A follow-up on the discussion from today's lunch meeting - Rana pointed out that rotation of the fiber in the mount by ~5degrees cannot account for such large power fluctuations. Here is a 3 day trend from my polarization monitoring setup. Assuming the output fiber coupler rotates in its mount by 5 degrees, and assuming the input light is aligned to one of the fiber's special axes, then we expect <1% fluctuation in the power. But the attached trend shows much more drastic variations, more like 25% in the p-polarization (which is what I assume we use for the beat, since the majority of light is in this polarization, both for PSL and EX). I want to say that the periodicity in the power fluctuations is ~12hours, and so this fluctuation is somehow being modulated by the lab temperature, but unfortunately, we don't have the PSL enclosure temperature logged in order to compare coherence.

Steve: your  plots look like temperature driven

The "beat length" of the fiber is quoted as <=2.7mm. This means that a linearly polarized beam that is not oriented along one of the special axes of the fiber will be rotated through 180 degrees over 2.7mm of propagation through the fiber. I can't find a number for the coefficient of thermal expansion of the fiber, but if temperature driven fluctuations are changing the length of the fiber by 300um, it would account for ~12% power fluctuation between the two polarizations in the monitoring setup, which is in the ballpark we are seeing...

All slow machines (except c1auxex) were dead today, so I had to key them all. While I was at it, I also decided to update MC autolocker screen. Kira pointed out that I needed to change the EPCIS input type (in the RTCDS model) to a "binary input", as opposed to an "analog input", which I did. Model recompilation and restart went smooth. I had to go into the epics record manually to change the two choices to "ENABLE" and "DISABLE" as opposed to the default "ON" and "OFF". Anyways, long story short, MC autolocker controls are a bit more intuitive now I think.

I've updated the sketches and added in front panels for the seismometer block and the 1U panel (attachments 3 and 4). There was an issue when it came to the panel on the block because the hole is only big enough for the cable that already exists there and there is no space to add in the D-9 connector. Not quite sure how to resolve this issue. Attachment 7 is the current panel on the seismometer block. Attachments 5 and 6 are the updated temperature circuit and the heater circuit.

The boxes will be located in the short racks at EX and EY to minimize cable length.

Can you please add dimensions to the drawing, so we can see if things fit and what the cable lenghts need to be?

For the panel on the granite slab, we should use a thinner piece of metal and mount it with an offset so that the D-sub cable can be fished through the hole in the slab. The hole is wide enough for 2 cables, but not 2 connectors.

Attached is a 8-day minute trend of the heater control signals, as well as the in-loop temperature sensor (which underestimates the true fluctuations; we really need an out-of-loop sensor attached to the can or seismometer).

You can see that since the last tuning (on the 13th), its been stable at the set point of 39 C with 8.5 - 10 W of heating power. Need to add the PID loop settings (all the sliders on the MEDM screen) to the frames so that we can help in diagnosing. Also, fix the spelling of "Celcisususs".

I'm working on fixing these (and the associated MEDM scripts) up so that we can get some reliable readback on how well centered the spots are on the MC mirrors. Seems like a bunch of MEDM display paths were broken, and it looks like the optimal demod phases (to put most of the output in I quadrature) are not what the current iteration of the scripts set them to be. It may well be that the gains that convert demodulated counts to mm of spot offset are also not correct anymore. I ran the script ~4times in ~1 hour time span, and got wildly different answers for the spot centering each time, so I wouldn't trust any of those numbers atm...

As you can see in Attachment #1, I stepped the demod phase of one of the servos from -180 to 180 degrees in 5degree increments. The previously used value of 57degrees is actually close to the worst possible point (if you want the signal in the I quadrature, which is what the scripts assume).

I used Attachment #2 to change up the demod phases to maximize the I signal. I chose the demod phase such that it preserved the sign of the demodulated signal (relative to the old demod phases). I also made some StripTool templates for these, and they are in the MC directory. Doing the spot centering measurement with the updated demod phases yields the following output from the script:

Seems totally unbelievable still that we are so far off center on MC1 yaw. Perhaps the gains and calibration to convert from counts to mm of spot offset need to be rechecked.

Steve, the pictures you posted are not the AA board I was referring to. The attached pictures show the board which is sitting beneath the GPS time server.

