I hooked up Bonnie and Clyde last night and tested it today. First I tried some loud noises to make sure I could identify them on the readout. Then, Steve suggested I try to look for some periodic stuff. I set up Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on the cabinets by the MC2 optic. Now for graphs!

I tapped on the microphone a few times. I also yelled a bit, but this is sampling by seconds, so perhaps they got overwhelmed by the tapping.

This time I tried some more isolated yells. I started with a tap so I'd be sure to be able to recognize what happened. Apparently, not so necessary.

Here, it looks like a pretty strong periodic pattern on the second mic (Butch Cassidy). I replaced the lines with dashed ones where the pattern was a little less clear. Possibility interference from something. Mic1 (Bonnie) seems to show a pretty regular beat pattern, which seems reasonable, as it isn't particularly close to any one instrument fan.

So, anyway. I thought those were neat. And that I wanted to share.

Joe, Alberto and Steve

We tested gate valve V1 interlock by :

1, decelerated rotation by brake from maglev controller unit.

2, turned maglev  controller off from controller unit.

3, unpluged 220VAC plug from wall socket

None of the above action triggered V1 to close. This needs to be corrected in the future.

The MEDM monitor screen of maglev indicated the correct condition changes.

Alan and Alberto conducted a tour of 40 high-school students.
It may be the same tour that Rana found a spare PMC during the tour explanation as far as I remember...

I am attempting to use the DTT program to look at the coherence of the individual accelerometer signals with the MC_L signal. Rana suggested that I might break up the XYZ configuration, so i wanted to see how the coherence changed when I moved things around over the past couple of weeks, but I keep getting a synchronization error every time I try to set the start time to more than about 3 days ago. I tried restarting the program and checking the "reconnect" option in the "Input" tab, neither of which made any kind of difference. I can access this data with no problem from the Data Viewer and the Matlab scripts, so I'm not really sure what is happening. Help?

EDIT: Problem solved - Full data was not stored for the time I needed to access it for DTT.

This week, I've been working on adapting the last week's circuit to make it buildable. Mostly this has involved picking components that are already in the lab, adding tunable components when necessary, and planning roughly how the components should be laid out on a board. I then built the circuit and put it in a box with BNC connectors for easy connection during testing. A picture of the built circuit is attached.

For initial testing, the transformer was removed from the design; since this changed the response of the circuit, I added two resistors to correct the response. A figure showing a schematic of the built circuit is attached. The expected responce of the circuit is also shown; the magnitude (solid) and phase (dashed) of the voltage across the EOM are shown in green, and the impedance of the circuit is shown in blue. While this response has sharp peaks and 50 Ohms (34 dB) of impedance at resonances, the gain is low compared to the circuit with the transformer. This means that, as is, this circuit cannot be used to drive the EOM; it is simply for testing purposes.

The last week I've spent mostly working on calculating shot noise and other sensitivities in three michelson sensor setups, the standard michelson, the "long range" michelson (with wave plates), and the proposed EUCLID setup.  The goal is to show that there is some inherent advantage to the latter two setups as displacement sensors.  This involved looking into polarization and optics a lot more, so I've been spending a lot of time on that also.  For example, the displacement sensitivity/shot noise on the standard michelson is around 6:805*10^-17 m/rHz at L_=1*10^-7m, as shown in the graph. 

The plan for the optical setup has been corrected after it was realized that it would be impossible to isolate a 29.501 MHz frequency from a 29.499 MHz one because they are so close in value.  Instead, we decided to adopt the setup pictured below.  In this way, the low-pass filter should have no trouble isolating 29.501-29.5 MHz from 29.501 + 29.5 MHz.  Also, we decided to scrap the idea of sending Alberto's laser through a fiber optic cable after hearing rumors of extra lasers.  Since I shouldn't have to share a beam when the second laser comes in, I plan on setting up both lasers on the same optics bench.  I've been working on the software while waiting for supplies, but I should be able to start building the trigger box today (assuming the four-pair cable is delivered).

Once again, this morning I found the wireless router disconnected from the LAN cable. No martian WiFi was available.

I wonder who is been doing that and for what reason.

After setting up the microphones last week, I modified the Wiener filtering programs so as to include the microphone signals. They didn't seem to do much of anything to reduce the MC_L signal, so I looked at coherences. The microphones don't seem to have much coherence with the MC_L signal at all. I tried moving Bonnie to near the optical table next to the PSL (which isn't in a vacuum, and thus would, presumably, be more affected by acoustic noise), but that didn't seem to make much of a difference. Eventually, I'd like to put a mic in the PSL itself, but I need to work out how to mount it first.

