What was the point:

I twiddled with several different things this evening to increase the power into the Mode Cleaner.  The goal was to have enough power to be able to see the arm cavity flashes on the CCD cameras, since it's going to be a total pain to lock the IFO if we can't see what the mode structure looks like.

Summed-up list of what I did:

* Found the MC nicely aligned.  Did not ever adjust the MC suspensions.

* Optimized MC Refl DC, using the old "DMM hooked up to DC out" method.

* Removed the temporary BS1-1064-33-1025-45S that was in the MC refl path, and replaced it with the old BS1-1064-IF-2037-C-45S that used to be there.  This undoes the temporary change from elog 3878.  Note however, that Yuta's elog 3892 says that the original mirror was a 1%, not 10% as the sticker indicates. The temporary mirror was in place to get enough light to MC Refl while the laser power was low, but now we don't want to fry the PD.

* Noticed that the MCWFS path is totally wrong.  Someone (Yuta?) wanted to use the MCWFS as a reference, but the steering mirror in front of WFS1 was switched out, and now no beam goes to WFS2 (it's blocked by part of the mount of the new mirror). I have not yet fixed this, since I wasn't using the WFS tonight, and had other things to get done.  We will need to fix this.

* Realigned the MC Refl path to optimize MC Refl again, with the new mirror.

* Replaced the last steering mirror on the PSL table before the beam goes into the chamber from a BS1-1064-33-1025-45S to a Y1-45S.  I would have liked a Y1-0deg mirror, since the angle is closer to 0 than 45, but I couldn't find one.  According to Mott's elog 2392 the CVI Y1-45S is pretty much equally good all the way down to 0deg, so I went with it.  This undoes the change of keeping the laser power in the chambers to a nice safe ~50mW max while we were at atmosphere.

* Put the HWP in front of the laser back to 267deg, from its temporary place of 240deg.  The rotation was to keep the laser power down while we were at atmosphere.  I put the HWP back to the place that Kevin had determined was best in his elog 3818.

* Tried to quickly align the Xarm by touching the BS, ITMX and ETMX.  I might be seeing IR flashes (I blocked the green beam on the ETMX table so I wouldn't be confused.  I unblocked it before finishing for the night) on the CCD for the Xarm, but that might also be wishful thinking.  There's definitely something lighting up / flashing in the ~center of ETMX on the camera, but I can't decide if it's scatter off of a part of the suspension tower, or if it's really the resonance.  Note to self:  Rana reminds me that the ITM should be misaligned while using BS to get beam on ETM, and then using ETM to get beam on ITM.  Only then should I have realigned the ITM.  I had the ITM aligned (just left where it had been) the whole time, so I was making my life way harder than it should have been.  I'll work on it again more today (Tuesday). 

What happened in the end:

The MC Trans signal on the MC Lock screen went up by almost an order of magnitude (from ~3500 to ~32,000).  When the count was near ~20,000 I could barely see the spot on a card, so I'm not worried about the QPD.  I do wonder, however, if we are saturating the ADC. Suresh changed the transimpedance of the MC Trans QPD a while ago (Suresh's elog 3882), and maybe that was a bad idea? 

Xarm not yet locked. 

Can't really see flashes on the Test Mass cameras. 

I undid Yuta's temporary setup, and put beam back on both WFS.  Since Koji had just aligned the Mode Cleaner, I centered the beam on the WFS using the WFS QPD screen, while watching the WFS Head screen, to make sure that the beam was actually hitting the QPD, and not off in lala land. 

[Kiwamu, Jenne]

We successfully aligned the X arm.  No big deal.  Nothing to write in giant colorful letters about.  If we thought it was tricky, we'd be excited.  But since we're rockstar grad students, we can do this anytime, with one hand behind our back.

The details:

Earlier this evening, Kiwamu put a PD at the dark port.  After starting with the usual steering beams around and approximately centering them by finding the beam on the SUS tower, we saw that we could see the fringes on a 'scope hooked up to the dark port's new PD.  We could make the dip in the scope trace go away by misaligning the ETM, so we were confident that it was due to some kind of resonance in the arm.  We then fine-tuned our beam centering by moving the optics in either pitch or yaw until the fringe went away, wrote down the number, then moved the other direction until the fringe went away, and then put the optic back in the middle of those two numbers.  We did the ETM first, then the ITM (because the beam on the PD is sensitive to the ITM pointing, so we didn't want to have to move the ITM very far).  We saw that the cavity had a visibility of ~56% when we had finished with this method.

We then went to look for the flashes transmitted through the ETM.  We were not able to see them on a card, but when we looked with an IR viewer at the back face of the ETM, we could see the flashes. We stole a spare CCD camera found on the PSL table, and the camera power supply from the RefCav Refl camera, and set up a CCD camera with telephoto lens on the ETMX Trans table, looking directly at the back of the ETM.  We hooked the camera up to the regular ETMX camera cable, so we can see the flashes in the control room.  You can see them here:

While the cavity was aligned, here were the slider positions:

Correct.  We can see the flashes clearly on our new ETM camera, but we see absolutely nothing on the ITM.

Unfortunately, the camera is in the path of the green beam, so we'll have to figure out a more permanent plan.  Right now the laser at the end is shuttered.

Measuring the power now....