Summary:

As shown in the Attachments, it seems like IMC DAC and coil driver noise is the dominant noise source above 30Hz. If we assume the region around the bounce peak is real motion of the stack (to be confirmed with accelerometer data soon), this NB is starting to add up. Much checking to be done, and I'd also like to get a cleaner measurement of coil driver and DAC noise for all 3 optics, as there seems to be a factor of ~5 disagreement between the MC3 coil driver noise measurement and my previous foray into this subject. The measurement needs to be refined a little, but I think the conclusion holds.

Details:

1. I had a measurement of the MC3 coil driver noise from ~2weeks ago when I was last working on this that I had not yet added to the NB.
2. Today I added it. To convert from measured voltage noise to frequency noise, I assumed the usual 0.016N/A per coil number, which is probably a large source of systematic error.
3. I define the "nominal" IMC operating condition as MC1 and MC3 having the analog de-whitening filters switched on, but MC2 switched off.
4. So length noise should be dominated by coil driver noise on MC1 and MC3, and DAC noise on MC2.
5. The measurement I had was made with the input to the coil driver board terminated in 50ohms. Measurement was made in-situ. The measurement has a whole bunch of 60Hz harmonics (despite the Prologix box being powered by a linear power adapter, but perhaps there are other ground loops which are coupling into the measurement). So I'd like to get a cleaner measurement tmrw.
6. To confirm, Koji suggested some On/Off test by driving some broadband noise in the coils. I figured toggling the analog de-whitening, such that the DAC noise or coil driver electronics dominate is an equally good test.
7. Attachment #2 shows the effect in arm error and control signal spectra. Note that I engaged analog de-whitening on all 3 optics for the red curves in this plot. But even leaving MC2 de-whitening off, I could see the read curve was below the black reference trace, which was taken with de-whitening off on all 3 optics.

Remarks:

Since I sunk some time into it already, the motivation behind this work is just to try and make the IMC noise budget add up. It is not directly related to lowering the IR ALS noise, but if it is true that we are dominated by coil driver noise, we may want to consider modifying the MC coil driver electronics along with the ITM and ETMs.

The most up to date pictures of the AP table and ETMX table that Steve took have been uploaded to the relevant page on the wiki. It seems like the wiki doesn't display previews of jpg images - by using png, I was able to get the thumbnail of the attachment to show up. It would be nice to add beam paths to these two images. The older versions of these photos were moved to the archive section on the same page.

Yesterday, I changed the P gain of the PID loop from zero to  +0.1. Seems good so far; will monitor for a couple days to see if we're in the right ballpark. Main issue in the stability may now be that the quantization noise is too big for the temperature sensor. If so, we should consider subtracting off the DC value (with a V ref) and then amplifying before ADC.

I've added in the dimensions to my sketch.

It seems like placing the two connectors right next to each other would allow both cables to just barely go through the hole in the block.

Summary:

Today, I repeated the coil driver noise measurement. Now, the coil driver noise curve in the noise budget plot (Attachment #1) is the actual measurement of all 12 coils (made with G=100 SR560). I am also attaching the raw voltage noise measurement (input terminated in 50ohms, Attachment #2). Note that POX11 spectrum has now been re-measured with analog de-whitening engaged on all 3 optics such that the DAC noise contribution should be negligible compared to coil driver noise in this configuration. The rows in Attachment #2 correspond to 800 Hz span (top) and full span (bottom) on the FFT analyzer.

Details:

The main difference between this measurement, and the one I did middle of last year (which agreed with the expectation from LISO modeling quite well) is that this measurement was done in-situ inside the eurocrate box while last year, I did everything on the electronics benches. So I claim that the whole mess of harmonics seen in the raw measurements are because of some electronics pickup near 1X6. But even disregarding the peaky features, the floor of ~30nV/rtHz is ~6x than what one would expect from LISO modeling (~5nV/rtHz). I confirmed by looking that the series resistance for all 3 MC optics is 430ohms. I also did the measurement with the nominal bias voltages applied to the four channels (these come in via the slow ADCs). But these paths are low-passed by an 8th order low pass with corner @ 1Hz, so at 100 Hz, even 1uV/rtHz should be totally insignificant. I suppose I could measure (with EPICS sine waves) this low-pass filtering, but it's hard to imagine this being the problem. At the very least, I think we should get rid of the x3 gain on the MC2 coil driver de-whitening board (and also on MC1 and MC3 if they also have the x3 factor).

since we're just going from the short rack (not the tall rack) to the seismometer, can't we use a cable shorter than 45' ?

the panel should be completely replaced like I described. We don't want to try to squeeze it in artificially and torque the wires. It just needs to be separated from the slab by a few more cm.

