[rika, aaron]

We are at it again. Rika is setting up the TF measurement, I'm looking into scripting the WFS sensing matrix measurement we made earlier in the week so we can return to it next week.

When we mesuring TF of SEG4, the beam leaking to SEG1 about 1%.

We finished mesurement SEG2-4 and get the figure by running PDH_calibrate.ipynb .

edit: We observed during segment 2 measurements that blocking the beam reduced the DC level of segment 1 by less than 1%, but still clearly observable. As you can see in the plots, something is suspicious about the normalization of these TFs. We took segment 1 data a few days before the other segments, so perhaps we weren't getting the full beam on the reference PD during the later measurements? When I make this measurement for WFS1, I will try to fix some of these problems by choosing different telescoping optics, and I will consider whether removing the QPD heads from their table will improve the measurement.

I'm scripting the WFS sensing matrix measurements. I haven't really scripted DTT before, so I'm trying to find documentation or existing scripts. I came across this elog where Gautam measured a sensing matrix during DRMI lock, and he pointed me to some .xml files used for these measurments.

not need to use DTT. I'm attaching some half-finished notebooks that give the gist.

1. Download the data with NDS2
2. Downsample the data for ease of use.
3. save the data as hdf5 for easy loading later.
4. demodulate the data at the specified frequencies.

That's it! Now you have the complex, single frequency TFs. Next you invert the matrix.

[rika, aaron]

We aligned optics of WFS as it was. Now auto-locker is working to lock MC.

But it still doesn't lock. We notice that the c1lsc machine doesn't work. So we run rebootCILSC.sh.

Now we reset the hardware!

17:11

After reset, auto locking didn't work well. Gautum and Aaron reboot slow c1ioo. Then it works, and Gautam returned the MC to a good alignment.

We found the beam is not in the center of the QPD, we (turned off the MC autolocker and MC loop, then) realigned to make beam to get in to the QPD center. Afterwards we start auto locking.

With the WFS on, the maximum MC transmission we observe is 14,700 counts; after the transmission level stabilizes (MC_TRANS pit and yaw brought to 0), the MC transmission is only 14,200 counts. Perhaps the MC_TRANS QPD offsets need adjustment. We relieve the WFS servo of its DC offsets. This is the configuration we'll use for WFS loop measurements this week.

I wanted to make a zero model of this circuit to get a handle on the results. I couldn't import zero on pianosa, and I tried pip installing zero, but was denied due to not finding version 3.0.3 of matplotlib. I finally got it to install using

 Oddly, even though I can now import zero when I open a python3 session from the command line, when I open a jupyter notebook and switch to a python3 kernel, the zero module is still unavailable. I think I recall that conda manages the jupyter environment -- is pip managing an entirely separate environment (annoying)?

edit: Yeah, it was something like that. I reminded myself how this works with this article.

Let's not worry about C1LSC until the c1iscaux upgrade is done.

I'm using the notebooks from rana as a starting point, and making a script to measure and fill the WFS sensing matrix. It lives at /users/aaron/WFS/scripts/WFSsensingMatrix.ipynb for now. Here's what it does; what's been tested is in green, untested is goldenrod, uncoded is fire brick.

1. Sets up an nds connection, listening to the WFS channels and the MC#_PIT/YAW IN1 channels.
2. Loops over the excitation channels. For now, I'm assuming the user is injecting excitations one at a time in awggui; in principle, we could excite the various MC angular dof at several frequencies and take a single measurement, or use the natural frequencies of the suspensions.
   1. For each excitation, grab the data
   2. Filter the data. I'm using a 30 Hz to 40 Hz cheby filter
   3. Take an FFT, hold on to that for future reference
   4. Generate an LO at the excitation frequency, and demodulate the signals. Strong low pass.
   5. The single-frequency transfer function is now [WFS channel] / [excited MC channel]. Each iteration of this loop generates a column of the sensing matrix.
3. Invert the sensing matrix
4. Populate in the appropriate channels of the WFS_OUTMATRIX

Grabbing data with nds

To run these on pianosa, I ran (inside the jupyter notebook)

I'm getting an error when starting the nds2 connection

conn = nds2.connection('192.168.113.201', 31200)
Failed to establish a connection[INFO: Request SASL authentication protocol]+

 I didn't find anything on the elog about this error, but I'm looking at the nds user manual. The problem was, I didn't have a valid Kerberos ticket; I opened one on Pianosa with my albert.einstein (note all caps ligo.org).

 I'm now able to run the scripts Rana mentions, but I haven't been able to grab the channels I want (eg C1:SUS-MC1_ASCPIT_IN1_OUT); it says the channel isn't found. When I check how many of the Caltech channels are available (conn.count_channels('C1*')), there are none. I was connecting to nds.ligo.caltech.edu, but this must be the wrong server (it has all the channels for the sites). fb and fb1 (and the IP they point to, 192.168.113.201) cannot be connected to, giving the error 'Error occurred trying to write to socket.'

I recall that in the cryo lab, we need to use port 8088 to get data from cymac1, and indeed substituting 31200 -> 8088 lets me access the C1 channels (I can count the channels), but no matter what time I request, nds tells me there is no data available (gap). Gautam came by and diagnosed that the gaps I'm seeing in the frames' data are real, fb is down (see elog).

WFS Sensing Matrix Script

Saving extra channels

Continuing, I'm going to modify the script to grab live data. I'm using the iterate and next methods. I noticed that the MC2_TRANS pit/yaw channels are not saved to frames, even though WFS1/2 pit/yaw are. Since I expect I'll want to lookback at these channels, I followed the instructions for adding a daq channel, uncommenting the following line in /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/chans/daq/C1IOO.ini:

I made a backup of the old version of this .ini file, which can be found in /users/aaron/backups/190917_C1IOO.ini. I did not remake the model, as I couldn't find the c1ioo model in /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/userapps/trunk or from the matlab command prompt. I restarted the fb via telnet, but didn't restart the model or check the svn (got an error?). The _DQ channels are now reachable on dataviewer, so things seem to be working.

awgpy

I also tried importing cdsutils, so I can control awg in the same script that we read out the sensing matrix, but I'm getting the python3 error when I import cdsutils:

I tried pip upgrading cdsutils, but it's already up-to-date. I get the above error even if I switch to a python 2 kernel; cdsutils is installed in the python2.7 directory, so I don't know why pip is finding it when I'm running a python 3 kernel. I can move on from this for now, but it would be useful to be able to script the excitation along with the measurement.

