND filters - so the total ND was 1.2 rather than 1.6, which is what we were operating at and which is the ND on TRY. Both arms now have transmission ~1 after maximizing with the dither alignment...
7. The AS spot looks nice and round on the camera, although the real check would be to do the sort of scan Yutaro and Koji did, and monitor the ASDC levels. I am leaving this task for tomorrow, along with checking the recycling cavities.
8. Lastly, I centered the Oplevs for all the TMs

I worked on recovering ALS today. Alignments had drifted sufficiently that I had to to the alignment on the PSL table onto the green beat PDs for both arms. As things stand, both green (and IR) beats have been acquired, and the noise performance looks satisfactory (see Attachment #1), except that the X beat noise above 100Hz looks slightly high. I measured the OLTF of the X end green PDH loop (after having maximized the arm transmission, dither alignment etc, measurement done at error point with an excitation amplitude of 25mV), and adjusted the gain such that the UGF is ~10kHz (see Attachment #2).

[ericq,gautam]

Given that most of the post vent recovery tasks were done, and that the ALS noise performance looked good enough to try locking, we decided to try PRFPMI locking again last night. Here are the details:

PRM alignment, PRMI locking

• We started by trying to find the REFL beam on the camera, the alignment biases for the 'correct' PRM alignment has changed after the vent
• After aligning, the Oplev was way off center so that was fixed. We also had to re-center the ITMX oplev after a few failed locking attempts
• The REFL beam was centered on all the RFPDs on the ASDC table

Post the most recent vent, where we bypass the OMC altogether, we have a lot more light now at the AS port. It has not yet been quantified how much more, but from the changes that had to be made to the loop gain for a stable loop, we estimate we have 2-3 times more power at the AS port now.

PRFPMI locking

• We spent a while unsuccessfully trying to get the PRMI locked and reduce the carm offset on ALS control to bring the arms into the 'buzzing' state - the reason was that we forgot that it was established a couple of weeks ago that REFL165 had better MICH SNR. Once this change was made, we were readily able to reduce the carm offset to 0
• Then we spent a few attempts trying to do blend in RF control - as mentioned in the above referenced elog, the point of failure always was trying to turn on the integrator in the CARM B path. We felt that the appearance of the CARM B IN1 signal on dataviewer was not what we are used to seeing but were unable to figure out why (as it turns out, we were locking CARM on POY11 and not REFL11 , more on this later)
• Eric found that switching the sign of the CARM B gain was the solution - we spent some time puzzling over why this should have changed, and hypothesized that perhaps we are now overcoupled, but it is more likely that this was because of the error signal mix up mentioned above...
• We also found the DC coupling of the ITM Oplev loops to be not so reliable - perhaps this has to do with the wonky ITMY UL OSEM, more on this later. We usually turn the DC coupling on after dither aligning the arms, and in the past, it has been helpful. But we had more success last night with the DC coupling turned off rather than on.
• Once the sign flip was figured out, we were repeatedly able to achieve locks with CARM partially on RF - we got through about 3 or 4, each was stable for just tens of seconds though. Also, we only progressed to RF on CARM on 1 attempt, the lock lasted for just a few seconds
• Unfortunately, the mode cleaner decided to act up just about after we figured all this out, and it was pushing 4am so we decided to give up for the night.
• The arm transmissions hit 300! We had run the transmission normalization scripts just before starting the lock so this number should be reliable (compare to ~130 in October last year). The corresponding PRG is about 16.2, which according to my Finesse models suggest we are still undercoupled, but are close to critical coupling (this needs a bit more investigation, supporting plots to follow). => Average arm loss is ~150ppm! So looks like we did some good with the vent, although of course an independent arm loss measurement has to be done...
• Lockloss plot for one of the locks is Attachment #1

Other remarks:

• Attachment #2 shows that the ITMY UL coil is glitchy (while the others are not). At some point last night, we turned off this sensor input to the damping servos, but for the actual locks, we turned it back on. I will do a Satellite box swap to see if this is a Sat. Box problem (which I suspect it is, the bad Sat. Boxes are piling up...)
• Just now, eric was showing me the CM board setup in the LSC rack, because for the next lock attempts, we want to measure the CARM loop - but we found that the input to the CM board was POY and not REFL! This probably explains the sign flip mentioned above. The mix-up has been rectified
• The MICH dither align doesn't seem to be working too well - possibly due to the fact that we have a lot more ASDC light now, this has to be investigated. But last night, we manually tweaked the BS alignment to make the dark port dark, and it seemed to work okay, although each time we aligned the PRMI on carrier, then went back to put the arms on ALS, and came back to PRMI, we would see some yaw misalignment in the AS beam...
• I believe the SRM sat. box is still being looked at by Ben so it has not been reinstalled...
• Eric has put together a configure script for the PRFPMI configuration which I have added to the IFO configure MEDM screen for convenience
• For some reason, the appropriate whitening gain for POX11 and the XARM loop gain to get the XARM to lock has changed - the appropriate settings now are +30dB and 0.03 respectively. These have not been updated in some scripts, so for example, when the watch script resets the IFO configuration, it doesn't revert to these values. Just something to keep in mind for now...