Summary:

I think the dominant cause for the fact that we were seeing huge swing in the power coupled into the fiber was that the beam being sent in was in fact not linearly polarized, but elliptically polarized. I've rectified this with the help of a PBS. Fiber has been plugged into my polarization monitoring setup. Let's monitor for some long stretch and see if the situation has improved.

Details:

• The new fiber mount I ordered, K6XS, arrived today. I like it - it has little keys with which all DoFs can be locked. Moreover, it is compatible with the fixed collimators which IMO is the easiest way to achieve good mode-matching into the fiber. It is basically a plug-and-play replacement for the mounts we were using. Anyways, we can evaluate the performance over the coming days.
• I installed it on the PSL table (started work ~10pm, HEPA turned up to maximum, PSL shutter closed).
• But even with the new rotational DoF locking feature, I saw that slight disturbances in the fiber caused wild fluctuations in my polarization monitoring setup PD outputs. This was a useful tool through the night of checking the polarization content in the two special axes - Aidan had suggested using a heat gun but shaking the fiber a bit works well too I think.
• The PM980 fiber has an alignment key that is aligned with the slow axis of the fiber - so it is a useful alignment reference. But even by perturbing the roational alignment about the vertical by +/-15 degrees, I saw no improvement in this behavior. So I began to question my assumption that the input beam itself had clean polarization content.
• Since my pickoff beam has gone through a QWP and two PBSs, I had assumed that the beam was linearly polarized.
• But by putting a PBS just upstream of the input fiber coupler, I could see a beam at the S-port with an IR card (while I expected the beam to be P-polarized).
• OK - so I decided to clean up the input polarization by leaving this PBS installed. With this modification to the setup, I found that me shaking the fiber around on the PSL table didn't affect the output polarization content nearly as dramatically as before!!
• The state I am leaving it in tonight is such that there is ~100x the power in the P-polarization output monitor as the S-polarization (PER ~ 20dB). I didn't try and optimize this too much more for now, I want to observe some long term trend to see if the wild power fluctuations have been mitigated.
• The output coupler is mounted on the inferior K6X mount, and so there is the possibility that some drift will be attributable to rotation of the output coupler in it's mount. Thermally driven length changes / time varying stresses in the fiber may also lead to some residual power fluctuations. But I don't expect this to be anywhere near the ~25% I reported in the previous elog.
• The rejected beam from the PBS was measured to be ~300 uW. I haven't dumped this properly, to be done tomorrow.
• HEPA turned back down to 30%, PSL enclosure closed up, PSL shutter re-opened ~0030am.
• Note that the EX and EY fiber coupled beams are also likely subject to the same problem. We have to double check. I think it's better to have a PBS in front of the input fiber coupler as this also gives us control over the amount of light coupled into the fiber.

Power budget:

If we lay the cable along the floor then it should be around 6' to the current setup and about 20' to the actual seismometer.

Edit: 16 gauge wire should be good.

Aidan called saying nodus was down at ~345pm. I was able to access it at ~330pm. I couldn't ssh in from my machine or the control room ones. So I went to 1X7 and plugged in a monitor to nodus. It was totally unresponsive. Since the machine wasn't responding to ping either, I decided to hard-reboot it. Machine seemed to come back up smoothly. I had trouble getting the elog started - it wasn't clear to me that the web ports were closed by default, so even though the startELOGD.sh script was running fine, the 8080 port wasn't open to the outside world. Anyways, once I figured this out, I was able to start the elog. DokuWiki also seems to be up and running now... 

ETMX table layout uploaded with beam paths to the wiki.   

Steve secured the GPS time server in the rack above the AA board and removed the wooden block that it was resting on. The new rack is shown in attachment 1.

I then opened the AA board to see why the channels aren't working. Even though the board was powered and outputting 4.6 V, none of the chips were getting power. I must have shorted something while trying to diagnose this and the board is no longer powered either.