Changes to the user environment

jupyter on donatella

Tangentially related, Rika wanted to be running some jupyter notebooks while working on donatella. I ran, on donatella:

 hm, that didn't work. Also jupyter is installed when you install conda, so I'm not sure how there is a version of conda but not of jupyter. I also see that pip and pip3 are not recognized commands on donatella.

scipy on pianosa

I noticed that some of the functions in the scipy signal processing toolbox were out of date on pianosa. The cheby and welch filters now accept additional kwargs (for eg, before you needed to give IIR filter methods a cutoff frequency normalized to the Nyquist rate, but now you can give it the frequencies and sampling rate separately).

I want to update this package, but I hesitate to break everyone's existing scripts.

[aaron, rika]

Once stop the auto-locker and realigned to make beam to get into QPD again.

After we lock MC, we took TFs from suspension MC1/2/3 PIT/YAW to WFS1/2 PIT/YAW. 

----- 

Diagnotics test tools

range: 7 Hz to 50 Hz

 avarage=61

Column 0: WFS2_PIT   1: WFS2_YAW   2:WFS1_PIT   3: WFS1_YAW   4: TRANCE_PIT   5:TRANCE_YAW 

-----

I'm wondering weather the MC1data I saved is correct, becouse I found the channel was changed when I exported MC2 data. So I took MC1 data again.

We got all data for TFs already.  Each data is devided to real part and imaginary part. Then we are arranging the datas to obtain TFs. 

TF of MC2 is attachiment 1. So tomorrow, I make other TF.

[aaron, rika]

Gettng TFs

In the data we got yesterday, we can see some filter's effect. 

But it is not good coherence above 10Hz, so we mesured again. And this time we save the data as xml file.

And also we chaned the frequency regions broader to watch corner frequency of suspension.

-----

 Diagnotics test tools

 range: 0.1 Hz to 100 Hz

 points: 120 

 Amplitude: 1000

----

but at low frequency, the mode maching cavity was unloked cause of too much shaking.

So, we saw single frequency TF, and searched the good amplitude.

First, I tried to get TF @0.1~1 Hz .

-----

0.1 to 1 Hz

points: 61 (I think it's too much becous it takes about an hour)

amplitude: 5

-----

The TFs and coherence of MC1/PIT to each QPD is below. [above window: coherence, below: TF]

During the mesurement, something happened @0.2-0.3Hz so I stopped it.

We found the coherence of WFS1P and WFS2Y is not good, but others are good.

we guess that it could come from alignment which made Q chainging to small.

Finaly, I also got the  .xml data of MC1P 1 Hz to 10 Hz. In this time,

-----

1 to 10 Hz

points: 41 

amplitude: 90

-----

Making matrics

Now we took single frequency 6 TFs (MC1/2/3 PIT/YAW) @7Hz (Because this frequency has good coherence in all channel).

Aaron wrote the script using dtt to making matrics. 

Summary:

The custom ribbon cables piping the coil driver board outputs to the eLIGO (?) TTs (a.k.a. TT1 and TT2) are damaged. They need to be re-made. I can't find any pin-mapping for them.

Details:

While waiting for the LSC photodiode whitening switching cross-connect work to be done, I thought I'd re-align the IFO a bit. However, I was unable to find any beam making it to the REFL/AS ports despite some TT steering. I remembered that Chub had undone the TT connections at 1Y2 as well, and thought I'd check the cabling to make sure all was in order. On going to the rack, however, I found that these connections were damaged at the coil-driver end (see Attachment #1), presumably during the cable extraction. These need to be re-made...😔 

While debugging this problem, c1lsc models crashed. I ran the reboot script this morning to bring the models back. There was a 0x4000 error on the DC indicators for the c1lsc models (mx_stream error which couldn't be fixed by restarting the mx service) the first time I ran the script so I did it again, now the indicator lights are in their nominal state.

False alarm - the mistake was mine. Looking at the schematic diagram, the AI/Dewhite board, D000316, accepts the inputs from the DAC on the P2 connector. While restoring the connections at 1Y2, I had plugged the outputs of the DAC interface board into the P1 connectors of the AI boards. Having rectified this problem, I am now able to move the beam on the AS camera in both PIT and YAW using TT1 or TT2. So to zero-th order, this subsystem appears to work. A more in-depth analysis of the angular stability of the TTs can only be done once we re-align the arms and lock some cavities.

I wanted to measure the RF transimpedance of the WFS heads, as outlined above.

Summary: Measurement is not done.

Details:

• closed the PSL shutter
• taped over the WFS 2 opening with frosted scotch tape
• illuminated the QPD with an incandescent flashlight.
  • All of the D batteries were close to dead, so it seemed dimmer than usual
• Observed the WFS2 segment 1 RF spectrum on the Agilent, but saw no difference between the spectrum with and without the flashlight. Must need a brighter light, and possibly also better alignment.
• Needed to skype someone and pass off the IFO to gautam, so I untaped the QPD, returned the appropriate LEMO connector, and opened the PSL shutter.

I set up the spectrum analyzer to make the WFS head RF transfer function measurement (V/W) on WFS1. I placed the Jenne laser on the AP table, along with the reference PD power supply, laptop, and laser power supply. The Agilent output AM modulates the laser; the reference PD is again NewFocus 1611, with its AC output sent to Agilent's R channel and DC output sent to an oscilloscope;

I closed the PSL shutter while checking for a location to place the breadboard, and opened it while writing this. Headed back to Cryo to pick up the large incandescent bulb we'd borrowed over the summer.

See trend. This is NOT symptomatic of some frozen slow machine - if I disable the WFS servo inputs, the lock holds just fine.

Turns out that the beam was almost completely missing the WFS2 QPD. WTF 😤. I re-aligned the beam using the steering mirror immediately before the WFS2 QPD, and re-set the dark offsets for good measure. Now the IMC remains stably locked. 

Please - after you work on the interferometer, return it to the state it was in. Locking is hard enough without me having to hunt down randomly misaligned/blocked beams or unplugged cables.

I took this opportunity to do some WFS offset updates.

• First I let the WFS servo settle to some operating point, and then offloaded the DC offsets to the IMC suspensions.
• Then I disabled the WFS servo.
• I hand-tweaked MC1 and MC3 PIT/YAW (while leaving MC2 untouched) to minimize IMC REFL (a more sensitive indicator of the optimal cavity alignment than the transmission).
• Once I felt the IMC REFL was minimized (~1-2% improvement), I set the RF offsets for the WFS while the IMC remained locked. I chose this way of setting the RF offsets as opposed to unlocking the cavity and having the high-power TEM00 mode incident on the WFS QPDs.
• Overnight, I'm going to run the MC2 spot position scanning code (in a tmux session on pianosa, started ~945pm) to see if we can find a place where the transmission is higher, looking at Kruthi's code now to see it makes sense...
• The convergence time of the MC2 spot position loop is pretty slow, so the scan is expected to take a while... Should be done by tomorrow morning though, and I expect no work with the IFO tonight.
• Does this loop have to be so slow? Why can't the gain be higher?