Bonnie's new location.

You can see in bonnie_butch.pdf that none of the mic signals are giving very good coherence, although they all seem to have a peak at 24 Hz. (In fact, everything seems to have a peak there. Must be a resonant frequency of something in the mode cleaner.)

I've also attached plots of the coherences for all six accelerometers and the three Guralp seismometer axes. I plotted the most coherent traces together in the last pdf: the y-axes of the MC2 accelerometer and the two seismometers (the Ranger measures ONLY y) and, interestingly, the z-axis of the MC2 accelerometer. Unsurprisingly, the seismometers are most coherent at the low frequencies, and the MC2-Y accelerometer seems to be coherent at very similar frequencies. The MC2-Z accelerometer, on the other hand, seems to be coherent at the higher frequencies, and is highly complementary to the others. I am not really sure why this would be...

Finally, I was curious about how the noise varies throughout the day, because I didn't want to mistakenly decide that some particular configuration of accelerometers/seismometers/whatever was better than another b/c I picked the wrong time of day to collect the data. So, here is a plot of Wiener filters (using only accelerometer data) taken over 2-hour intervals throughout the entirety of July 6, 2009 (midnight-midnight local).

It's a little bit confusing, and I should probably try to select some representative curves and eliminate the rest to simplify things, but I don't have time to do that before the meeting, so this will have to suffice for now.

The beam scan (which has been living in the bridge subbasement for a bit now) is in a state of imperfection.

I noticed that:

• The waist reading seems to change by not insignificant amounts as you move the spot across the head, even for just small perturbations about the center.
• None of the features which require two slits seem to be working (unsure if this is software or hardware related)

I took some pictures to try and illuminate the situation - The inverted images are included to make it easier to see the flecks (?) in the slits

I am not sure how to figure out if any bit of the scan is/has been fried.

Pending further investigation, enjoy large error bars in your scan measurements!

PICTURES OF BOTH SLITS ON THE BEAMSCAN HEAD:

Today I tuned the periscope on the PSL table to align the beam to the Mode Cleaner. With the Wave Front Sensor control off, I minimized the reflection from the MC and maximized the transmission. While doing that I also checked that the transmitted beam after the MC didn't lose the alignment with the interferometer's main Faraday isolator.

In this way, I've got a reflection, as read from the MC_REFLPD_MC, of about 0.6. Then I centered the WFS on the AS table. After that the WFS alignment control brought the reflection to 0.25 and a nice centered bull-eye spot showed on the monitor.

In her position overlooking whichever table it is that is next to the PSL, Bonnie drummed up some decent coherence with the PSL-PMC_ERR channel, but not so much with the MC_L. I moved her into the PSL itself, and now there is rather good coherence with the PMC_ERR channel, but still not so great for MC_L.

Bonnie's new home in the PSL.

Bonnie has been strung up on bungees in the PSL so that her position/orientation can be adjusted however we like. She is now hanging pretty low over the table, rather than being attached to the hanging equipment shelf thing. Butch Cassidy has been hung over the AS table.

Moving Bonnie increased the coherence for the PMC_ERR_F signal, but not the MC_L. Butch Cassidy doesn't have much coherence with either.

I noticed that the coherence would drop off very sharply just after 10 kHz - there would be no further spikes or anything of the sort. I used my computer to play a swept sine wave (sweeping from 20Hz to 10kHz) next to Butch Cassidy to see if the same drop-off occurred in the microphone signal itself. Sure enough, the power spectrum showed a sharp drop around 10kHz. Thinking that the issue was that the voltage dividers had too high impedance, I remade one of them with two 280 Ohm and one 10 Ohm resistor, but that didn't make any difference. So, I'm not sure what's happening exactly. I didn't redo the other voltage divider, so Bonnie is currently not operating.

I have increased the temperature setpoint in the office area by ~0.75 deg F. Figure attached. Also a few days ago I increased the setpoint of the AC in the control room. Looks like the Laser is able to handle the changes in office area temperature so far, but lets see how it fares over the weekend.

I popped by the 40m, and was dismayed to find that all of the front end computers are red (only framebuilder, DAQcontroler, PEMdcu, and c1susvmw1 are green....all the rest are RED).

I keyed the crates, and did the telnet.....startup.cmd business on them, and on c1asc I also pushed the little reset button on the physical computer and tried the telnet....startup.cmd stuff again.  Utter failure. 

I have to pick someone up from the airport, but I'll be back in an hour or two to see what more I can do.