The schematic is given in D990147. The D68L8EX filter is bypassed on all the channels, as can be seen in attachment 3, so the board isn't really doing anything. Rana suggested that we could just bypass the whole circuit by wiring the IN channels directly to the OUT channels going to the ADC. I'll try that next for a single channel.

I found megatron in a similar state to that which nodus was in yesterday. Clued by the fact that MCautolocker wasn't executing the mc scripts (as was evident from looking at the wall StripTool trace), I tried ssh-ing into megatron, but was unable to (despite it being responsive to ping requests). So I went into the VEA and plugged in a monitor to megatron - saw nothing on it. With no soft reboot options available, I power cycled the machine via the front panel button. It came back up smoothly. I manually restarted the autolocker, FSSslow and EX thermal control processes (the former two with initctl, while the latter runs in a tmux session). Everything seems alright for now. Not sure how long megatron has been dead for.

Seems like there is still a bit of variation in the power in the two polarizations, though it is much smaller now, at the ~5% level (see Attachment #1). Since the pattern is repeating itself over the day timescale, I think this effect is not because of rotation of the output coupler in the mount, but is in fact a temperature driven waveplate effect because of imperfect alignment at the input coupler (which itself is locked down). I'm going to rotate the input coupler by 5 degrees (old = 110 degrees, new=115degrees) to see if the situation improves...

gautam Apr 24 2pm: Steve suggested confirming the correlation by hooking up the PSL table temperature sensor. This used to be logged but since the c1psl ADC card failure, has not been recorded. Assuming the sensor and preamp still work fine, we can use the PSL diagnostic Acromag (whose channels I have hijacked to monitor polarization stability already) to at least temporarily monitor the temperature inside the PSL enclosure. I am in need of a DB25 breakout board for this purpose which I am missing right now, as soon as I obtain one, I'll hook this up...

This shows a step response of the EX seis temp control with K_I = -1 and K_P = -0.1. The time constants for both heatup and cooldown are ~2 hours.

I'm not so sure if the PID code itself makes sense though:

  # The basic finite-difference PID approximation
  e[0] = (p-s)
  print("Error signal = {}" .format(e[0])) 

  # These are the main equations of the PID Process
  u[0] = u[1]
  u[0] = u[0] + Kp * (e[0] - e[1])
  u[0] = u[0] + Ki * (e[0])
  u[0] = u[0] + Kd * (e[0] - 2*e[1] + e[2])
 

Seems like the Proportional term uses the difference (or derivative) of the error signal. This makes it more likely to pick up some high frequency noise; maybe we should low pass this signal somewhat, or at least implement a running average.

Since we still don't have an out of loop sensor or a PSL room temperature monitor or a particle counter in the frames, I've disabled the PID loop to see how much the can temperature varies with no feedback. Please leave it this way for a few days.

I've attached the final sketch for the panel on the granite block.

I'm copying and pasting Nikhil's email here as he was unable to login to the elog (but should now be able to in order to reply to any comments, and add more details about this test, motivation, methodology etc).

The pdf file is uploaded into the wiki.

In the ongoing attempt to recover the seismometer BLRMS, I removed the AA board from the rack and modified the BS seismometer Z channel. The BS_Z BLRMs seem to be recovered after this modification.

I removed the three resistors from the output of the circuit and wired the input and from the seismometer directly to the input to the ADC. The modified schematic is shown in attachment 1. Attachments 2 and 3 show the top and bottom of the modified board. The board is doing nothing now other than serving as a connector for this channel.

I put the board back in the rack and injected a 2 Vpp signal into the BS_Z channel and saw +/- 1600 cts in C1PEM-SEIS_BS_Z. I then plugged the seismometer back into the board and took the spectrum shown in attachment 4. This shows the working Z channel giving a reasonable seismic spectrum. Note that X and Y are not modified yet.

If there are no objections, I will modify all the other channels on the board in the same way tomorrow.

I wired all 32 channels going to the AA board directly to the ADC as described in the previous log. However, instead of using the old AA board and bypassing the whole circuit, I just used a breakout board as is shown in the first attachment. I put the board back in the rack and reconnected all of the cables.

The seismic BLRMs appear to be working again. A PSD of the BS seismometers is shown in attachment 2. Tomorrow I'll look at how much the ADC alone is suppressing the common mode 60 Hz noise on each of the channels.