Summary:

There is ~ 7% variation in the power seen by the MC2 trans QPD, depending on the WFS offsets applied to the MC2 PIT/YAW loops. Some more interpretation is required however, before attributing this to spot-position-dependent loss variation inside the IMC cavity.

Analysis:

Attachment #1: This shows a scatter plot of the MC2 transmission and IMC REFL average values after the WFS loops have converged to the set offset positions. The size of the points are proportional to the normalized variance of the quantity. The purpose of this plot is to show that there is significant variation of the transmission, much more than the variance of an individual datapoint during the course of the averaging (again, the size of the circles is only meant to be indicative, the actual variance in counts is much smaller and wouldn't be visible on this plot scale). For a critically coupled cavity, I would have expected that the TRANS/REFL to be perfectly anti-correlated, but in fact, they are, if anything, correleated. So maybe the WFS loops aren't exactly converging to optimize the inoput pointing for a given offset? 

Attachment #2: Maps of the transmission/reflection as a function of the (YAW, PIT) offset applied. The radial coordinate does not yet mean anything physical - I have to figure out the calibration from offset counts to spot position motion on the optic in mm, to get an idea for how much we scanned the surface of the optic relative to the beam size. The gray circles indicate the datapoints, while the colormaps are scipy-based interpolation. 

Attachment #3: After talking with Koji, I explicitly show the correlation structure between the IMC REFL DCMON and MC2 TRANS. The shaded ellipses indicate the 1, 2 and 3-sigma bounds for the 2D dataset going radially outwards. The correlation coefficient for this dataset is 0.46, which implies moderate positive correlation. 🤔 

Scan algorithm:

The following was implemented in a python scipt:

1. Choose 2 independent random numbers from the uniform distribution in the interval [-0.5, 0.5] (in uncalibrated counts).
2. One of these numebrs is set as the error point offset for the QPD spot-centering PITCH WFS loop, while the other is the YAW offset.
3. Wait for 600 seconds - this long wait is required because the step-response time for these loops is long. 
4. If there is an MC unlock event - wait till the MC relocks, and then another 600 seconds, to give the WFS loops sufficient time to converge.
5. Once the WFS loops have converged, average a few data channels (MC TRANS, REFL, WFS loop error points etc) for 10 seconds, and write these to a file.

I am now setting the offsets to the WFS QPD loop to the place where there was maximum transmission, to see if this is repeatable. In fact it was. Looking at the QPD segment outputs, I noticed that the MC2 transmission spot was rather off-center on the photodiode. So I went to the MC2 in-air optical table and centered the beam till the output on the 4 segments were more balanced, see Attachment #4. Then I re-set the MC2 QPD offsets and re-enabled the WFS servos. The transmission is now a little lower at ~14,500 counts (but still higher than the ~14200 counts we had before), presumably because we have more of the brightest part of the beam falling on the gap between quadrants. For a more reliable measurement, we should use a single-element photodiode for the MC2 transmission.

I think this offset setting thing is not so good. People do this every few years, but putting offsets in servos means that you cannot maintain a stable alignment when there are changes in the laser power, PMC trans, etc. The better thing is to do the centering of the WFS spots with the unlcoked beam after the control offsets have been offloaded to the suspensions.

I installed nds2 on donatello with yum, but still can't import nds2.

I installed nds2 again, this time successfully with

Gautam and I were talking about some modulation and demodulation and wondered what is the power combining situation for the triple resonant EOM installed 8 years ago. And we noticed that the current setup has additional ~5dB loss associated with the 3-to-1 power combiner. (Figure a)

N-to-1 broadband power combiners have an intrinsic loss of 10 log10(N). You can think about a reciprocal process (power splitting) (Figure b). The 2W input coming to the 2-port power splitter gives us two 1W outputs. The opposite process is power combining as shown in Figure c. This case, the two identical signals are the constructively added in the combiner, but the output is not 20Vpk but 14Vpk. Considering thge linearity, when one of the port is terminated, the output is going to be a half. So we expect 27dBm output for a 30dBm input (Figure d). This fact is frequently oversight particularly when one combines the signals at multiple frequencies (Figrue e). We can avoid this kind of loss by using a frequency-dependent power combiner like a diplexer or a triplexer.

With all of the shaking (man-made and divine), it was a hard to debug this problem. Summary of fixes:

1. The beam was misaligned on the WFS 1 and 2 heads, as well as the MC2 trans QPD. I re-aligned the former with the IMC unlocked, the latter (see Attachment) with the IMC locked (but the MC2 spot centering loops disabled).
2. I reset the WFS DC and RF offsets, as well as the QPD offsets (once I had hand-aligned the IMC mirrors to obtain good transmission).

At least the DC indicators are telling me that the IMC locking is back to a somewhat stable state. I have not yet checked the frequency noise / RIN.

I resume my IMC ringdown activities now that the IMC is aligned again.

To avoid any accidental misalignments Gautam turned off all the inputs to the WFS servo.

I set up a PD and a lens as in attachment 1 (following Gautam's setup).

I connect the REFL, TRANS and INPut PDs to the oscilloscope.

I connect a Siglent function generator to the AOM driver. I try to shut off the light to the IMC using 1V DC waveform and pressing the output button manually. However, it produced heavily distorted step function in the PMC trans PD.

I use a square wave with a frequency of 20mHz instead with an amplitude of 0.5V offset of 0.25V and dutycycle of 1% so there will be minimal wasted time in the off state. I get nice ringdowns (attachment 2) - forgot to take pictures. The autolocker slightly misaligns the M2 every time it is acting, so I manually align it everytime the IMC gets unlocked.

Data analysis will come later.

I remove the PD and lens and reenable the WFS servo inputs. The IMC locks easily. The WFS outputs are very different than 0 now though.

I analyze the IMC ringdown data from last night. 

Attachment 1 shows the normalized raw data. Oscillations come in much later than in Gautam's measurement. Probably because the IMC stays locked.

Attachment 2 shows fits of the transmitted PD to unconstrained double exponential and the Zucker model.

Zucker model gives time constant of 21.6us

Unconstrained exponentials give time constants of 23.99us and 46.7us which is nice because it converges close to the Zucker model.

One factor which hampers locking efforts is the apparent drift of the input beam into the IFO. Over timescales of ~1 hour, I have noticed that the spot on the AS camera drifts significantly (~1 spot size) in pitch. The IPPOS QPD bears out this observation, see Attachment #1. The IMC WFS control signals do not show a correlated drift, hence my claim that the TTs are to blame.