[Kiwamu, Jenne]

We have a measely 465mW going into the MC.  We lose a boatload of power on the PZT mirror that is part of the last zigzag for steering into the MC.  Just before this mirror, we measure 1.21W .  Just after this mirror, we measure ~475mW.  Then a teeny bit gets picked off for the PSL POS/ANG.  But we're losing a factor of 3 on this one mirror.  Need to fix!!!!!!!!!

[Kiwamu, Jenne]

We went this evening in search of a beat note signal between the Xarm transmitted green light and the PSL doubled green light. 

First, we removed our new ETMX camera (we left the mount so it should be easy to put back) from the other day.   We left the test masses exactly where they had been while flashing for IR, so even though we can no longer confirm, we expect that the IR beam axis hasn't changed.  We used the steering mirror on the end table to align the green beam to the cavity.  We turned on the loop to lock the end laser to the cavity, and achieved green lock of the arm.

Then we went to the PSL table to overlap the arm transmitted light with the PSL doubled light.  We made a few changes to the optics that take the arm transmitted light over to the PD.  We found that the arm transmitted light was very high, so we changed from having one steering mirror to having 3 (for table space / geometry reasons we needed 3, not just 2) in order to lower the beam axis.  We also found that the spot size of the arm transmitted beam was ~2x too small, so we changed the mode matching telescope from a 4x reducer to a 2x reducer by changing the 2nd lens from f=50mm to f=100mm (the first lens is f=200mm).  We made the arm transmitted beam and the PSL green beam overlap, but we saw no peak on the spectrum analyzer. 

We checked the temperature of the PSL and end lasers, and determined that we needed to adjust the set temp of the end laser.  However, we still didn't find any beat note.

We then tweaked the temperature of the doubling oven at the end station, to maximize the power transmitted, since Kiwamu said that that had worked in the past.  Alas, no success tonight.

We're stopping for the evening, with the success of reacquiring green lock of the Xarm.

[Larisa and Jenne]

We wanted to get rid of the awkward cart that was sitting behind the 1Y1 rack.  This cart was supplying a +5V offset to the PZT driver, so that we could use the MC length signal to feedback to lock the laser to the MC cavity.  Instead, we put the offset on the last op amp before the servo out on the Mc Servo Board.  Because we wanted +5V, but the board only had +5, +15, -15V as options, and we needed -5 to add just before the op amp (U40 in the schematic), because the op amp is using regular negative feedback, we made a little voltage divider between -15V and GND, to give ourselves -5V.  We used the back side of the voltage test points (where you can check to make sure that you're actually getting DC voltage on the board), and used a 511Ohm and 1.02kOhm resistor as a voltage divider. 

Then we put a 3.32kOhm resistor in ~"parallel" to R124, which is the usual resistor just before the negative input of the op amp.  Our -5V goes to our new resistor, and should, at the output, give us a +5V offset. 

Sadly, when we measure the actual output we get, it's only +2.3V.  Sadface.

We went ahead and plugged the servo out into the PZT driver anyway, since we had previously seen that the fluctuation when the mode cleaner is locked was much less than a volt, so we won't run into any problems with the PZT driver running into the lower limit (it only goes 0-10V).

Suresh has discovered that the op amp that we're looking at, U40 on the schematic, is an AD829, which has an input impedance of a measely 13kOhm.  So maybe the 3.32kOhm resistors that we are using (because that's what had already been there) are too large.  Perhaps tomorrow I'll switch all 3 resistors (R119, R124, and our new one) to something more like 1kOhm.  But right now, the MC is locked, and I'm super hungry, and it's time for some arm locking action.

I've attached the schematic.  The stuff that we fitzed with was all on page 8.

My goal this afternoon was to measure the quantum efficiency of the MC WFS.  In the process of doing this, I discovered that when I reverted a change in the MCWFS path (see elog 4107 re: this change), I had not checked the max power going to the WFS when the MC unlocks.

Current status:

MC locks (is locked now).  No light going to WFS at all (to prevent MC WFS french-fry action).  Quantum Efficiency measured.

The Full Story:

Power to WFS:

Rana asked me to check out the quantum efficiency of the WFS, so that we can consider using them for aLIGO.  This involves measuring the power incident on the PDs, and while doing so, I noticed that WFS1 had ~160mW incident and WFS2 had ~240mW incident while the mode cleaner was unlocked.  This is bad, since they should have a max of ~10mW ever.  Not that 200mW is going to destroy the PD immediately, but rather the current out, with the 100V bias that the WFS have, is a truckload of power, and the WFS were in fact getting pretty warm to the touch.  Not so good, if things start melting / failing due to extended exposure to too much heat.

The reason so much power was going to the WFS is that it looks like Yuta/Koji et. al., when trying to use the WFS as a MC1 oplev, changed out 2 of the beam splitters in the MC WFS / MC Refl path, not just one.  Or, we've just been crispy-frying our WFS for a long time.  Who knows?  If it is option A, then it wasn't elogged.  The elog 3878 re: BS changeout only mentions the change of one BS.

Since the MC Refl path has a little more than ~1W of power when the MC is unlocked, and the first BS (which was reverted in elog 4107) is a 10% reflector, so ~100mW goes to the MC Refl PD, and ~900mW goes to the MC WFS path.  In front of a Black Hole beam dump was sitting a BS1-33, so we were getting ~300mW reflected to be split between the 2 WFS, and ~600mW dumped.  The new plan is to put a W2 window in place of this BS1-33, so that we get hopefully something like 0.1% reflected toward the WFS, and everything else will be dumped.  I could not find a W2-45S (everything else is S, so this needs to be S as well).  I found a bunch of W2-0deg, and a few W2-45P.  Does anyone have a secret stash of W2-45S's???  To avoid any more excessive heat just in case, for tonight, I have just left out this mirror entirely, so the whole MC WFS beam is dumped in the Black Hole.  The WFS also have aluminum beam dumps in front of them to prevent light going in.  None of this affects the MC Refl path, so the MC can still lock nice and happily.

Quantum Efficiency Measurement:

I refer to Jamie's LHO elog for the equation governing quantum efficiency of photodiodes: LHO 2 Sept 2009

The information I gathered for each quadrant of each WFS was: [1] Power of light incident on PD (measured with the Ophir power meter), [2] Power of light reflected off the PD (since this light doesn't get absorbed, it's not part of the QE), and [3] the photo current output by the PD (To get this, I measured the voltage out of the DC path that is meant to go to EPICS, and backed out what the current is, based on the schematic, attached). 

I found a nifty 25 pin Dsub breakout board, that you can put in like a cable extension, and you can use clip doodles to look at any of the pins on the cable.  Since this was a PD activity, and I didn't want to die from the 100V bias, I covered all of the pins I wasn't going to use with electrical tape.  After turning down the 100V Kepco that supplies the WFS bias, I stuck the breakout board in the WFS.  Since I was able to measure the voltage at the output of the DC path, if you look at the schematic, I needed to divide this by 2 (to undo the 2nd op amp's gain of 2), and then convert to current using the 499 Ohm resistor, R66 in the 1st DC path.  

I did all 4 quadrants of WFS1 using a 532nm laser pointer, just to make sure that I had my measurement procedure under control, since silicon PDs are nice and sensitive to green.  I got an average QE of ~65% for green, which is not too far off the spec of 70% that Suresh found.

I then did all 8 WFS quadrants using the 1064nm CrystaLaser #2, and got an average QE of ~62% for 1064 (58% if I exclude 2 of the quadrants....see below).  Statistics, and whatever else is needed can wait for tomorrow.

Problem with 2 quadrants of WFS2?

While doing all of this, I noticed that quadrants 3 and 4 of WFS2 seem to be different than all the rest.  You can see this on the MEDM screens in that all 6 other quadrants, when there is no light, read about -0.2, whereas the 2 funny quadrants read positive values.  This might be okay, because they both respond to light, in some kind of proportion to the amount of light on them.  I ended up getting QE of ~72% for both of these quadrants, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense since the spec for green is 70%, and silicon is supposed to be less good for infrared than green.  Anyhow, we'll have to meditate on this.  We should also see if we have a trend, to check how long they have been funny.

The MC WFS have had beam dumps in front of them for the past ~2 weeks, until I could find the appropriate optic to put in the WFS path, to avoid melting the WFS' electronics. 

Koji noted that Steve had a W2-45S in a secret stash near his desk (which Steve later had put into the regular optics storage shelves down the Yarm), so I used that in front of the black hole beam dump on the AS table.  Now the beam is ~1W reflected from the unlocked mode cleaner, and ~100mW goes to the MC REFL PD.  The other 900mW now goes to this W2, and only ~5mW is reflected toward the MC WFS.  Most of the 900mW is transmitted through the window and dumped in the black hole.  There is a ghost beam which is reflected off the back surface of the wedged window, and I have blocked this beam using a black anodized aluminum dump.  I will likely change this to a razor dump if space on the table allows.  I have aligned the beam onto WFS1 and WFS2, although I did not re-align the mode cleaner first, so this alignment of the WFS will likely need to be redone. 

WFS1 has about 2mW incident, and WFS2 has about 3mW incident, when the mode cleaner is unlocked.  I have not yet measured the power incident when the MC is locked, although obviously it will be much smaller.

Except that I might temporarily remove one of the WFS for more quantum efficiency measurements later today, the WFS should be ready to turn back on for alignment stabilization of the mode cleaner. 

Back in the days when we were talking about getting a new 2W PSL, I was given naming rights by Rana for this new laser. 

Today, the 40m PSL was given its new name: Edwin.

Here he is, with his shiny new label:

Mystery solved!

I removed WFS2 from the AP table (after placing markers so I can put it back in ~the same place) so that I could take some reflectivity as a function of angle measurements for aLIGO WFS design stuff.

I was dismayed to discover, upon glancing at the diode itself, that half of the diode is covered with some kind of oil!!!.  The oil is mostly confined to quadrants 3 and 4, which explains the confusion with their quantum efficiency measurements, as well as why the readback values on the MEDM WFS Head screen for WFS2 don't really make sense. 

The WFS QPD has a piece of glass protecting the diode itself, and the oil seems to be on top of the glass, so I'm going to use some lens tissue and clean it off.

Pre-cleaning photos are on Picasa.

Update:  I tried scrubbing the glass with a Q-tip soaked with Iso, and then one soaked in methanol.  Both of these failed to make any improvement.  I am suspicious that perhaps whatever it is, is underneath the glass, but I don't know.  Rana suggested replacing the diode, if we have spares / when we order some spares.

I sat down in the control room to find that ETMX and PRM's watchdogs had been tripped.  I don't know how long they've been crazy, but there was a big something that showed up in the seismometers around 16:30UTC, or ~11:30 this morning.  I don't find any significant earthquakes on the USGS site for that time though, so it might be more local, i.e. work next door or trucks or whatever.

I take back the suggestion that it was that seismic event.  Clearly the PRM and the ETMX were kicked at different times, neither of which is the same as the seismic action. Mystery.  You can see they have been ringing down for a while though, which is neat. 

I did a yum-install of the latest ldg-client (to get onto the LIGO Clusters) on Rossa. 

I followed the instructions on the wiki page, and everything seemed to work nicely.

I think the new ldg client installs somewhere on the local computer, so if anyone wants cluster access on any other computer, they should follow the same directions.

Using a stray beam that is generated as the transmitted green beam from the Xarm goes through the viewport to the PSL table, I installed a fast lens (because I was constrained for space) and a Thorlabs PDA36 photodiode on the PSL table.

The BNC cable runs along the edge of the PSL table, up the corner hole with the huge bundle of cables, and over to IOO_ADC_0. It's channel 3 on the simulink model, which means that it is plugged into connector #4.

With the green resonating TEM00, I have ~1.4V output from the photodiode, as seen on a voltmeter. This corresponds to ~1500 counts on the MEDM screen.

Note to self:  Switch to a ~1cm diode with a boatload of gain (either from the 40m or Bridge), and use transmission through a steering mirror of the actual beat note path, not the jittery viewport pickoff.  Want RIN noise level to be about 1e-5, only care about below ~100Hz so don't need broadband.

[Larisa and Jenne]

A few weeks ago (on the 28th of January) I had tried to measure the quantum efficiency of one quadrant of the WFS as a function of angle.  However, Rana pointed out that I was a spaz, and had forgotten to put a lens in front of the laser.  Why I forgot when doing the measurement as a function of angle, but I had remembered while doing it at normal incidence for all of the quadrants, who knows?

Anyhow, Larisa measured the quantum efficiency today.  She used WFS2, quadrant 1 (totally oil-free), since that was easier than WFS1.  She also used the Jenne Laser (with a lens), since it's more stable and less crappy than the CrystaLasers.  We put a 50 Ohm terminator on the RF input of the Jenne Laser, since we weren't doing a swept sine measurement.  Again, the Ophir power meter was used to measure the power incident on the diode, and the reflected power, and the difference between them was used as the power absorbed by the diode for the quantum efficiency measurement.  A voltmeter was used to measure the output of the diode, and then converted to current as in the quote below. 

Still on the to-do list:  Replace the WFS2 diode.  See if we have one around, otherwise order one.  Align beams onto WFS so we can turn on the servo.

QE = (h*c)/(lambda*e) * (I/P)

Where I = (Volts from Pin1 to GND)/2 /500ohms
P = Power from laser - power reflected from diode.
h, c, e are the natural constants, and lambda is 1064nm.

Also, I/P = Responsivity

Larissa is going to put her data and plots into the elog shortly....

Just in case anyone has encountered this / knows how to fix it....

I'm running NDS2 on Rossa, trying to get a bunch of raw data from S5.  I get 10min of data at a time, and it goes through ~200 iterations successfully, and then throws the following error:

Getting new data
Connecting.... authenticate ... done
daq_recv_id: Wrong length read (0)
Error reading writerID in daq_recv_block
Warning: daq_request_data failed
 
??? Error using ==> NDS2_GetData
Fatal Error getting channel data.

Error in ==> getDARMdataTS at 37
oot = NDS2_GetData({...

Error in ==> SaveRawData_H1_DARM at 40
    oot = getDARMdataTS(t0s(ii), strideDuration, srate);

[Valera, Jenne]

After Steve and Valera switched out the PMC, the Mode Cleaner resonance needed to be brought back.  We spent some time playing with the 2 steering mirrors directly after the PMC, to get the beam through the EOM, and to achieve flashing in the MC.  Valera then adjusted those 2 steering mirrors to minimize MC_REFL_DC.  I did a little bit more, and it's kind of close now, but we're only at ~half normal transmitted power.  Since the 2 steering mirrors after the PMC are so close together, the beam alignment is pretty sensitive to even small touches.  So it's probably time to move on to using the last zigzag steering mirrors on the PSL table, since they're farther apart. 

I have to head out for a little while, but I'll be back in a few hours. Kiwamu said he might continue the alignment into the MC, if he needs the IFO.  Also, we should measure the power before and after the EOM, just to confirm that we're getting through it optimally.  The beam looks good after the EOM, and the MC is resonating, so it should be fine, but it can't hurt to check.

So.... Kiwamu and I were concerned (still a little concerned) that ETMY is not damping as nicely as it should be.  (It's fine, but the UL rms is ~5, rather than ~1 or less. BURT restores by Kiwamu didn't change anything.) Anyhow, I was heading out to push the annoying ribbon cables more firmly into the satellite adapter board things that are tied to the racks in various places (The back of 1X5 for the corner optics and the end station racks for the ETMs).  The point was to push in the ETMY one, but while I was out in the lab and thinking about it, I also gave all of the corner connectors (MC1, MC2, MC3, ITMx, ITMY, BS, PRM, SRM) a firm push. 

Kiwamu noticed that when I did this, the Mode Cleaner alignment got a little bit worse, as if the connection to the satellite adapter boards hadn't been great, I pushed the connectors in and the connection got better, but we also got a bit of a DC offset in the MC alignment.  Anyhow, the MC_TRANS power went down by ~2, to about the place it had been before Kiwamu adjusted the position of the lens in between the zigzag mirrors.  (I don't know if Kiwamu elogged it earlier, but he scooted the lens a teensy bit closer in the optical path to the Mode Cleaner). 

To counteract this loss in MC transmitted power as a result of my connector actions, I went back to the PSL table and fiddled with the zigzag steering mirrors that steer the beam from the PSL table over to the mode cleaner.  I got it a little better, but it's still not perfect.

Kiwamu has noted that to improve the mode matching into the Mode Cleaner with the new PMC in place, we might have to move the lens which is currently between the zigzag steering mirrors, and put it after the second mirror (so in between the last steering mirror and the pickoff window that sends a piece of the beam over to PSL_POS and PSL_ANG).  This will make the waist between MC1 and MC3 tighter. 

Moral of the story:  To improve IMC mode matching we need to move the last lens closer in the optical path to the mode cleaner waist. Twiddle with zigzag steering mirrors to optimize.

I worked a little bit more on optimizing the mode matching to the MC, but it's still not great.  I've only gotten a visibility of ~45%, but Koji said that it used to be ~87%.  So there is a long way to go.  Kiwamu said he can work with the lower-power configuration for a few days, and so my next step will be to measure the beam profile (stick a window in the path, and look at the refl from the window....that way we don't get thermal lensing from transmission through an optic), and redo the mode matching calculation, to figure out where the last lens should actually sit.

Just in case anyone else wants to access it, we now have 30 days of H1 S5 DARM data sitting on Rossa's harddrive.  It's in 10min segments.  This is handy because if you want to try anything, particularly Wiener Filtering, now we don't have to wait around for the data to be fetched from elsewhere.

 I'm going to take the easy question - What are the pink data points??

I (think) I have finished the new PMC base riser.  The eDrawing of it (so you can view it on any computer) has been uploaded to the PMC wiki page.

I also attach it here, for comments.

 Hmmm, so, this was just meant to be a riser that goes underneath the old PMC mount, to raise it from 3" beam height to 4" beam height.  I will make another one that is a complete mount, designed for 4" beam height.  Please hold........... .......... ....... ..... ... .

I unpacked the STS2 seismometers that we borrowed from LLO.  They are sitting underneath the Xarm, in the middle of the mode cleaner, near the other seismometer stuff. 

 Nope.  I know I had the right address, and it was down for me too all weekend.  It's better now though.  blue.ligo-wa.caltech.edu was up though.

I modified C1LSC.mdl to use the CDSphase blocks, which automatically calculate the R and D phase rotation for us.  Now each of the RFPDs has 2 channels in place of the old IQ_MTRX channels:  C1:LSC-RFPD_PHASE_R and C1:LSC-RFPD_PHASE_D.

I have not yet compiled / rebooted / done CDS magic to actually make these installed.  So far the change is only in the simulink model.

I was going to wait until morning to compile/reboot/magic, so I can do it under Joe's supervision.

In the meantime, I also modified the RFPD screens.  They have white boxes for the _R and _D channels just now, but that's because the new model hasn't been put in.  They now look like phase rotators, instead of Koji's temporary matrix.

Still to do:  Find the EPICS database where the phase rotation calculation is done (you give it an angle, it gives you sin(angle) and cos(angle) ).  I want to put a "90-angle" in the database so that we can type in the measured relative phase between I and Q, and it will calculate how many more degrees it needs to get to 90deg. 

eeek.  I've been running around all day, so this is an incomplete elog.  I'll fill in more stuff in the next hour or so, but just to let people know what's going on:

[Valera, Jenne]

Valera noticed that lots of things in and around the PSL table are drifting with temperature.  This is why he and Steve installed a temp sensor on the table earlier today.

Since the alignment into the PMC, and also the alignment downstream of the PMC have been drifting in angle, we supposed that it might be the PMC itself which is changing somehow with temperature.  We don't have a good idea of how exactly it is sensitive to temperature, but we're working on figuring it out.

Round 1 of testing:  We put a foil hat over the PMC to shield it from the HEPA air blowing directly down on top of it.  I made sure that the foil is also covering the PZT and the metal ring at the end of the PMC, because this could potentially be the problem (metal is usually more temperature sensitive than glass, or the PZT itself could be changing, either of which could make the end mirror twist, and change the alignment of the PMC).  We'll see later if this did anything useful or not. 

I have photos of the aluminum foil setup, which I will post later when I get back to the lab after teaching. 

Joe helped me compile the lsc simulink model, and now we have R&D phase rotation.

Right now, we have to do our own math, and figure out what relative phase to put in.  Soonly, I'll figure out how to do subtraction, and we can put in the measured value.

More details when I'm not running around like crazy...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Okie dokie.  Last night I had modified the c1lsc.mdl to accommodate the R & D phase rotation.  I also made pretty new screens.  This morning however, the adventures began.....

Under Joe's supervision, I ran "make c1lsc".  The error that came up was something about things not being connected.  Joe assures me that this is a temporary problem, that Rolf is already working on.  The reason is that right now the LSC model is "flat", i.e. it doesn't have a bunch of sub-boxes and sub-screens in the simulink model.  Somehow this causes badness.  Joe stuck all the guts of the LSC model into a sub-model.  He then enabled "top_names", which makes the channels use the name of the sub-model, not the sub-model AND the main model (so since the sub-model is called LSC, our channels are just C1:LSC-OTHER_STUFF, rather than C1:LSC-LSC_OTHER_STUFF).  This fixed things so that the compiling worked (when we did "make c1lsc").  The one other thing that we changed was to delete all of the little "Outs" that were attached to EPICS readouts.  These are unneccessary and don't go anywhere, and when we made the sub-model, they made a bunch of empty outputs (unconnected outs on the main simulink model).  So, after doing that, we were able to compile, and do "make install-c1lsc", and all was good in the world.  Mostly.

Joe then noticed that I was using the CDS part "cdsPhase", which only takes one phase input.  I wanted "cdswfsPhase", which actually does the R&D phase rotation that we want.  Perhaps Alex/Rolf/whoever should change the name of that CDS part.  We switched all of the cdsPhase blocks to be cdswfsPhase, and recompiled.  All was still good in the world.  Mostly.

The last thing that was funny was that when I wanted to execute the medm screens, they would still look at the old _IQ_MTRX_1_1 and _IQ_MTRX_2_1 values, rather than the newly defined _PHASE_R and _PHASE_D channels, even though while editing the medm screen, it looked like it was pointing to the right place.  Anyhow, I opened the text file version of the C1LSC_PDX.adl, and changed the channel names to the _R and _D versions by hand.  I don't know if we edit the screens and run generate_screens.py again, if we'll have to re-edit the .adl text files.

After fixing this, all really was good in the world. 

Perhaps though, this making a subsystem business broke the filters somehow?  Foton is looking at the wrong text file now?  Something?  The filters are all still there, they just got moved down a level.  Joe said that he and Rolf are on it, and he should be able to put the LSC model back to being "flat" in the next few days.

 See my updated elog 4636 for what Joe and I did this morning, and what a possible problem is (making the LSC model into a sub-model).

I put the ETMY trans QPD in. 

The ETMY trans beam was already going toward the TRY DC PD, and a CCD camera.  I put a beam splitter in that beam (reducing the power to TRY and the CCD by 50%), and sent my picked-off beam to the ETMY QPD.  Since there is a lens in this path to focus the beam onto TRY and the camera, I put the QPD ~the same distance from the lens as the camera.  Due to space requirements (because of all the green stuff on the table now), I had to put a Y1 turning mirror between the beam splitter and the QPD.  The beam is aligned onto the PD, although the signal isn't super strong.  When the PD is blocked, the sum is ~(-92 counts).  When the beam is on the PD, the sum is ~(-78 counts). 

I didn't notice it the other day when I was working on putting in the trans QPD, but do we need to switch the mirror mount for the first turning mirror of the IR trans beam, which the green transmits through to go into the cavity?  It seems like we've set ourselves up for potential clipping.

Aka, from a hotel in Pisa.

I am in the process of calibrating AS55's shot noise, and I noticed that the AS55 PD input to the demod board was only finger-tight.  I then checked all of the other SMA connections in the set of RF PD demod boards, and found several more that were loose, including all of the REFL55 connections.  This is no good!!!! RF connections need to be tightened!  I went through and tightened all of the offending connections with my personal Snap-on SMA wrench. 

 What Larisa meant to post (I'm sure) is something more like this (sorry it's a little squished...I put too many words in the legend):

I've only included the 2 noise contributions from the LISO model that seem to dominate the sum noise.  The plot gets a little crazy if you include all of the non-important sources.

So, what's the point??

First, the new box design doesn't have any crazy-special op-amps in it, so the noise of the new box is probably comparable to the old box.  So, if that's true, the old box may not have been limiting the differential seismic noise.  This definitely needs to be checked out.  I'll make a quickie LISO model of the old Guralp breakout box, to see what its noise actually looks like, according to LISO.  If it wasn't ever the breakout box that was limiting us, what the heck was it??

Second, the current box design seems to be better than the Guralp Spec sheet noise by ~a factor of 10.  It would be nice if that number were more like a factor of 100.  Or at least 30.  So some work needs to be done to find a lower-noise op amp for the voltage buffer (the first op amp in the circuit).

Next steps:

Since Larisa is now starting her SURF project with Tara and Mingyuan, I'll look into improving the design of this box by a factor of 3 or 10. 

Then I'll need to make a mock-up of it, and test it out. 

If successful, then I'll draw it up in Altium and have it made.  Recall that there should be 2 outputs per seismometer channel, one with high gain, one with low gain.  Then 3 seismometer channels per seismometer (X, Y, Z), and perhaps multiple seismometer inputs per box.  So lots and lots of stuff all in the same box.  It's going to be pretty cool.

I would like to announce my confusion with regard to the MICH noise budget, in hopes that someone else has some inspiration. 

If you tilt your head sideways, you will notice that in this plot (totally uncalibrated, as yet), the BLACK trace, which is my white-light measurement of the AS55 shot noise is above the AS55Q noise when the Michelson is locked (true only at low frequency).  You will also notice that the same appears to be true for the Whitening Filter + Antialiasing Filter + ADC noise (GRAY trace).  Since Black, Gray, Pink and Green should all have the same calibration factor (a constant), calibrating the plot will not change this.  Brown and Blue are the MICH_OUT (aka MICH_CTRL) for dark and bright fringes, respectively.

I measure 58mV at the DC out of the AS55 PD when the Michelson is locked on the bright fringe.  This (assuming DC transimpedance of 50ohms) gives 1.16mA of DC photo current.

So.  What is going on here?  Am I totally confused??

In other news, assuming (which I'm not 100% confident about right now) that these traces are vaguely correct, the Michelson is limited by shot noise above ~20Hz.  This is...good?  We want to be shot noise limited.  Do we want to be limited at such a low frequency?

(Also, yes I can calibrate the plot to m/rtHz, but no, I won't tonight because something is funny with my calibration for the free running noise and I'll fix it tomorrow.)

[Jenne, Steve]

After talking with Steve, I had a look at the PEM's AA board, to see what the problem was. 

Steve said the symptom he had noticed was that the Kepco power supplies which supply the +\- 5 V to the AA board were railing at their current limits as soon as he plugged the board in.  Also, he smelled smoke. 

I started with the power supplies, and saw that the 2 individual supplies each had a dV=5V, and that the one labeled +5V had the red wire on the + output of the power supply, and the black wire on the - output.  The supply labeled -5V had the orange wire on the -output of the power suppy, and the black wire on the + output.  Normally, you would expect that the 2 black wires are also connected together, and perhaps also to ground.  But at least together, so that they share a common voltage, and you get +\- 5V.  However these 2 power supplies are not connected together at all. 

This implies that the connection must be made on the AA boards, which I found to be true.  It seems a little weird to me to have that common ground set at the board, and not at the power supplies, but whatever.  That's how it is.

The problem I found is this:  The keyed connectors were made backward, so that if you put them in "correctly" according to the key, you end up shorting the +5V to the -5V, and the 2 black wires are not connected together.  You have to put the keyed connectors in *backwards* in order to get the correct wires to the correct pins on the board.  See the attached pdf figure.

Since these are internal board connections, and they should not ever be changed now that Steve has put in the adapter thing for the SCSI cable, I'm just leaving them as-is.  Steve is going to write in huge letters in sharpie on the board how they're meant to be connected, although since this problem wasn't caught for many many years, maybe it won't ever be an issue again.  Also, we're going to move over to the new Cymac system soon-ish.  However, whomever made the power cable connector from the box to the board for this AA board was lazy and dumb.

After putting the connectors on the way they needed to be, Steve and I powered up the board, hooked up the SCSI cable in the back, and put a constant voltage (~1.3VDC battery) across various different channels, and confirmed that we could see this voltage offset in Dataviewer. (Kiwamu is hoarding both of our SRS function generators, so we couldn't put in a low freq sine wave like I normally would). Everything looked okie dokie, so I'll check the regular PEM channels tomorrow.

Steve will re-install the board in the rack in the morning.

I found the PMC unlocked.  Koji noticed that the FSS Slow Actuator Adjust was railed at the positive end of the slider.  I set it close to zero, and relocked the PMC.  The FSS slow loop servo is doing its thing, and the PMC and MC are now locked. 

I have measured / calculated the latest MICH noise budget.  It doesn't really look all that stellar.

As you can see, we are nowhere near being shot noise limited, since there's a huge discrepancy between all of the measured spectra and the teal Shot Noise line. 

One possible suspect is that the analog whitening filters weren't on when I took my measurements.  I didn't actually check to ensure that they were on, so they might not have been.  Right now we're limited by electronics and other boring noises, so I need to make sure we're limited by the noise of the diode itself (we don't have enough light in the IFO to actually be shot noise limited since that takes 2.5mA for AS55 and I only have 1.1mA, but we should be ~within a factor of 2ish).

 I don't know if this would work, but it might be worth a try:

You've achieved single levitation before, with fairly good stability.  Can you try taking each magnet + coil and finding the DC coil current required to hold a mass at a given position?  If you can hold the same mass at the same place with all the different magnets+coils, then you're exerting the same force against gravity, so your DC forces are balanced. 

While closing up the whitening shop for the night, I noticed that the ITMX whitening state (Whitening "On") is opposite that of all other suspensions (they all have Whitening "Off").  I don't know which way is correct, but I assume they should all be the same.  Once all the whitening and BO testing is done, we should make sure that they're all the way we want them to be.

Also, Koji and I are leaving ETMX free swinging.  That's the way we found it, presumably from Jamie's BO testing at the end station today.  We don't know what the optic's story is, so we're leaving it the way we found it.  Jamie (or whomever left it free swinging), can you please restore it when it is okay to do so?  Thanks!

I have fit all of the LSC whitening filters using vectfit4.m

All the data is in my folder ..../users/jenne/LSC_WhiteningTest_29June2011/

The zpk info is saved with each plot of the fit.  The pdfs are kind of huge to stitch together (or rather my computer doesn't want to do it), so I'll just post a representative one for now.

During the daytime either tomorrow or Friday I'll adjust the actual dewhitening filters to match the measured zpk values.

 I made a handy-dandy table showing the zpk values for each whitening filter in the wiki: New whitening filter page

Next on the whitening filter to-do list: actually put these values into the dewhitening filters in foton.

It was unlocked since ~4:30am.  No idea why.  It's relocked so I can try round N of measuring the PRC length.

There's too much tromping around, so I'm not going to actually measure PRC length right now, but I did set some channels to be acquired (POPDC, POXDC, POYDC) in addition to ASDC which was already acquired, so that I can look at the resonance fringes when I sweep the ABSL laser (hopefully later tonight....)

[Jamie, Jenne]

We decided to take on the deceptively easy-sounding task of checking that the LSC whitening switching was happening as anticipated.  We hoped to discover that when we clicked the "unwhitening" switches in FM1 of the LSC PDs, we would see the analog whitening turn on and off for the matching channel.  That is what is supposed to happen.

Tragically, it is instead one big giant crazy disaster of a mess.

What we did:

Made a 24tapus (octopus like last time, except more...), with a 50kOhm resistor as our white noise source (instead of using a DAC channel and AWG). 

We plugged our 24tapus into the 3 of 4 whitening boards on the LSC rack that are currently in use.  One of the boards just has 8 terminators on the input, so we left that one alone for now. 

We put the whitening gains to 0dB so that all the channels looked the same. 

We looked at the PD _IN1 channels in DTT, and monitored which signals had whitening switching when we clicked the "unwhitening" buttons on the PD filter banks. 

So far, we can find no rhyme or reason as to why some of the channels work (click unwhite on that PD, see that signal have whitening switching), and others don't.  Some channels we just can't get to switch no matter what, others are just mis-mapped.  There is no discernible pattern.

What we think (so far) is going on:

All of the cables from the PD demod boards are going to the Whitening board inputs, exactly as in Suresh's Diagram.  The only difference is that Refl33, AS165 and Refl165 demod boards don't exist in the rack at this time. 

The Whitening and AA boards in Suresh's Diagram labeled 0-7 are connected to Binary Output channels 0-7. This is a good thing.

The Whitening and AA boards in the diagram labeled 8-15 are connected to Binary Output channels 24-31. This is not so awesome.

This is all we are confident about at this time.

Next steps:

We are hoping that Ben has a secret stash (or can tell us who would) of LSC rack wiring diagrams.  We would like to find out, without the pain of tracing wires and cables by hand, how the Binary I/O information gets through the cross-connect on the LSC rack up to the whitening boards. 

We are leaving the 24tapus in place for now, so that we can carry on tomorrow, either with a wiring diagram in hand, or carefully tracing cables. 

[Jenne, Rana]

We had another look at the MICH noise budget tonight. Rana has verified that my techniques / math aren't too ridiculous. 

In the first attachment, you'll notice that the MICH noise is waay above the shot noise of 1mW on the beam splitter.  We don't know why.  One problem is that the modulation depth of the 55MHz is too low by ~a factor of 10.  Kiwamu and his magical resonant circuit are working on fixing this.  This will not, however, fix the huge discrepancy here.  More investigation and meditation is required!  For this measurement, the whitening gain of AS55 was set to 42dB for both I and Q.

In the 2nd attachment, the PSL shutter is closed, so all of these are dark measurements of AS55.  (The input matrix on the LSC screen is AS55Q * 1 -> MICH_IN1, so they're the same).  All we've done is change the whitening gain before the ADC.  For 0dB and 9dB, you can see that the low freq noise didn't change - here we're still limited by the ADC noise.  With 21dB and 42dB we're clear of the ADC, so either is fine.  Unfortunately, the high freq stuff when the loop is on matches up with the high freq part of the dark noise, so that's part of the problem....

Because I'm too lazy to write a cohenrent elog right now, here's my notes that I wrote while working tonight:

Elog notes, 27July2011

Aligned Xarm, just to check on it.  Had to flip sign of TRX in DCPD filter bank (to gain of -1) to make the signal positive.

Restored Yarm, see some slight flashing, but no lock yet.
Adjusted phase rotation of AS55 from 56.5deg to 60deg, just by-eye trying to maximize AS55I, my arm error signal. AS55I goes from ~ -40 to +60 counts

Tried fitzing with Yarm gain, flipping sign, incr gain. No real change in signals, or flashing.

Incr. ETMY oplev gains to -0.4 from -0.2
Engaged ELP35's on Pit and Yaw, to be more similar to other optics.  However, right now all of the optics have different things in their filter banks.  Why??

Arm is flashing pretty reliably now, but still not locking.  The trigger threshold is always satisfied, so that's not it.

The hazardous waste people are moving chemicals around outside our door, and have roped off our regular front door. 

Please go around, and use the control room door to enter and exit.  It is currently unlocked, although I'll lock up when I leave for LIGOX.

I found PRM watchdog tripped.  It's all better now.

So far, this is just preliminary, because I haven't done full error analysis to determine the error on my measurements.  That will hopefully be done by tomorrow afternoon (so before we start taking off doors).

I find that the length of the Xarm is:  37.5918 meters.

I find that the length of the Yarm is:   37.5425 meters.

I used the mass-kicking technique, as summarized by Kiwamu, and fully described by Alberto.  More words / description to follow with the full error analysis.