Steve: 5 of ADC DAC In Line Test Boards [ D060124 ] ordered. They should be here within 10 days.

Increased the Integral gain (from -1 to -4) on the EX temperature controller. This didn't work a few weeks ago, but now with the added P gain, it seems stable. Daily temperature swings are now ~3x smaller.

Notes for Kira on what we need to do tomorrow (Friday):

1. add the MEDM screen EPICS values to the DAQ so that we can plot those trends DONE
2. add the out-of-loop sensor to the EX can
3. reboot the AUX-EX so we can pick up the new channels and the fixed spelling of the old channels DONE
4. Re-install EX seismometer and hook up seismometer channels to PEM DAQ so we can start testing its performance.

For those who are flabbergasted by the way I calibrated the TEMP_MON channel from volts to deg C, here's how:

XMgrace->Data->Transformations->Geometric Transforms...

use the 'scale' and 'translate' fields to change the slope and offset for calibration in the obvious ways

Yesterday I wired the outputs from the seismometers directly to the ADC input bypassing the old AA board circuit as is described in this elog. The old circuit converted the single-ended output from the seismometers to a differential signal. Today I looked at whether 60 Hz noise is worse going directly into the ADC due to the loss of the common mode rejection previously provided by the conversion to differential signals.

I split the output from the BS Z seismometer to the new board and to an SR785. On the SR785 I measured the difference between the inner and outer conductors of the seismometer output, i.e. A-B with A the center conductor and B the outer conductor, with grounded input. At the same time I took a DTT spectrum of C1:PEM-SEIS_BS_Z_IN1. Both spectra were taken with 1 Hz bandwidth and 25 averages. The setup is shown in attachment 1.

The spectra are shown in attachment 2. The DTT spectrum was converted from counts to volts by multiplying by 2 * 10 V/32768 cts where the extra factor of 2 is from converting from single-ended to differential input. If there was common 60 Hz noise that the ADC was picking up we would expect to see less noise at 60 Hz in the SR785 spectrum measured directly at the output from the seismometer since that was a differential measurement. Since both spectra have the same 60 Hz noise, this noise is differential.

After fixing the spelling of the EX temperature readback, I also added all of the MEDM sliders to the C0EDCU.ini file (making sure to add an even number of channels). Restarted FB (after installing telnet on rossa):

telnet fb 8083

> shutdown

preferred method of posting DataViewer images: print as a SVG image (since its vectorized). Then from the command line do:

inkscape steven.svg --export-pdf=vass.pdf

Steve was calibrating the load cells at the EY table with the crane - we didn't get through the full procedure today, so the area near the EY table is kind of obstructed. The 100kg donut is resting on the floor on the North side of the EY table and is still connected to the crane. There are stopper plates underneath the donut, and it is still connected to the crane. Steve has placed cones around the area too. The crane has been turned off.

for whatever reason, I am unable to get minute or second trends from nodus for any channels (IMC, PEM, etc) since the reboot. has there been some more recent FB failure or is this still a bug since last years FB catastrophe?

Motivation:

We'd like to know how much actuation is required on the ETMs to lock the DARM degree of freedom. The "disturbance" we are trying to cancel is the seismic driven length fluctuation of the arm cavity. In order to try and estimate what the actuation required will be, we can use data from POX/POY locks. I'd collected some data on Friday which I looked at today. Here are the results.

Method:

• I collected the error and control signals for both arm cavities while they were locked to the PSL.
• Knowing the POX/POY sensing response and the actuator transfer functions, we can back out the free running displacements of the two arm cavities.
  • I used numbers from the cal filters which may not be accurate (although POX sensing response which was recently measured).
  • But the spectra computed using this method seem reasonable, and the X and Y arm asds line up around 1 Hz (albeit on a log scale).
  • In this context,  is really a proxy for  and similarly for L_Y so I think the algebra works out correctly.
  • I didn't include any of the violin mode/AA/AI filters in this calculation.
• Having calculated the arm cavity displacements, I computed "DARM" as L_y- L_x and then plotted its asd.
• For good measure, I also added the quadrature sum of 4 optics' displacement noise as per the 40m GWINC model - there seems to be a pretty large discrepancy, not sure why.