I am able to correct this misalignment by moving TT1 in pitch (see Attachment #2, which shows some signals from a ~1 hour PRMI lock, during which time the pointing drifted, and I corrected it by moving TT1 pitch). Assuming the problem is purely TT1 pitch drifting, this corresponds to 3mm / 6m ~500urad of shift in 1 hour - seems very large. The fact that the drift is only present in pitch and doesn't really show up in yaw makes me think the problem is likely mechanical (unless the voltage to the top two coils is drifting relative to the bottom, but no LR drift, which would be very coincidental). At the moment, this is just an annoyance, but it'd be good for this problem to be fixed.

I haven't yet figured out how to make ndscope export these plots to SVG preserving the dark color theme, hence the weird light axes...

I extended the ringdown data analysis to the reflected beam following Isogai et al.

The idea is that measuring the cavity's reflected light one can use known relationships to extract the transmission of the cavity mirrors and not only the finesse.

The finesse calculated from the transmission ringdown shown in the previous elog is 1520 according to the Zucker model, 1680 according to the first exponential and 1728 according to the second exponential.

Attachment 1 shows the measured reflected light during an IMC ringdown in and out of resonance and the values that are read off it to compute the transmission.

The equations for m1 and m3 are the same as in Isogai's paper because they describe a steady-state that doesn't care about the extinction ratio of the light.

The equation for m2, however, is modified due to the finite extinction present in our zeroth-order ringdown.

Modelling the IMC as a critically coupled 2 mirror cavity one can verify that:

Where  is the coupled light power 

 is the power rejected from the cavity (higher-order modes, sidebands)

 is the cavity gain.

 and  are the power reflectivity and transmissivity per mirror, respectively.

 is the power attenuation factor. For perfect extinction, this is 0.

Solving the equations (m1 and m3 + modified m2), using Zucker model's finesse, gives the following information:

Loss per mirror = 84.99 ppm
Transmission per mirror = 1980.77 ppm
Coupling efficiency (to TEM00) = 97.94%

I translate the results obtained in the previous elog to the IMC 3 mirror cavity. I assume the loss in each mirror in the IMC is equal and that M2 has a negligible transmission.

I find that to a very good approximation the loss per IMC mirror is 2/3 the loss per mirror in the 2 mirror cavity model. That is the loss per mirror in the IMC is 56 ppm. The transmission per mirror in the IMC is the same as in the 2 mirror model, which is 1980 ppm.

The total transmission is the same as in the 2 mirror model and is given by:

where  is the coupling efficiency to the TEM00 mode.

{Yehonathan, Meenakshi}

We measure the IMC transfer function using SR785.

We hook up the AOM driver to the SOURCE OUT, Input PD to CHANNEL ONE and the IMC transmission PD to CHANNEL TWO.

We use the frequency response measurement feature in the SR785. A swept sine from 100KHz to 100Hz is excited with an amplitude of 10mV.

Attachment 1 shows the data with a fit to a low pass filter frequency response.

IMC pole frequency is measured to be 3.795KHz, while the ringdowns predict a pole frequency 3.638KHz, a 4% difference.

The closeness of the results discourages me from calibrating the PDs' transfer functions.

I tend to believe the pole frequency measurement a bit more since it coincides with a linewidth measurement done awhile ago Gautam was telling me about.

Thoughts:

I think of trying to try another zero-order ringdown but with much smaller excitation than what used before (500mV) and than move on to the first-order beam.

Also, it seems like the reflection signal in zero-order ringdown (Attachment 2,  green trace) has only one time constant similar to the full extinction ringdown. The reason is that due to the fact the IMC is critically coupled there is no DC term in the electric field even when the extinction of light is partial. The intensity of light, therefore, has only one time constant.

Fitting this curve (Attachment 3) gives a time constant of 18us, a bit too small (gives a pole of 4.3KHz). I think a smaller extinction ringdown will give a cleaner result.

[Yehonathan, Hang]

We did some quick DC balancing of the MC2 coil drivers to reduce the l2a coupling. We updated the gains in the C1:SUS-MC2_UL/UR/LR/LLCOIL to be 1, -0.99, 0.937,-0.933, respectively. The previous values were 1, -1, 1, -1.

The procedures are the following:

Lock IMC.

Drive UL+LR and change the gain of LR to zero pitch.

Drive UR+LL and change the gain of LL to zero pitch.

Lastly, drive all 4 coils and change UR & LR together to zero yaw. 

We used C1:SUS-MC2_LOCKIN1_OSC to create the excitations at 33 Hz w/ 30,000 cts. The angular error signals were derived from IMC WFSs.

While this time we did things by hand, in the future it should be automated as the procedure is sufficiently straightforward. 

Today, I did the following tests (and so was touching electronics/cables at/around 1X2):

• Measured the IMC OLTF.
• Measured the TF from injection at IN2 to response at the IMC error point (T-eed the I out of the IMC demodulator as there is no longer a monitor point available).
• Measured the IMC in loop error signal with 0.25 Hz resolution from DC-2kHz.
• Confirmed that the IMC IN2 (a.k.a. AO path) gain slider performs as advertised. This is a useful test to run post Acromag switchover on Friday.

Results to follow.

After this work, I reverted the EPICS channels to the usual values. The IMC can be locked.

In the style of the KA characterization of the CM board, the AO path gain EPICS slider (IN2) of the IMC servo board was stepped by 1 dB through the full available range of -32 dB to +31 dB. For each value of the requested gain, I measured the TF from the injected signal (to IN2) to TP1A on the IMC servo board. I used the BNC connector for this test, whereas we use the LEMO connector for the AO path. The source was tee-d off at the SR785 side, with one leg going to IN2 of the IMC servo board, and the other going to CH1A of the SR785. TP1A of the IMC board was connected to CH2A of the SR785. 

Attachment #1 - Measured gain vs requested gain.

• When debugging the CM board, it was this kind of test that revealed the faulty latch ICs.
• -12 dB to -11 dB gain step looks anomalous, but overall the trend seems linear.
• I was confused by why there should be a discontinuity at this stage of the gain stepping - seems like the scanning script I use changes the SR785 excitation amplitude at this point (from 300mV to 100mV). But why should the size of the excitation signal change the magnitude of the transfer function? Is this indicative of some loading issue?
• There is an overall offset between the requested gain and measured gain of ~2-3 dB. This seems large.
• There is nothing in the schematic which would have me expect this - there is a 1/2 divider at the positive input of the differential receiving stage, but this just cancels out the non-inverting gain of x2.