Before heading back to the 40m to check on the computer situation, I thought I'd check the web screenshots page that Kakeru worked on, and it looks like none of the screens have been updated since June 1st.  I don't know what the story is on that one, or how to fix it, but it'd be handy if it were fixed.

 I think the problem was caused by a failure of the RFM network: the RFM MEDM screen showed frozen values even when I was power recycling any of the FE computers. So I tried the following things:

After Alberto's bootfest which was more successful than mine, I tried powercycling the AWG crate one more time.  No success.  Just as Alberto had gotten, I got the DAQ screen's AWG lights to flash green, then go back to red.  At Alberto's suggestion, I also gave the physical reset button another try.  Another round of flash-green-back-red ensued.

When I was in a few hours ago while everything was hosed, all the other computer's 'lights' on the DAQ screen were solid red, but the two AWG lights were flashing between green and red, even though I was power cycling the other computers, not touching the AWG at the time.  Those are the lights which are now solid red, except for a quick flash of green right after a reboot.

I poked around in the history of the curren and old elogs, and haven't found anything referring to this crazy blinking between good and bad-ness for the AWG computers.  I don't know if this happens when the tpman goes funky (which is referred to a lot in the annals of the elog in the same entries as the AWG needing rebooting) and no one mentions it, or if this is a new problem.  Alberto and I have decided to get Alex/someone involved in this, because we've exhausted our ideas. 

Today Alex came over, performed his magic rituals on the DAQAWG computer and fixed it. Now it's up and running again.

I asked him what he did, but he's not sure of what fixed it. He couldn't remember exactly but he said that he poked around, did something somewhere somehow, maybe he tinkered with tpman and eventually the computer went up again.

Now everything is fine.

Today, I moved the router from on top of the PSL into the control room in order to perform dark field tests on the GC650 (which I also moved).  The GC750 along with the lens that was on it and the mount it was on has been lent to Ricardo's lab for the time being.  I successfully triggered the GC650 externally and I also characterized the average electronic noise.  For exposure times less than 1 microsecond, the average noise contribution appears to be a constant 15 on a 12-bit scale.

Since lately the alignment of the input beam to the interferometer has changed, I went checking the alignment of the beam on the photodiodea. They were all fine except for pd9, that is AS DD 199. Here the DC is totally null. The beam seems to go right on the diode but the scope on the PD's DC output shows no power. This is really strange and bad.

Alex and Steve,

SunFire x4600 ( not  MEGATRON 2 , it is fb40m2 ) and JetStor ( 16 x 1 TB drives ) were installed on side rails at the bottom of 1Y6

We cleaned up the fibres and cabling in 1Y7 also

So, I actually took these measurements last week, but I didn't get around to making nice plots and things until now. I figured the time while I wait for the spectrum analyzer to do its thing was a good time.

Having been unable to locate the SR785 and also unsure how to connect it to a computer speaker (and also unable to find a free one), I downloaded a demo of a function generator onto my computer and just used that. (Same thing I used to do the swept sine that created the frequency power response plots I posted last week.) I set the program to a number of different frequencies and had the other end of the cable hooked into the oscilloscope to see a) if I could pick out the frequency and b) see how the magnitude of the microphone output varied with the frequency.

The first set of measurements I took, I didn't realize that I could increase the output power of the function generator. Because the generated sound at the default setting was relatively quiet, the oscilloscope traces were pretty chaotic, so I usually froze the trace so that I could look at it better. I ended up with a lot of weird jumps in the magnitude, but I later realized that there was a lot of beating going on at some frequencies, and the amplitude changes were probably much more drastic for the -20 dB sounds than the 6 dB sounds, since it was closer in amplitude to the surrounding noises. So, I've included that data set in my plots for the sake of completeness, but I'm pretty sure that it is useless.

Once I realized I could increase the power output for the signal generator, I took a set of data with and without the voltage divider at 6 dB. There was a cluster of frequencies that showed significant beating around 1700-3000 Hz in the data WITH the voltage divider, but I did not see any clear beating in the data WITHOUT. In the plots, I simply plotted up the highest and lowest amplitudes I measured for the frequencies with significant beating, since it was obviously hard to tell what the amplitude would have been without any background noise. In the w/o volt. div. set, although I didn't see any obvious beat patterns, the measured amplitudes did jump slightly at the frequencies that showed beats with the voltage divider. So, perhaps I was just not seeing them, but they influenced my amplitude measurements? I'm not sure if it would be possible for the voltage divider itself to cause beat frequencies.

 (Note: the amplitudes measured were from zero to peak, as the oscilloscope I was using wouldn't show a big enough vertical range to easily measure the peak-to-peak voltage difference.)

I've attached two plots of my measurements. One has a regular x-scale and includes all the measurements. The second has a logarithmic x-scale and omits the 20 Hz points. I had some troubles being able to pick out the 20 Hz signal on the oscilloscope... I don't know if my computer speakers just don't work well at that frequency or what, but either way, those points seemed highly suspect, and omitting them from the log plot allowed me to spread things out more.

One thing I'm not sure about is the 3000 Hz point. It was one of the ones with a beat frequency (~130 Hz), and the amplitudes were pretty low. The corresponding point from the non-voltage-divider data set is also low. So, I'm not sure what's happening there.

The one thing that I do think is quite clear is that the 1000 Hz drop-off in power when the microphone is connected to the ADC has nothing to do with the voltage divider. Beat issues aside, the shapes are very similar (pay no attention to the absolute scale... obviously, the voltage responses with and without the voltage divider were very different, and I just scaled them to fit in the same plot).

Update: Jenne pointed out that I was not absolutely clear about the voltage scale in my plots. The GREEN and BLUE points are on a mV scale, and the RED points are on a 10mV scale. I should probably redo the plots in Matlab in eventuality, since Excel is hard to use if you want to do anything that is not extremely basic with your plots, but this was my solution for the time being. So, the fact that the RED points, which are the data taken WITHOUT the voltage divider, are lower than the GREEN ones does not in any way indicate that I measured lower voltages when the voltage divider was not used.

Also, a to do list:

- Many of the beat frequencies I picked out were veeeeery slow, indicating that something is going at a frequency that is very close to the arbitrary frequencies I chose to sample, which is a little strange. That, combined with the fact that I saw clear beats with the voltage divider but not without leads me to believe that it may be worth investigating the frequency response of the voltage divider itself.

- Redo the measurements near the anomalous 3000 Hz point with a higher density of sampled frequencies to try to see what the heck is going on there.

The fb40m just went out of order with status indicator number 8

It recovered on its own five minutes later.

It's railed.  This is what halted locking progess on Monday night, as this channel is used for the offloadMCF script, which slowly feeds back a CARM signal to the ETMs to prevent the VCO from saturating.

Attached is a 5 day trend, which shows that the channel went dead a few days ago.  All the channels shown are being collected from the same ICS110B (I think), but only some are dead.  It looks like they went dead around the time of the "All computers down" from Sunday.

This week I've been working on testing the first version of the prototype circuit. Initially, I tested the circuit that I built last week, which had resistors in the place of the transformer. The magnitude and phase of the transfer function, as measured by the Agilent 4395A, are shown in the attached plot (first plot, MeasuredTransferFunction_R.jpg). The transfer function doesn't look like the simulated transfer function (second plot, BuiltCkt_ExpectedResponse.png), but I think I see the three peaks at least (although they're at the wrong frequencies). I spent some time trying to recreate the actual transfer function using LTSpice, and I think it's reasonable that the unexpected response could be created by extra inductance, resistance, capacitance and interaction between components.

When the transformer arrived  yesterday, I replaced the resistors in the circuit with the transformer, and I have measured the following response (last plot, MeasuredTransferFunction.jpg). The gain is much lower than for the circuit with the resistors; however, I am still trying to track down loose connections, since the measured transfer function seems very sensitive to jiggled wires and connections.

Meanwhile, the parts for a flying-component prototype circuit have been ordered, and when they arrive, I'll build that to see if it works a little better.

After inspecting PD9 with the viewer and the cards, the beam looks like it is aligned to the photodiode althought there is no signal at the DC output of the photodetector. So I checked the spectrum for PD9_i and Q (see attachments) and it seems that those channels are actually seeing the beam. I'm going to check the alignemtn again and see the efefct on the spectra to make sure that the beam is really hitting the PD.

I've spent most of the last week working on finishing up the UCSD calculations, comparing it to the EUCLID design, and thinking about getting started with a prototype and modelling in MATLAB.  Attached is something on EUCLID/UCSD sensors.

Lately, I have been able to externally trigger the camera using a signal generator passing through the op-amp circuit that I built.  The op-amp circuit stabilizes the jitter in the sine wave from the signal generator and rectifies the wave.  I wrote the calculations into the code allowing me to find the phase and amplitude from the images I take.  I still need to develop code that will plot these arrays of phase and amplitude.

The mysterious dark band at the top of the ccd images continues to defy explanation.  However, I have found that it only appears for short exposure times even when the lens is completly covered.  During the next couple of days, I will try to write a routine to correct for this structure in the dark field.

Koji recommended that we use the optical setup pictured below.  This configuration would require fewer optics and we would have to rely on slight misalignments between the carrier and reference beams to test the effectiveness of the phase camera instead of a wavefront-deforming lens.

Yet again, the DAQAWG flipped out for an unknowable reason.  In order of restart activities listed on the Wiki, I keyed the crate and nothing really happened, then I hit the physical reset button and nothing happened, and then I did the 'telnet....vmeBusReset', and a couple minutes later, it was all good again.

I talked with Zach. So this is just a note for the others.

The setup I suggested was totally equivalent with the setup proposed in the entry http://131.215.115.52:8080/40m/1721, except that the PLL PD sees not only 29.501MHz, but also 1kHz and 59.001MHz. These additional beating are excluded by the PD and the PLL servo. In any case the beating at 1kHz is present at the camera. So if you play with the beamsplitter alignment you will see not only the perfect Gaussian picture, but also distorted picture which is resulted by mismatching of the two wave fronts. That's the fun part!

The point is that you can get an equivalent type of the test with fewer optics and fewer efforts. Particularly, I guess the setup would not be the final goal. So, these features would be nice for you.

Using FET probes, I was able to measure a transfer function that looks a little more like what I expected. There are only two peaks, but I think this can be explained by a short between the two capacitors (and two tunable capacitors) in the LC pairs, as shown (in red) in the circuit diagram attached. The measured transfer function (black), along with the simulated transfer functions with (red) and without (blue) the short are shown in the attached plot. The measured transfer function doesn't look exactly like the simulated transfer function with the short, but I think the difference can be explained by stray impedances.

 I aligned PD9. Here are the spectra confirming that.

 Backup script restarted, backup of trend frames and /cvs/cds is up-to-date.

I made and tested a female-to-female TRS(audio)-RNC cable. It only has a single channel, so it won't work for stereo speakers or anything, but I should only need one speaker for testing the microphones. The tip of the plug is the signal, the sleeve is ground, and the ring is null.

 Attached are the channels being recorded from the ICS110B in 1Y2 (the IOO rack).  Channels 12, 13, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25 appear to have gone dead after the computer problems on Sunday.

 This has been fixed by one of the two most powerful & useful IFO debugging techniques: rebooting.  I keyed the crate in 1Y2.

I've been trying for most of the week to get noise measurements on the output of the Guralp box as well as scross the AD640 chip. The measurements haven't really been making sense, and, being at a loss as to what else I should try, I decided to redo the resistors on the N/S 2 and E/W 2 channels. (I had been comparing the VERT1 and VERT2 channels, as VERT1 has been restuffed and VERT2 has not.) I don't need all three of the second set of channels to do more measurements, so it seemed like a good use of time.

The first thing I noticed was that the VERT2 channel was missing two resistors (R24 and R25). I probably should have noticed this sooner, as they are right by the output points I had been measuring across, but it didn't occur to me that anyone did anything to the VERT2 channel at all. So, probably the measurements on VERT2 are no good.

Note the existence of 100 kOhm resistors on the top channel, and none on the bottom channel (VERT2).

Then, while I was soldering in some 100 Ohm resistors, I happened to notice that the resistors I was using had a different number (1001) on them than the corresponding ones on the already redone channels (1003). I checked the resistance, and the ones on the already redone channels turned out to be 100 kOhm resistors, rather than 100 Ohms. So, I double checked the circuit diagram to make sure that I had read it correctly, and there were a number of resistors that had been relabeled as 100 Ohms and several relabeled as 100 kOhms. On the board, however, they were ALL 100 kOhms. Clearly, one of them is wrong, and I suspect that it is the circuitboard, but I don't know for sure.

The diagram clearly shows that R6 should be a 100k resistor, while R5 and R8 should be 100 Ohm resistors, but they are all the same (100k) on the board. I suspect this may have something to do with larger-than-expected noise measurements. But, it's possible the diagram is wrong, not the board. In any case, I didn't really know what to do, since I wasn't sure which was right, so I just replaced all the resistors I was sure about and removed the 100k and 100 Ohm resistors without replacing them with anything. Incidentally, the box of 100kOhm resistors seems to be missing, so I wouldn't have been able to finish those anyway.

 Apparently I broke this when I added op540m to the webstatus page.  It's fixed now.

 APC Smart-UPS (uninterruptible power supply) batteries RBC12 replaced at 1Y8 vacuum rack.

Their life span were 22 months.

I found the alignment biases for the PRM and the SRM in a funny state.  It seemed like they had been "saved" in badly misaligned position, so the restore scripts on the IFO configure screen were not working.  I've manually put them into a better alignment.