If this approach looks legit, I will compute the control signal that is required to stabilize this level of disturbance using the DARM control loop, and see what is the maximum permissible series resistance we can use in order to realize this stabilization. We can then compare various scenarios like different whitening schemes, with/without Barry puck etc, and look at coil driver noise levels for each of them. 

I've attached a sketch of how the panel will be mounted. We should make a small rectangular box that would raise the panel from the block by 1 cm or so to allow the cables to fit into the hole in the block without getting bent. It also has to be airtight so maybe having a thin layer of rubber between the mount and block would be good.

I was trying to plot trends (min, 10 min, and hour) in DataViewer and got the following error message

Connecting.... done
 mjd = 58235
leapsecs_read()
  Opening leapsecs.dat
  Open of leapsecs.dat failed
leapsecs_read() returning 0
frameMemRead - gpstimest = 1208844718
 

thoough the plots showed up fine after. Do we need to fix something with the leapsecs.dat file?

I added an out of loop sensor to the can by placing the lab temperature sensor inside the can. I'm not sure which channel is logging this temperature though. I also noticed that the StripTool still had the old misspelled name for the temperature readout so I fixed that as well.

I've attached a picture of the setup.

[Kira, Johannes]

I connected up the channels for the ADC Acromag a while back and we were planning to install it today so that we could set up a new channel for the out of loop sensor. Unfortunately, the Acromag seems to be broken. We connected up a precision 10V voltage to one of the channels, but the Acromag read out ~7V and it kept fluctuating. Even after calibration, we still got the same result. When enabling the legacy support, we got ~11V. But when we measured the voltage at the screw terminals with a multimeter and it showed 10V, so the issue is not with the wiring. All of the channels have this same issue. We will be ordering more Acromags soon, so hopefully we'll be able to set up the channel soon. I've attached a picture of the Acromag along with the front panel with the channels labeled

Here is an updated plot - the main difference is that I have added a trace that is the frequency domain wiener filter subtraction of the coherent power between the L_X and L_Y time series. I tried reproducing the calculation with the time domain wiener filter subtraction as well, using half of the time series (i.e. 5 mins) to train the wiener filter (with L_X as target and L_Y as witness), but I don't get any subtraction above 5 Hz on the half of the data that is a test data set. Probably I am not doing the pre-filtering correctly - I downsampled the signal to 1 kHz, weighted it by low passing the signal above 40 Hz and trained the Wiener filter on the resulting time series. But this frequency domain Wiener filter subtraction should be at least a lower bound on DARM - indeed, it is slightly lower everywhere than simply taking the time domain subtraction of the two data streams.

To do:

• Re-measure calibration numbers used.
• Redo calculation once the numbers have been verified.

Putting a slightly cleaned up version of this plot in now - I'm only including the coherence-inferred DARM estimate now instead of the straight up time domain subtraction. So this is likely to be an underestimate. At low (<10 Hz) frequencies, the time domain computation lines up fairly well, but I suspect that I am getting huge amounts of spectral leakage (see Attachment #2) in the way I compute the spectrum using scipy's filtering routine (once the Wiener filter has been computed). Note that Attachment #2, I didn't break up the data into a training/testing set as in this case, we just care about the one-off offline performance in order to get an estimate of DARM.

The python version of the wiener filter generating code only supports [b,a] output of the digital filter, an sos filter might give better results. Need to figure out the least painful way of implementing the low-noise digital filtering in python...

In light of the discussion at today's meeting, Guantanamo and I looked at how the series resistance for the test mass coil drivers limits the amount of squeezing we could detect.

The parameters used for the following calculations are:

• 4.5 kΩ series resistance for the ETM's (this was 10 kΩ in the previous calculations, so these numbers are a bit worse); 15 kΩ for the ITM's
• 100 ppm transmissivity on the folding mirrors giving a PRC gain of 40
• PD quantum efficiency of 0.88

Since we need to operate very close to signal recycling, instead of the current signal extraction setup, we will need to change the macroscopic length of the SRC. This will change the mode matching requirements such that the current SRM does not have the correct radius of curvature. One solution is to use the spare PRM which has the correct radius of curvature but a transmissivity of 0.05 instead of 0.1. So using this spare PRM for the SRM and changing the length of the SRC to be the same as the PRC we can get