Attachment #2 - Frequency dependent transfer functions

• There seem to be two families of curves - they correspond to <-12 dB and >-12 dB.
• The feature at 90 kHz is strange - need to look at the schematic to see what this could be.

The motivation here is to try and figure out why I cannot engage the AO path smoothly in the CARM handoff part of lock acquisiton. I plan to use this information to do some loop modeling and project laser frequency noise coupling in various stages of the lock acquisition process.

Summary:

Sometime between 1PM and 6PM on Tuesday, excess laser frequency noise shows up in MCF at around 800 Hz, as shown in Attachment #1. Sigh.

Details:

While I show the MCF spectrum here, I confirmed that this noise is not injected by the IMC loop (with the PSL shutter closed, and the IMC servo board disconnected from the feedback path to the NPRO, the PMC error and control points still show the elevated noise, see Attachment #2). I don't think the problem is from the PMC loop - see Attachment #3 which is the ALS beat out-of-loop noise with the PMC unlocked (the PSL beam doesn't see the cavity before it gets to the ALS setup, and we only actuate on the cavity length for that loop, so this wasn't even really necessary).

Was there some work on the PSL table on Tuesday afternoon that can explain this? 

I did some preliminary debugging of this, and have localized the problem to the output path (after MC slow) on the IMC Servo card. Basically, I monitored the spectrum of the ALS beat frequency fluctuations under a few different conditions: 

• With the BNC to the NPRO PZT disconnected, there is no noise. So the laser and the FSS phase correction EOM (which the ALS beat pickoff sees) are not responsible.
• With the input to the Koji summing box disconnected, still no excess - so the summing box + Thorlabs HV driver are not responsible.
• With the TTFSS output connected to the summing box, but with the input switch to the TTFSS box disabled (isolating the on-PSL table parts of the FSS system), still no excess.
• With the input to the TTFSS enabled, and the BNC output of the IMC Servo card disconnected at 1X2, still no excess.
• Finally, when I connect the BNC cable, the excess starts to show up.

Toggling C1:IOO-MC_FASTSW, which supposedly isolates the post-MC slow (a.k.a. MCL) part of the servo, I see no difference. I am also reasonably confident this switch itself works, because I can break the IMC lock by toggling it. So pending a more detailed investigation, I am forced to conclude that the problem originates in the part of the IMC servo board after the MCL pickoff. Some cabling was removed at 1X2 on Tuesday between the times when there was no excess and when it showed up, but it's hard to imagine how this could have created this particular problem.

My old scheme was flawed as I used pitch as the readback. The pitch signal could not distinguish the cross-coupling due to coil imbalance and that due to the natural suspension L2P. A new scheme based on yaw alone has been developed and will be integrated into ifo_test. For now we revert the C1:SUS-MC2_UL/UR/LR/LLCOIL gains back to 1, -1, 1, -1. 

I lowered the (FAST) PZT gain on the IMC/FSS servo today.

I noticed that the MC locks looked unstable a lot of the day, and during lock the PCDRIVE channel is above 1 Vrms (which means the loop is oscillating, ttypically at the PZT/EOM crossover frequency).

I changed the default setting from 22 to 20 19 dB in the PSL Settings screen so the mcup script will use this for now. Feel free to revert if this turns out to be a Fluke (which you would think is a terrible name for a company, but...)

since the summary pages are working again, I was clicking through and noticed that there's a wandering peak in the whitened IMC spectrogram that goes from 10-30 Hz over the course of a day.

https://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:30889/detcharsummary/day/20200909/ioo/

anyone know what this is ?

There was an abrupt change in the MC_F spectrum between August 4 and August 5, judging by the summary pages - the 1 and 3 Hz resonances are no longer visible in the spectrum. Possibly, this indicates some electronics failure on the MC servo board / whitening board, the CDS settings don't seem to have changed. There is no record of any activity in the elog around those dates that would explain such a change. I'll poke around at 1X2 to see if anything looks different.

Update 1740: I found that the MCL / MCF cables were disconnected. So since August 5, these channels were NOT recording any physical quantity. Because their inputs weren't terminated, I guess this isn't a clean measurement of the whitening + AA noise, but particularly for MC_F, I guess we could use more whitening (see Attachment #1). Probably also means that the wandering ~10-30Hz line in the spectrogram is a electronics feature. The connections have now been restored and things look nominal again.

that's a very curious disconnection

the "Pentek" whitening board that carries the MC channels has jumpers to enable either 1 or 2 stages of 15:150 whitening. Looks lik MC_F has 2 and MC_L has 1.

I guess the MC_F signal is so low because of the high gain on the FSS board.  We could lower the FSS common gain and increase the IMC board's VCO gain to make up for this. Maybe 6 dB would be enough. IF that is risky, we could also up the analog gain on the whitening board.

This elog suggests that there is uniformly 1 stage engaged across all channels. I didn't look at the board to see what the jumper situation is, but only 1 stage of whitening is compensated digitally for both _F and _L. The Pomona box attached to the NPRO PZT input is also compensated digitally to convert counts to frequency.

I tried the gain re-allocation between VCO gain and FSS COMM (and also compensated for the cts to Hz conversion in MCF), but it doesn't seem to have the desired effect on the MCF SNR in the 5-50Hz band. Since the IMC stays locked, and I had already made the changes to mcup, I'll keep these gains for now. We can revert to the old settings if the IMC locking duty cycle is affected. Explicitly, the changes made were:

VCO gain: +7dB ---> +13 dB

FSS COMM: +6 ddB ---> +0 dB

The mcdown script wasn't modified, so the lock acquisition gains are the same as they've been. 

[Koji, Rana]

We wanted to track down the excess noise seen in MC_F and other places (see the previous report by Gautam)

Setup1: The IMC was locked and MC_F signal between 500 and 1500Hz was observed. The DTT template was saved as /users/Templates/MC/MCF_noise_201023.xml

- Suspected mech resonance/jitter coupled with clipping or any other imperfections. Poked the various optics and optomechanics on the table. Basically no change. If we tap the laser chassis and the optics close to the laser source, we occasionally unlocked the IMC

- When we touched (lifted) the Innolight controller box from the shelf, for the first time we saw a significant change in the shape of the noise spectrum. The peak around the 700Hz shited towards lower frequency by a few %. Other peaks have no obvious change in the shapes and the heights.

- While observing the MC_F signal on the laptop, we went to the back of the laser controller. Placing a hand close to the fan clearly changes the peak frequency lower. By temporarily disconnecting the fan from the power supply for a short moment, the 700Hz peak could be eliminated. We also tried to see the noise level with the slow thermal servo and diagnosis DB cable disconnected, but we didn't see any significant change of the noise level.

Setup 2: Using the ALS phase tracker, we can observe the relative freq noise of the PSL laser and the ETMY AUX laser without any servo involved. This way we can freely disconnect any cables from the lasers. The measurement template for DTT was saved as /users/Templates/ALS/Y_ALS_FINE_PHASE_OUT_102320.xml

- Noise spectrum before disconnecting the cable (REF0, RMS REF1)

- The Fast PZT input to the PSL was disconnected => This made all the peaks (including the 700Hz) disappeared (REF2, RMS REF3)

- The Fast PZT input was restored as before, then the chain was disconnected at the input of the HV PZT driver (Thorlabs) => Again, this made the peaks disappeared (REF4, RMS REF5)

- The chain was disconnected at the input of the TTFSS box => Again, this made the peaks disappeared (REF6, RMS REF7)

- Disconnected the demod input and the AO cables from the IMC servo board => This made the peaks came back (REF8)

- Disconnected all the input/peripheral cables from the IMC servo board except for the connection to the TTFSS box => Still the excess noise was observed  (REF9)

- In addition to the above, the cable to the FSS box was disconnected but the ground was still touching the MC servo board => This made the peaks disappeared (REF10)

The conclusion is that the noise is injected from the main circuit of the IMC servo board.

Next time we will check if the backplane connection is doing something wrong. Also, we'll test if the presence of the RF signals does something bad to the IMC board via EMI and RFI.

We have reverted the connection and tested if we lock the IMC and Y arm. ==> We saw at least they were locked for a short period. The things are still stabilizing, but left them turned on so they keep trying to lock automatically for the night.

In fact, the problem was the grounding issue (presumably on the IOO racks).
A temporary differential receiver at the TTFSS side was built using an SR560 and a few ponoma cables. This removed the structures ~850Hz.

The MC Servo Output was disconnected from the TTFSS box and monitored with SR785. The 850Hz structure was kept visible no matter what cables, including all the acromag DB cables, were removed. This made me suspicious about the measurement setup. The SR785 was connected to an AC power strip under the SP table and this was too far from the IOO rack.

The SR785 was connected to the AC power strip on 1X2, and now the difference becomes clear. No matter if the acromag cables are connected or not, the connection (particularly ground connection) between the MC servo module and the TTFSS box causes the MC servo output contaminated. (Comparison between Blue and Orange of Attachment #1). During the measurement, the EPICS switch for the fast path was disengaged (=no signal) and the VCO gain (...so called. It's just the MC Servo Gain) was set to be 0dB.

To test if the differential receiving of the MC Servo Output at the PSL helps to reduce this noise, I've built a simple (hacky) differential receiver using an SR560. (Attachment #2)
This kept the noise level same as the disconnected case (Comparison between Green and Orange of Attachment #1, I don't think the difference between them is not significant), while the IMC is locked as before.
Note that we can see that the 36kHz line was significantly reduced. Did we remove this annoying noise?

After talking with Gautam, we decided to leave this configuration while the SE-Diff cable was replaced with a more robust one. (See Attachment #3)

The PSL laser frequency performance was evakluated in the following two ways as we did last week:
1) Use the beat frequency of the free running PSL and the Y-end laser (Attachment #4). The PSL shutter was closed and thus the IMC was not locked.
2) Use the IMC MCF while the IMC was locked. (Attachment #5)

For both cases, the improvement was confirmed.

I also tried to check the reported issue by Gautam on this elog. He used 1Hz BW, but I cheated with 16Hz BW and 10x12.8kHz span PSDs. (Attachment #6)

For the measurement, IN1 GAIN of the IMC Servo was set to be 0dB and the OUT2 was switched to monitor the IN1 noise, while IN1 was terminated by a 50Ohm.

As I mentioned above, the AC power of SR785 was taken from a 1X2 power strip. Is this the reason for the power line forest look less severe compared to the previous case???
Anyway, I tried to use the same differential receiving technique (but with gain of x100) to see if this helps. The differential receiver helped to reduce the structure above 50kHz. The floor noise level was observed to be higher. I didn't pursue this any further, but the forest of the power line looked like a part of the measurement noise. This is indicative that the grounding condition on 1X2 is really not great and we need to review the configuration of the acromag grounding.

Apart from the questionable wiring on the Acromags, one other important difference is in the way the connections were made between the old VME crates to the Eurocrate backplanes, and how we do it now. The thick cables had their sheilds connected to the eurocrate ground (or at least, there was a dedicated ground lug on those cables which we screwed on to the ground terminals on the Eurocrate backplanes). However, in our current configuration, we interface the Acromag ADCs and DACs to the backplane via these adaptor boards. The shields of the DSUB cables are presumably NOT connected to the Eurocrate grounds. This should also be investigated as one potential cause of the grounding issue - while on some of the Eurocrate modules, the P1/P2 connectors may have either the "A" or "C" row of connectors shorted to ground, some may not, and the TTFSS may suffer from such an issue?

Note that we have this problem in all of the slow machines that were upgraded to Acromag (if this turns out to be the issue). 

Looking back through the elog, 1mtorr is the pressure at which it is deemed safe to send the full power beam into the IMC. After replacing the HR mirror in the MCREFL path with a 10% reflective BS, I just cranked the power back up. IMC is locked. With the increased exposure on the MC2T camera, lots of new scattered light has become visible.

While proceeding with the interferometer recovery, I noticed that there appeared to be no light on WFS2. I confirmed on the AP table that the beam was indeed hitting the QPD, but the DC quadrants are all returning 0. Looking back, it appears that the failure happened on Monday 26 October at ~6pm local time. For now, I hand-aligned the IMC and centered the beams on the WFS1 and MC2T QPDs - MCT is ~15000 cts and MC REFL DC is ~0.1, all consistent with the best numbers I've been able to obtain in the past. I don't think the servo will work without 1 sensor without some retuning of the output matrix.

It would appear that both the DC and RF outputs of WFS2 are affected - I dithered the MC2 optic in pitch (with the WFS loop disabled) at 3.33 Hz, the transmission and WFS1 sensors see the dither but not WFS2. It could be that I'm just not well centerd on the PD, but by eye, I am, so it would appear that the problem is present in both the DC and RF signal paths. I am not going into the PD head debugging today.

I checked the backplane connection for IMC WFS2  and found that the cables for IMC WFS2 and the IMC demod were swapped during my IMC noise hunting activities. I reverted it just now.

But we need to check if this damaged anything such as the WFS2 head, the WFS2 demod, etc, once the IMC locking is back.

Summary:

There seems to be significant phase loss in the TTFSS path, which is limiting the IMC OLTF to <100 kHz. 

Details:

See Attachment #1 and #2. The former shows the phase loss, while the latter is just to confirm that the optical gain of the error point is roughly the same, since I noticed this after working on and replacing the RF frequency distribution unit. Unfortunately there have been many other changes also (e.g. the work that Rana and Koji did at the IMC rack, swapping of backplane controls etc etc - maybe they have an OLTF measurement from the time they were working?) so I don't know which is to blame. Off the top of my head, I don't see how the RF source can change the phase lag of the IMC servo at 100 kHz. The only part of the IMC RF chain that I touched was the short cable inside the unit that routes the output of the Wenzel source to the front panel SMA feedthrough. I confirmed with a power meter that the power level of the 29.5 MHz signal at that point is the same before and after my work.

The time domain demod monitor point signals appear somewhat noisier in todays measurement compared to some old data I had from 2018, but I think this isn't significant. Once the SR785 becomes available, I will measure the error point spectrum as well to confirm. One thing I noticed was that like many of our 1U/2U chassis units, the feedthrough returns are shorted to the chassis on the RF source box (and hence presumably also to the rack). The design doc for this box makes many statements about the precautions taken to avoid this, but stops short of saying if the desired behavior was realized, and I can't find anything about it in the elog. Can someone confirm that the shields of all the connectors on the box were ever properly isolated? My suspicion is that the shorting is happening where the all-metal N-feedthroughs touch the drilled surfaces on the front panel - while the front and back surfaces of the panel are insulating, the machined surfaces are not.

This is an unacceptable state but no clear ideas of how to troubleshoot quickly (without going piece by piece into the IMC servo chain) occur to me. I still don't understand how the freq source work could have resulted in this problem but I'm probably overlooking something basic. I'm also wondering why the differential receiving at the TTFSS error point did not require a gain adjustment of the IMC servo? Shouldn't the differential-receiving-single-ended-sending have resulted in an overall x0.5 gain?

Update 8 Dec 1200: To test the hypothesis, I bypassed the SR560 based differential receiving and restored the original config. I am then able to run with the original gain settings, and you see in Attachment #4 that the IMC OLTF UGF is back above 100 kHz. It is still a little lower than it was in June 2019, not sure why. There must be some saturation issues somewhere in the signal chain because I cannot preserve the differential receiving and retain 100 kHz UGF, either by raising the "VCO gain" on the MC servo board, setting the SR560 to G=2, or raising the "Common Gain Adjust" on the FSS box by 6 dB. I don't have a good explanation for why this worked for some weeks and failed now - maybe some issue with the SR560? We don't have many working units so I didn't try switching it.

So either there is a whole mess of lines or the frequency noise suppression is limited. Sigh.

The servos are almost certainly not optimal - but we have the IFO sort of working, so before we make any changes, let's make a strong case for it. Once the loop TFs and noises (e.g. the sensing noise reinjection you maybe saw) are fully characterized and a new loop is shown to perform better, then we can make the changes, but until then, let's continue using the "nominal" configuration and keep all the WFS loops on . I turned everything back on.

BTW, MC2_ASCPIT_IN1 isn't the correct channel to measure the sensing noise re-injection, you need some other sensor, e.g. is the MC transmission (de)stabilized. 0-20 Hz is where I expect the WFS is actually measuring above the sensing noise.

Summary:

I spent an hour today evening checking out the remote waveplate operation. Basic remote operation was established 👍 . To run a test on the main beam (or any beam for that matter), we need to lay out some long cabling, and install the controller in a rack. I will work with Jordan in the coming days to do these things. Apart from the hardware, some EPICS channel will need to be added to the c1ioo.db file and a python script will need to be set up as a service to allow remote operation.

Part numbers:

• The controller is a NewFocus ESP300.
• The waveplate stage is a PR50CC. The waveplate itself that is mounted has a 1" diameter (clear aperture is more like 21mm), which I think is ~twice the size of the waveplates we have in the lab, good thing Livingston shipped us the waveplate itself too. It is labelled QWPO-1064-10-2, so should be a half wave plate as we want, but I didn't explicitly check with a linearly polarized beam today. Before any serious high power tests, we can first contact clean the waveplate to avoid any burning of dirt. The damage threshold is rated as 1 MW/cm^2, and I estimate that we will be well below this threshold for any power levels (<30W) we are planning to put through this waveplate. For a 100um radius beam with 30W, the peak intensity is ~0.2 MW/cm^2. This is 20% of the rated damage threshold, so may be better to enforce that the beam be >200um going through this waveplate.
• The dimensions of the mount look compatible with the space we have on the PSL table (though of course once the amplifier comes into the picture, we will have to change the layout. Maybe it's better to keep everything downstream of the PMC fixed - then we just re-position the seed beam (i.e. NPRO) and amplifier, and then mode-match the output of the amplifier to the PMC.

Electrical tests:

1. First, I connected a power cord to the ESP300 and powered it on - the front display lit up and displayed a bunch of diagnostics, and said something to the effect of "No stage connected".
2. Next, I connected the rotary mount to "Axis #1": Male DB25 on the stage to female DB25 on the rear of the ESP300. The stage was recognized.
3. Used the buttons on the front panel to rotate the waveplate, and confirmed visually that rotation was happening 👍 . I didn't calibrate the actual degrees of rotation against the readback on the front panel, but 45 degrees on the panel looked like 45 degrees rotation of the physical stage so seems fine.

RS232 tests:

• This unit only has a 9-pin Dsub connector to interface remotely to it, via RS232 protocol. c1psl Supermicro host was designated the computer with which I would attempt remote control.
• To test, I decided to use a serial-USB adapter. Since this is only a single unit, no need to get an RS232-ethernet interface like the one used in the vacuum rack, but if there are strong opinions otherwise we can adopt some other wiring/control philosophy.
• No drivers needed to be installed, the host recognized the adapter immediately. I then shifted the waveplate and controller assembly to inside the VEA - they are sitting on a cart behind 1X2. Once the controller was connected to the USB-serial adapter cable, it was registered at /dev/ttyUSB0 immediately. I had to chown this port to the controls user for accessing it using python serial. 
• Initially, I was pleasantly surprised when I found not one but TWO projects on PyPi that already claimed to do what I want! Sadly, neither NewportESP1.1 nor PyMeasure0.9.0 actually worked - the former is for python2 (and the string typesetting has changed for PySerial compatible with python3), while the latter seems to be optimized for Labview interfacing and didn't play so nice with the serial-USB adapter. I didn't want to spend >10mins on this and I know enough python serial to do the interfacing myself, so I pushed ahead. Good thing we have several pySerial experts in the group now, if any of you want to figure out how we can make either of these two utilities actually work for us - there is also this repo which claims to work for python 3 but I didn't try it because it isn't a managed package.
• The command list is rather intimidating, it runs for some 100 (!) pages. Nevertheless, I used some basic commands to readback the serial number of the controller, and also succeeded in moving the stage around  by issuing the "PR" command appropriately 👍. BTW, I forgot that I didn't test the motor enable/disable which is an essential channel I think.
• I think we actually only need a very minimal set of commands, so we don't need to read all 100 pages of instructions:
  • motor enable/disable
  • absolute and relative rotations
  • readback of the current position
  • readback of the moving status
  • a stop command
  • an interlock
• Note that as a part of this work, in addition to chowning /dev/ttyUSB0, I installed the two aforementioned python packages on c1psl. I saw no reason to manually restart the modbus and latch services running on it, and I don't believe this work would have impacted the correct functioning of either of those two services, but be aware that I was poking around on c1psl. I was also reminded that the system python on this machine is 2.7 - basically, only the latch service that takes care of the gains for the IMC servo board are dependent on python (and my proposed waveplate control script will be too), but we should really upgrade the default python to 3.7/3.8.

Next steps:

Satisfied that the unit works basically as expected, I decided to stop for today. My thinking was that we can have the ESP300 installed in 1X1 or 1X2 (depending on where space is more readily available). I will upload have uploaded a cartoon here so people can comment if they like/dislike my plan. 

• We need to use a long-ish cable to run from 1X1/1X2, where the controller will be housed, to the PSL enclosure. Livingston did ship one such long cable (still on Rana's table), but I didn't check if the length is sufficient / the functionality of this long cable. 
• We need to set up some EPICS channels for the rotation stage angle, motor ENABLE/DISABLE, a "move stage" button, motion status, and maybe a channel to control the rotation speed? 
• We need a python script that is reading from / writing to these EPICS channel in a while loop. Should be straightforward to setup something to run like the latch.py service that has worked decently reliably for ~a year now. afaik, there isn't a good way to run this synchronously, and the delay in sending/completing the execution of some of the serial commands might be ~1 second, but for the purpose of slowly ramping up the power, this shouldn't be a problem.
• One question I do have is, what is the strategy to protect the IFO from the high power when the lock is lost? Surely we are not gonna rely on this waveplate for any fast actuation? With the current input power of 1W, the MCREFL photodiode sees ~100mW when the IMC loses lock. So if the final input power is 35W, do we wanna change the T=10% beamsplitter in the MCREFL path to keep this ratio?

Once everything is installed, we can run some tests to see if the rotary motion disturbs the PSL in any meaningful way. I will upload some photos to the picasa later. Photos here.

I spent some time today setting up a workable user interface to control the waveplate.

1. Created some EPICS database records at /cvs/cds/caltech/target/ESP300.db. These are all soft channels. This required a couple of restarts of the modbus service on c1psl - as far as I can tell, everything has come back up without problems.
2. Hacked newportESP to make it work, mainly some string encoding BS in the python2-->python3 paradigm shift.
3. Made a python script at /cvs/cds/caltech/target/ESP300.py that is based on similar services I've set up for the CM servo and IMC servo boards. I have not yet set this up to run as a service on c1psl, but that is pretty trivial.
4. Made a minimal MEDM screen, see Attachment #1. It is saved at  /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/medm/c1psl/C1PSL_POW_CTRL.adl and can be accessed from the "PSL" tab on sitemap. We can eventually "calibrate" the angular position to power units.
5. Confirmed that I can move the waveplate using this MEDM screen.

So this system is ready to be installed once Jordan and I find some time to lay out cabling + install the ESP300 controller in a rack.

At the moment, there is no high power and there is minimal risk of damaging anything, but someone should double check my logic to make sure that we aren't gonna burn the precious IFO optics. We should also probably hook up a hardware interlock to this controller.

I went through some aLIGO documentation and believe that they are using a custom made potentiometer based angle sensor rather than the integrated Newport (or similar) sensor+motor. My reading of the situation was that there were several problems to do with hysterisis, the "find home" routine etc. I guess for our purposes, none of these are real problems, as long as we are careful not to randomly rotate the waveplate through a full 180 degrees and go through the full fringe in the process. Need to think of a clever way to guard against careless / accidental MEDM button presses / slider drags.

Unrelated to this work: I haven't been in the lab for ~a week so I took the opportunity today to go through the various configs (POX/POY/PRMI resonant carrier etc). I didn't make a noise budget for each config but at least they can be locked 👍 . I also re-aligned the badly misaligned PMC and offloaded the somewhat large DC WFS offsets (~100 cts, which I estimate to be ~150 nNm of torque, corresponding to ~50 urad of misalignment) to the IMC suspensions' slow bias voltages. 

[jordan, gautam]

We did the following this afternoon.

1. Disconnected the cable from the unused (and possibly not working) RefCav heater power supply, and removed said PS from 1X1. There was insufficient space to install the ESP300 controller elsewhere. I have stored the power supply along the east arm under the beamtube, approximately directly opposite the RFPD cabinet.
2. Installed the ESP 300 - conveniently, the HP DCPS was already sitting on some rails and so we didn't need to add any.
3. Ran a long D25-D25 cable from the ESP300 to the NE corner area of the PSL enclosure. The ends of the cable are labelled as "ESP end" and "Waveplate end". The HEPA was turned on for the duration we had the enclosure open, and I have now turned it off.
4. Connected the waveplate to this cable. Also re-connected the ESP300 to the c1psl supermicro host via the USB-RS232 adapter cable.

The IMC stayed locked throughout our work, and judging by the CDS overview screen, we don't seem to have done any lasting damage, but I will run more tests. Note that the waveplate isn't yet installed in the beam path - I may do this later today evening depending on lab activity, but for now, it is just sitting on the lower shelf inside the PSL enclosure. I will post some photos later.

Update: The waveplate was installed. I gave it a couple of rounds of cleaning by first contact, and visually, it looked good to me. More photos uploaded. I also made some minor improvements to the MEDM screen, and setup the communication script with the ESP300 to run as a systemd service on c1psl. Let's see how stable things are... I think the philosophy at the sites is to calibrate the waveplate rotation angle in terms of power units, but i'm not sure how the unit we have performs in terms of backlash error. We can do a trial by requesting ~100 "random" angles, monitoring the power in s- and p-polatizations, and then quanitfying the error between requested and realized angles, but I haven't done this yet. I also haven't added these channels to the set recorded to frames / to the burt snapshot - do we want to record these channels long term?