Great to hear that we have the PRG of ~16 now!

Is this 150ppm an avg loss per mirror, or per arm?

[Gautam, Johannes]

The autolocker was acting up today, Gautam traced it to EPICS channels ( namely C1:IOO-MC_LOCK_ENABLE and C1:IOO-MC_AUTOLOCK_BEAT ) served by c1iool0 not being responsive and keyed the crate. This restored it nominal operation.

I realized that I did not have a Finesse model to reflect the current situation of flipped folding mirrors (I've been looking at 'ideal' RC cavity lengths with folding mirrors oriented with HR side inside the cavity so we didn't have to worry about the substrate/AR surface losses), and it took me a while to put together a model for the current configuration. Of course this calculation does not need a Finesse model but I thought it would be useful nevertheless. 

In summary - the model with which the attached plot was generated assumes the following:

• Arm lengths of 37.79m, given our recent modification of the Y arm length
• RC lengths are all taken from here, I have modelled the RC folding mirrors as flipped with the substrate and AR surface losses taken from the spec sheet
• The X axis is the average arm loss - i.e. (L_ITMX+L_ITMY+L_ETMX+L_ETMY)/2. In the model, I have distributed the loss equally between the ITMs and ETMs.

This calculation agrees well with the analytic results Yutaro computed here - the slight difference is possibly due to assuming different losses in the RC folding mirrors. 

The conclusion from this study seems to be that the arm loss is now in the 100-150ppm range (so each mirror has 50-75ppm loss). But these numbers are only so reliable, we need an independent loss measurement to verify. In fact, during last night's locking efforts, the arm transmission sometimes touched 400 (=> PRG ~22), which according to these plots suggest total arm losses of ~50ppm, which would mean each mirror has only 25ppm loss, which seems a bit hard to believe.

It is also difficult to have a high arm transmission without having high PRG.

What about to plot the arm trans and the REFL DC power in a timeseries?
Or even in a correlation plot (X: Arm Trans or PRG vs Y: REFL Reflectivity)

This tells you an approximate location of the critical coupling, and allows you to calibrate the PRG, hopefully.

As Gautam mentioned, we had some success locking the PRFPMI last night. (SRM satellite box is still in surgery...)

Unsurprisingly, changing the loss/PRG/CARM finesse means we had to fiddle with the common mode servo parameters a little bit to get things to work. However, before too long, we achieved a first lock on the order of a few minutes. Not long afterwards, we had a nice half hour lock stretch where we could tune up the AO crossover and loop UGFs. The working locking script was committed to SVN. Really, no fundamentally new tactics were used, which is encouraging. (One thing I wondered about was whether a narrower CARM linewidth would still let our direct ALS->REFL11 handoff with no offset reduction work. Turns out it does)

However, the step where we increase the analog CARM gain isn't as bulletproof as it once had been. The light levels "sputter" in and out sometimes if the gain increases are too agressive, and can cause a lockloss. Maybe this is an effect of the narrower linewidth and injecting more ALS noise at high frequencies with the higher CARM bandwidth.

The spatial profiles of the light on the cameras is totally bananas. Here's AS and REFL.

As Koji suggested, here is a 2D histogram of TRY vs REFLDC. It appears that the visibility would max out at 75% or so at arm powers around 400. Indeed, we briefly saw powers that high, but as can be seen on the plot, we were usually a little under 300. Exploring the transmon QPD offset space didn't seem to have much effect here.

One thing that I hadn't looked at in previous locks is coherence with our ground seismometers. It would be cool to have more seismic feedforward, and looking at the frequency domain multiple coherence, it looks like we can win a lot between 1 and 20 Hz. I expected more of a win at 1Hz, though.

Following Koji's suggestion, I decided to investigate the relation between my Finesse model and the measured data.

For easy reference, here is the loss plot again:

Sticking with the model, I used the freedom Finesse offers me to stick in photodiodes wherever I desire, to monitor the circulating power in the PRC directly, and also REFLDC. Note that REFLDC goes to 0 because I am using Finesse's amplitude detector at the carrier frequency for the 00 mode only. 

Both the above plots essentially show the same information, except the X axis is different. So my model tells me that I should expect the point of critical coupling to be when the average arm loss is ~100ppm, corresponding to a PRG of ~17 as suggested by my model.

Eric has already put up a scatter plot, but I reproduce another from a fresh lock tonight. The data shown here corresponds to the IFO initially being in the 'buzzing' state where the arms are still under ALS control and we are turning up the REFL gain - then engaging the QPD ASC really takes us to high powers. The three regimes are visible in the data. I show here data sampled at 16 Hz, but the qualitative shape of the scatter does not change even with the full data. As an aside, today I saw the transmission hit ~425!

I have plotted the scatter between TRX and REFL DC, but if I were to plot the scatter between POP DC and REFL DC, the shape looks similar - specifically, there is an 'upturn' in the REFL DC values in an area similar to that seen in the above scatter plot. POP DC is a proxy for the PRG, and I confirmed that for the above dataset, there is a monotonic, linear relationship between TRX and POPDC, so I think it is legitimate to compare the plot on the RHS in the row directly above, to the plot from the Finesse model one row further up. In the data, REFL DC seems to hit a minimum around TRX=320. Assuming a PRM transmission of 5.5%, TRX of 320 corresponds to a PRG of 17.5, which is in the ballpark of the region the model tells us to expect it to be. Based on this, I conclude the following:

• It seems like the Finesse model I have is quite close to the current state of the IFO 
• Given that we can trust the model, the PRC is now OVERCOUPLED - the scatter plot of data supports this hypothesis
• Given that in today's lock, I saw arm transmission go up to ~425, this suggests that at optimal alignment, PRG can reach 23. Then, Attachment #1 suggests the average arm loss is <50ppm, which means the average loss per optic is <25ppm. I am not sure how physical this is, given that I remember seeing the specs for the ITMs and ETMs being for scatter less than 40 25ppm, perhaps the optic exceeded the specs, or I remember the wrong numbers, or the model is wrong

In other news, I wanted to try and do the sensing matrix measurements which we neglected to do yesterday. I turned on the notches in CARM, DARM, PRCL and MICH, and then tuned the LO amplitudes until I saw a peak in the error signal for that particular DOF with peak height a factor of >10 above the noise floor. The LO amplitudes I used are 

MICH: 40

PRCL: 0.7

CARM: 0.08

DARM: 0.08

There should be about 15 minutes of good data. More impressively, the lock tonight lasted 1 hour (see Attachment #6, unfortunately FB crashed in between). Last night we lost lock while trying to transition control to 1f signals and tonight, I believe a P.C. drive excursion of the kind we are used to seeing was responsible for the lockloss, so the PRFPMI seems pretty stable.

With regards to the step in the lock acquisition sequence where the REFL gain is turned up, I found in my (4) attempts tonight that I had most success when I adjusted the CARM A slider while turning up the REFL gain to offload the load on the CARM B servo. Of course, this may mean nothing... 

I don't think the loss of 25 ppm is outrageous. Its just surprisingly good. The SIS model predicted numbers more like 1 ppm / mirror taking into account just the phase map and not the coating defects.

However, we should take into account the lossed in the DRMI to be more accurate: AR coating reflectivities, scatter loss on those surfaces, as well as possible clipping around BS or some other optics.

https://chat.ligo.org/ligo/channels/40m

Building:         Campus Wide         

Date:             Thursday 11/03/16 at Approx. 6:20 a.m.   

Notification:     Unplanned City Wide Power Glitch Affecting Campus   

*This is to notify you that the Caltech Campus experienced a campus wide power glitch at approx. 6:20 a.m. this morning.

The city was contacted and they do not expect any further interruptions related to this event.

The vacuum was not effected. ITM sus damping restored. IFO room air conditions on.

PSL Innolight and ETMY Lightwave lasers turned on

I did the following:

• Hard reboots for fb, megatron, and all the frontends, in that order
• Checked time on all FEs, ran sudo ntpdate -b -s -u pool.ntp.org where necessary
• Restarted all realtime models
• Restarted monit on all FEs
• Reset Marconi to nominal settings, fCarrier=11.066209MHz, +13dBm amplitude
• In the control room, restarted the projector and set up the usual StripTool traces
• Realigned PMC
• Slow machines did not need any touchups - interestingly, ITMX did not get stuck during this power glitch!

There was a regular beat coming from the speakers. After muting all the channels on the mixer and pulling the 3.5mm cable out, the sound persisted. It now looks like the mixer is broken

     ProFX8v2

The projector failed just now with a pretty loud 'pop' sound - I've never been present when the lamp goes out, so I don't know if this is usual. I have left the power cable unplugged for now...

Replacement is ordered Nov 4

Looking back at elog 12528, the uncertainty in the armloss number from the individual quantities in the equation for can be written as:

Making some generous assumption about the individual uncertainties and filling in typical values we get in our measurements, results in the following uncertainty budget:

In my recent round of measurements I had a 2.5% uncertainty in the ASDC reading, which completely dominates the armloss assessment.

The most recent numbers are 57 ppm for the YARM and 21 ppm for the XARM, but both with an uncertainty of near 150 ppm, so while these numbers fit well with Gautam's estimate of the average armloss via PRG, it's not really a confirmation.

I set the whitening gain in ASDC to 24 dB and ran LSC offsets, and now I'm getting a relative uncertainty in measured reflected power of .22%, which would be sufficient for ~25ppm accuracy according to the above formula. I'm going to start a series of measurements tonight when I leave, should be done in ~2 hours (10 pm) the latest.

If anybody wants to do some night work: I misaligned ITMY by a lot to get its reflection off ASDC. Approximate values are saved as a restore point. Also the whitening gain on ASDC will have to be rolled back (was at 0dB) and LSC offsets adjusted.

PRM and SRM sat. boxes have been switched for some time now - but the PRM sat. box has one channel with a different transimpedance gain, and the damping loops for the PRM and SRM were not systematically adjusted to take this into account (I just tweaked the gain for the PRM and SRM side damping loops till the optic damped). Since both sat. boxes are nominally functioning now, I saw no reason to maintain this switched configuration so I swapped the boxes back, and restored the damping settings to their values from March 29 2016, well before either of this summer's vents. In addition, I want to collect some data to analyze the sat. box noise performance so I am leaving the SRM sat. box connected to the DAQ, but with the tester box connected to where the vacuum feedthroughs would normally go (so SRM has no actuation right now). I will collect a few hours of data and revert later tonight for locking activities....

I had a mistake in my script that reported the wrong error after averaging several datapoints, and because I hadn't looked at the individual numbers I didn't catch it so far. Thanks to Gautam it is no more.

The updated numbers are (with fresh, more trustworthy data):

XARM: 21 +/ 35 ppm
YARM: 69 +/- 45 ppm

This looks much better. I'm planning to take more data with the AS110 PD rather than AS55 when I get the chance, increase the averaging time, and also sigma filter the datapoints. That should get us to a good spot and cut down the uncertainty even further.

I am currently looking at the acoustic noise around both arms to see if there are any frequencies from machinery around the lab that stand out and to see what we can remove/change.

• Attachment 1 is a picture of the microphone and suspension system (bungee cords) that hangs from the cable trays to isolate it from vibrations.
• To record data, I used both the microphone (attachment 1) attach it its preamp connected to a spectrum analyzer in order get a graph of power spectral density, recording from 0-10k Hz and 10-100kHz. I started recording data at the furthest end of the x arm and worked towards the center taking measurements every couple of feet (ten rungs on the cable tray). 
• The second attachment is the first 5 psd I got from the furthest end of the x arm going 10 rungs on the cable tray closer each measurement.
• Going forward, I am going to take more measurements with greater resolution at the lower frequencies from 0-200 and stepping up from there by factors of 2.

I don't like AS110 or AS55. Neither of them are designed for DC and so the DC readout chain is hokey. How about use an actual transimpedance PD with a 100-1000 Ohm resistor and a 3 mm diode? This would eliminate the alignment sensitivity and the drifts due to electronics and room lights.

Vivitek D952HD sn2160130 was send out for warranty repair. It's hard to believe that it has a 5 year warranty...... RMA - WR16004483.....expected to be back by Friday, Dec 2

The most recent power outage took out our projector and mixer. The projector was sent for repair while we ordered a new mixer. Both arrived today. Steve is working on re-installing the projector right now, and I installed the mixer which was verified to be working with our DAFI system (although the 60Hz issue still remains to be sorted out). The current channel configuration is:

Ch1: 3.5mm stereo output from pianosa

Ch2: DAFI (L)

Ch3: DAFI (R)

I've set some random gains for now, but we will have audio again when locking

Manasa pointed me to the CAD drawings in the 40m SVN and I've now uploaded them to the 40m DCC Tree so that EricG and SteveV can convert them into SolidWorks.

Caltech Facilities promissed to email the 40m facility drawings in Cad format.

I organized the old of optical , vacuum and facility layout drawings on paper in the old cabinet.