• 0.63 dBvac of squeezing at 205 Hz for 1 W incident on the back of PRM
• 1.12 dBvac of squeezing at 255 Hz for 5 W incident on the back of PRM

This lower transmissivity for the SRM also reduces the achievable squeezing from the current transmissivity of 0.1. For an SRM with a transmissivity of 0.15 (which is roughly the optimal) we can get

• 1 dBvac of squeezing at 205 Hz for 1 W incident on the back of PRM
• 1.7 dBvac of squeezing at 255 Hz for 5 W incident on the back of PRM

The minimum achievable squeezing moves up from around 205 Hz at 1 W to 255 Hz at 5 W because the extra power increases the radiation pressure at lower frequencies.

Reboot for c1susaux and c1iscaux today. ITMX precautions were followed. Reboots went smoothly.

IMC is shuttered while Jon does PLL characterization...

Now relocked.

[SV,KA,RXA,GV]

The stack weight measurement is going on at EX. ETMX watchdog is shutdown. Area is off limits over the weekend until the test is finished.

Not related to this work, but the dog clamps used on the EX table have to be re-positioned such that the clamping force is better distributed. The 2" beam splitter mount used to pick off a portion of the EX NPRO beam to the fiber has to be rotated. Also, there was a M6.9 EQ in Hawaii while we were doing this work it seems..

Caution: Because of this work and my negligence, the RF output of the main Marconi for the IFO modulation is probably off. The amplifier (freq gen. box) was turned on. Therefore, we need to turn the Marconi on for the IFO locking.

I worked on my EOM m easurement using the beat setup. As there was the aux injection electronics, I performed my measurement having tried not to disturb the aux setup. The aux Marconi, the splitted PD output, and an open channel of the oscilloscope were used for my purpose. I have brought the RF spectrum analyzer from the control room. I think I have restored all the electronics back as before. I have re-aligned the beat setup after the EOM removed. Note that the aux NPRO, which had been on, was turned off to save the remaining life of the laser diode.

The 3IFO EOM was formerly tuned as the H2 EOM, so the resonant frequencies are different from the nominal aLIGO ones.

PORT1: 8.628MHz / 101 +/- 6 mrad_pk/V_pk
PORT2: 24.082MHz / 41.2 +/- 0.7 mrad_pk/V_pk
PORT3: 43.332MHz / 62.2 +/- 4 mrad_pk/V_pk

9MHz modulation is about x2.4 better than the one installed at LHO.
24MHz modulation is about x14 better. (This is OK as the new 24MHz is not configured to be resonant.)
45MHz modulation is about x1.4 better.
 

As part of investigation into this issue, Jonathan Hanks pointed out that the "minute trends" being recorded by our system were actually only being recorded every 120 seconds (a.k.a. 2 minutes). He had fixed the appropriate line in the parameter file, but had not restarted the FW processes. I had restarted it on Friday. (but failed to elog it !) 

To check if this made any difference, I pulled 1 hour of "minute trend" data for the PSL table temperature channel from ~1 hour ago, and compared the number of datapoints against a 1 hour minute trend time series from 2 May. I've put the display with # of datapoints (for an identical length of time) from before [left] and after [right] the restart next to the plots in Attachment #1. Seems like we are getting minute trends written every 60 seconds now, as it should be .

The unavailability of trends from nodus is a separate issue for which JH has suggested another fix, to be elogged separately.

[steve,gautam]

We tried to estimate what the load cell measurement should yield. Here is the weight breakdown (fudge factor for Al table is to try and account for tapped holes):

• Steve pointed out that there is some material removed from the stack legs for stability (hollows into which the viton springs fit). These countersinks have dimensions of diameter=2", height=1.75". So if we assume each leg has 10% less mass, the total weight becomes ~4600lbs.
• I think we will need to use one more load cell (i.e. total 4) for this measurement (we have more load cells, just need to setup one more controller).
• Steve is looking into acquiring some low profile jacks to deal with the fact that we only have limited travel range on the overall stack height because of the bellows.
• A useful document, from which we pulled some numbers (which also look reasonable using estimated dimensions and density calculations): P952005

Summary:

Using the Wiener Filter estimate of the DARM disturbance we will have to cancel, I computed how the control signal would look like for a few scenarios. Our DACs are 16-bit, +/-10V (i.e. +/-32,768cts-pk, or ~23,000cts RMS). We need to consider the shape of the de-whitening filter to conclude whether it is feasible to increase the series resistance by x10 or not.

Some details:

Note that in this first computation, I have not considered

• Actuation range required by other loops (e.g. local damping, Oplev etc).
• At some point, I need to add the 2P/c radiation pressure disturbance as well.
• The control signal is calculated assuming we are actuating equally on both ETMs (but with opposite phase).
• RMS computation is done from 30 Hz downwards, as above 30 Hz, I think the estimate from the previous elog is not true seismic displacement. 
• De-whitening filters (or digital whitening), which will be required to suppress DAC noise at 100Hz.
• DARM loop shape, specifically low-pass to avoid sensing noise injection. In this calculation, I just used the pendulum transfer function.

While doing this calculation, I have accounted for the fact that right now, the analog de-whitening filters in the ETM drive chain have a x3 gain which we will remove. Actually this is an assumption, I have not yet measured a transfer function, maybe I'll do one channel at EY to confirm. Also, the actuator gains themselves need to be confirmed.

As I was looking at the coil driver schematic more closely, I realized that there are actually two separate series resistances, one for the fast controls path, and another for the DC bias voltage from the slow ADCs. So I think we have been underestimating the Johnson noise of the coil drivers by sqrt(2). I've also attached screenshots of the IFOalign and MCalign screens. The two  ITMs and ETMX have pitch DC bias values that are compatible with a x10 increase of the series resistance. But even so, we will have ~3pA/rtHz per coil from the two resistances.

gautam 8pm May8: Seems like I had confirmed the x3 gain in the EX de-whitening board when Johannes and I were investigating the AI board offset.

example of plots illustrating DAC range / saturation

There was an earthquake, all watchdogs were tripped, ITMX was stuck, and c1psl was dead so MCautolocker was stuck.

Watchdogs were reset (except ETMX which remains shutdown until we finish with the stack weight measurement), ITMX was unstuck using the usual jiggling technique, and the c1psl crate was keyed.

There is no beam going into the IFO at the moment. There was definitely a spot on the AS camera after I restored the suspensions yesterday, as you can see from the ASDC level in Attachment #1. But at around 2pm Pacific yesterday, the ASDC level has gone to 0. I suspect the TTs. There is no beam on the REFL camera either when PRM is aligned, and PRM's DC alignment is good as judged by Oplev.

Normally, I am able to recover the beam by scanning the TTs around with some low frequency sine waves, but not today. We don't have any readback (Oplev/OSEM) of the TT alignment, and the DC bias values havent jumped abnormally around the time this happened, judging by the OUT16 monitor points (see Attachment #2). The IMC was also locked at the time when this abrupt drop in ASDC level happened. Unfortunately, we don't have a camera on the Faraday so I don't know where the misalignment is happening, but the beam is certainly not making it to the BS. All the SOS optics (e.g. BS, ITMX and ITMY) are well aligned as judged by Oplev.

Being debugged now...

As suspected - the problem was with the TTs. I tested the TT signal chain by driving a low frequency sine wave using AWG and looking at the signal on an o'scope. But I saw nothing, neither at the AI board monitor point, nor at the actual coil driver mon point. I decided to look at the IOP testpoints for the DAC channels, to see if the signals were going through okay on the digital side. But the IOP channels were flatlined, as viewed on dataviewer (see Attachment #1). This despite the fact that the DAC output monitor screen in the model itself was showing some sensible numbers, again see Attachment #1.

Looking at the CDS overview screen, there were no red flags. But there was a red indicator sneakily hidden away in the IOP model's CDS status screen, the "DAC" field in the state word is red. As Attachment #2 shows, a change in the state word is correlated with the time ASDC went to 0.

Note that there are also no errors on the c1lsc frontend itself, judging by dmesg. I want to do a model restart, but (i) this will likely require reboots of all vertex FEs and (ii) I want to know if any CDS experts want to sniff for clues to what's going on before a model restart wipes out some secret logfiles. I'm a little confused that the rtcds isn't throwing up any errors and causing models to crash if the values are not being written to the registers of the DAC. It may also be that the DAC card itself is dead . To re-iterate, all the EPICS readbacks were suggesting that I am injecting a signal right up to the IOP.

Quoting from the runtime diagnostics note: