To aid Jenny's valiant attempt to finish her SURF project, I did some things with the front end system over the last couple days, largely tricking Jamie into doing things for me lest I ruin the 40m RCG system. Several tribulations have been omitted.

We stole a channel in the frontend, in the proccess:

1. Modified the C1GFD simulink model (now analog) to be "ADC -> TMP -> DAC" where TMP is a filter bank
   • C1GFD_TMP.adl (in /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/medm/c1gfd) is the relevant part which connects the ADC to the DAC in the frontend
2. Confirmed that the ADC was working by putting a signal in and seeing it in the frontend
3. Could not get a signal out of the anti aliasing board
4. Looked sad until Kiwamu found a breakout board for the SCSI cable coming from the DAC
5. Used SR560 to buffer DAC output
   • drove a triangle wave with AWG into the TMP EXC channel (100 counts 1 Hz) and looked at it after the ~25 ft of BNC cable running between the DAC and the NRPO driver
   • wave looked funny (not like a triangle wave), maybe the DAC is not meant to push a signal so far, so added buffer
6. Took the control signal going to the fast input of the NPRO driver (using the 500 Ohm SR560 output - see Jenny's diagram) and put it into the anti aliasing board of the ADC
7. Added switchable integrator to filter bank with Foton
   • I couldn't get the names to display in the filter bank, so I looked sad again
   • Jamie and Koji both poked at the "no name displayed" problem but had no conclusions, so I decided to ignore it
   • I confirm that when the two filters were toggled "on" that the transfer function was as expected: simple integrator with a unity gain at ~10mHz - agrees with what Foton's Bode Plot tool says it should be (see attached DTT plot)
8. I got Jamie to manually add the two epics channels from the TMP model to the appropriate .ini file so they would be recorded
   • C1:GFD-TMP_OUTPUT  (16 Hz)
   • C1:GFD-TMP_INMON    (16 Hz)
9. RefCav heater servo seems to still be set up, so we can use existing channels:
   • C1:PSL-FSS_RCPID_SETPOINT (temp setpoint - will do +/-1C steps about 35 C)
   • C1:PSL-FSS_MINCOMEAS (In loop temp sensor - in C)
   • C1:PSL-FSS_RCTEMP (out of loop temp sensor - in C)
   • C1:PSL-FSS_TIDALSET (Voltage to heater - rails @ +/- 2V)
10.  Closed loop on the control signal for the NPRO driver with an integrator, saw error signal go to zero
    • Turned up gain a little bit, saw some oscillations, then turned gain down to stop them, final gain = 2
11. Left system on for Jenny to come in and do step responses

Below are some plots from dataviewer of temperature-step data taken over the past 32 hours. (They show minute trends). I am looking at the thermal coupling from the can surrounding the reference cavity on the PSL table to the cavity itself, and trying to measure the cavity temperature response via the control signal sent to heat the NPRO laser, which is locked to the cavity.

• Top left: out-of-loop temperature sensor on can surrounding ref cav (RCTEMP)
• Top right: control signal sent to slow drive of laser (laser heater), which is supposed to follow the cavity temperature (TMP_OUTPUT)
• Bottom left: in-loop can temperature sensors (MINCOMEAS)
• Bottom right: room temperature reading (RMTEMP)

I stepped the temperature set point from 35 to 36 deg. C for the can at 12:30am last night. Then I waited to see the cavity temperature change and the slow actuator (laser heater: TMP_OUTPUT) follow that change.

I was a bit worried about the oscillations that were occuring in the TMP_OUTPUT signal even long after this temperature step was made, but I figured that they were simply room-temperature changes propagating into the cavity, since they seemed to have a similar pattern to the room-temperature variations, and since it is clear that the out-of-loop temperature sensor on the can (RCTEMP) experiences variations, even when the in-loop sensors are recording no variation.

At 8:46pm tonight I stepped the temperature down 2 degrees to 34 deg. C. The step had a clear effect on TMP_OUTPUT. The voltage to the heater dropped and eventually railed at its lowest output. I'm worried that the loop is unstable, although I haven't ruled out other possibilities, such as that a 2 deg. C temperature step is too large for the loop. I will investigate further in the morning.

 The lock was lost when I came in around noon today to check on it. The slow actuator was still railing.

1) I got lock back for a few minutes, by varying the laser temperature set point manually. TMP_OUTPUT was still reading -30000 cts (minimum allowed) and the transmission was not as high as it had been.

2) I toggled the second filter button off. The TMP_OUTPUT started rising up to ~2000 cts. I then toggled the second filter back on, and TMP_OUTPUT jumped the positive maximum number of counts allowed.

3) I lost the lock again. I turned off the digital output to the slow actuator.

4) I have so far failed at getting the lock back. My main problem is that when the BNC cable to the slow port is plugged in, even when I'm not sending anything to that port, it makes it so that changing the temperature set point manually has almost no effect on the transmission (it looks as though changing the setpoint is not actually changing the temperature, because the monitor shows the same higher order mode even when with +-degree temperature setpoint changes).

I am trying again to measure a temperature step response on the reference cavity on the PSL table.

I have been working to relock the NPRO to the cavity. I unblocked the laser beam, reassembled the setup described in my previous elog entry: 5202. I then did the following:

1) Monitored error signal (from LB1005 PDH servo), transmitted signal, and control signal sent to drive PZT on oscilloscope.

2) With loop open, swept through 0,0-mode resonance, saw a peak in the transmission, saw an accompanying error signal similar to the signal shown in 5202.

3) Tried to lock. Swept the gain on the LB1005 and could not find a gain that would make it lock. Tried changing the PI-corner freq. from 10 kHz to 30 kHz and back and still could not lock.

4) Noticed that the open loop error signal displayed on the scope was DC-offset from zero. Changed the offset to zero the error signal.

5) Tried to lock again and succeeded.

6) Noticed that upon closing the loop, the error signal became offset from zero again. Turning on the integrator on the LB1005 increased DC-offset.

7) Reduced the gain on the SR560 being used as a low pass filter from 5 to 1. Readjusted the open loop error signal offset on the LB1005.

8) Closed the loop and locked. Closing the loop then caused a much smaller DC change in the signal than I had seen with the larger gain (now around 3mV). RMS fluctuations in error signal are now 1 mV (well within the linear region of the error signal).

9) Noticed transmission has a strange distorted harmonic oscillation in it a 1MHz. (Modulation freq is 230kHz, so it's not that). Checked reflected signal and also saw a strange oscillation--in a sawtooth-like pattern.

I intend to

1) Post oscilloscope traces here showing transmitted and reflected signal when locked.

2) Look upstream to see if the sawtooth-like oscillation is in the laser beam before it enters the cavity:

• Sweep the temperature of the laser so that the beam is no longer resonating in the cavity.
• Compare the reflected signal off the cavity to the signal detected before being directed into the cavity (using the PDA255 that I used for measuring the AM response of the PZT) both with and and without the frequency modulation.

3) At some point, try to close the slow digital loop, perhaps readjusting the gain.

4) Try to measure a temperature step response.

I decided to go forward and try to close the digital loop in spite of the unexplained oscillations in the transmission.

1) Plugged the 20dB attenuator into the slow port on the laser drive. This pushed the laser out of lock and, for some reason, made the laser temperature stop responding to sweeping the set point manually with the knob.

2) Plugged the output from the digital system into the slow port (with the attenuator still in place).

3) Displayed the beam seen by the camera on a monitor in the control room

4) Stepped the laser temperature using MEDM until finding the 0,1 mode. Locked to that mode.

5) Closed the digital loop (input to slow laser drive attenuated 20dB attenuator). Gain 0.010

6) Loop appeared stable for 30 minutes, then temperature began shooting off. I opened the loop, cleared history, reduced the gain to 0.008, and started it again. Loop appears stable after 15 minutes of watching. I'm going to leave it for a few hours, then come back to check on it and, if it's stable, step the can temperature.

After finishing my last elog entry, I monitored the digital loop's error signal (the control signal for the fast loop) and the output to the laser heater remotely, (from West Bridge), using dataviewer. The ref cav surrounding can temperature was set to 36 degrees C.

With the loop closed and a gain of 0.008, after seeing the output voltage to the laser heater (TMP_OUTPUT) remain fairly constant and the error signal (TMP_INMON) stay close to zero for ~3 hours, I tried to step the temperature. (This was at 2am last night). I was working remotely from West Bridge. To step the temperature I used the following command:

ezcawrite C1:PSL-FSS_RCPID_SETPOINT 35.5

Rather than change the can temperature to 35.5 C, it outputted:

C1:PSL-FSS_RCPID_SETPOINT=0.

It had set the setpoint to 0 degrees C, which was essentially turning the heater off. I tried resetting it back to 36 and had no luck. I tried changing the syntax slightly.: ezcawrite C1:PSL-FSS_RCPID_SETPOINT=36 and ezcawrite C1:PSL-FSS_RCPID_SETPOINT (36). No success.

I ran over to the 40m and changed the temperature back to 36 manually. The in-loop temp sensor had decreased to 31.5 degrees C before I was able to step the setpoint back up. The system seems to have recovered from this large impulse though, and the laser has remained locked.

(5 hours of minute-trend data)

From left to right: 

Top: Out-of-loop can temp sensor; Voltage sent to heat can

Middle: signal sent to heat the laser (TMP_OUTPUT); room temp

Bottom: Error signal for slow loop (sampled control signal from fast loop); In-loop can temp sensor

At 9:30 this morning (7 and a half hours after accidentally setting the setpoint to zero), I came in to the 40m. TMP_OUTPUT was still decreasing but was slowing somewhat, so I decided to step the can temperature up half a decree to 36.5 C.

TMP_OUTPUT responded to the step, but it is also oscillating slowly with room-temperature changes, and these oscillations are on the same order as the step response. The oscillations look like the room-temp oscilations, but inverted. (TMP_OUTPUT reaches maxima when RMTEMP reaches minima). Oddly, there does not appear to be much of a time delay between the room temperature and TMP_OUTPUT signals. I would expect a time delay since there's a time constant for a room-temperature change to propagate into the cavity. Perhaps the laser itself is susceptible to room-temperature changes and those propagate into the laser cavity on a much faster time scale. I don't know the thermal coupling of ambient temperature changes into the laser.

(24-hours of second-trend data)

Options are:

--If the system can handle it, do a larger temperature step (3 degrees, say), so that I can more clearly distinguish the oscillations with room temp from the step response.

--Insulate the cavity with foam (will in principle make the temperature over the can surrounding the ref cav more uniform and less affected by room temperature changes).

--Insulate the laser? Is this possible?

--Leave the system as is and, as a first approximation, fit the room-temp data to a sine wave and subtract it off somehow from my data to just see the step response.

--Don't bother with steps and just try to get the transfer function from out-of-loop temperature (RCTEMP, which is affected by temperature noise from the room) to TMP_OUTPUT via taking the Fourier transforms of both signals.

I'm flying out tomorrow morning, so I'll either need to figure out how to step the temperature set point of the can remotely, successfully, or I'll need someone to manually enter in the temperature steps for me in the control room.

[Koji Suresh]

c1psl has got frozen during our ezcaread/write business.
After the target was rebooted and we lost the previous setting as there was no burt snapshot for the slow targets since Dec 13, 2010.

It seems that burtrestore is essential for the bootstrapping of the MC servo, as the auto locker script refers the locking parameters
from the PSL setting values (C1PSL_SETTINGS_SET.adl).

Jenne is working on the recovery of the snap-shotting for the slow targets.

[Kiwamu Suresh Koji]

Some main parameters of the PSL has been recovered using Dataviewer and some screen snapshots, as seen in the screenshots below.

Relocked the PMC.  MC came back immediately.

[Koji, Suresh]

In the previous measurement, the PDA 255 had most probably saturated at DC, since the maximum ouput voltage of PDA255 is 5V when it is driving a 50 Ohm load.  It has a bandwidth of 0 to 50MHz and so can be reliably used to measure only the 11 MHz AM peak.  In this band it has a conversion efficiency of 7000 V per Watt (optical power at 1064nm).  [Conversion efficiency:  From the data sheet we get 0.7 A/W of photo-current at 1064nm and 10^4 V/A of transimpedance]  The transimpedance at 55 MHz is not given in the data sheet.  Even if PDA255 is driving a high impedance load, at high incident power levels the bandwidth will be reduced due to finite gain x bandwidth product of the opamps involved, so the conversion efficiency at 11 MHz would not be equal to that at DC.

So Koji repeated the measurement with a lower incident light level:

**********************************

V_DC = 1.07 V  with 50 Ohm termination on the multimeter.

Peak height at 11 MHz on the spectrum analyzer (50 Ohm input termination) = -48.54 dBm

***********************************

Calculation: 

a) RF_Power at 11 MHz :  -48.45 dBm = 1.4 x 10^(-8) W

b) RF_Power = [(V_rms)^2] / 50_ohm  ==> V_rms = 8.4 x 10^(-4) V

c) Optical Power at 11 MHz: [V_rms / 7000] = 1.2 x 10^(-7) W

d) Optical Power at DC =  [V_DC / 7000] = 1.46 x 10^(-4) W

e) Intensity ratio:  I_AM / I_c = 7.9 x 10^(-4) . AM:Carrier amplitude ratio is half of the intensity ratio = 4.0 x 10^(-4)

f) PM amplitude ratio from Mirko's measurement is 0.2

g) The PM to AM amplitude ratio is 506

_________________________________

As the AM peak is highly dependent upon the drifting EOM position in yaw, it is quite likely that a higher PM/AM ratio could occur.  But this measurement shows how small it could get if the current situation is allowed to continue.

Correction: Koji noted that Mirko actually reports a PM modulation index of 0.17 for the 11 MHz sideband (elog: http://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:8080/40m/5462. This means

f) the amplitude ratio of the PM side-band to carrier is half of that = 0.084

g)  the PM to AM amplitude ratio as 0.084 / [4.0 x 10^(-4)]  = 209.

[Koji Suresh]

The steering mirrors for PMC were aligned. The transmission went up from 0.779 to 0.852.

I just relocked the PMC.  I don't know why it was unlocked.

 Again....

In order to move the emergency shut off switch in room 103 I had to turn off the 2 W Innolight laser. This job will take an hour.

 It is back on.

Ben and Sam came over to fix one of  the east side  sliding  door sensor that had to be moved from the inside  to outside on the enclosure.

We turned off the 2w Innolight for 20minutes. The power is back on, the  PMC and MC locked itself immediately.

This moring I centered the IOO Angle QPD. The IOO Pos QPD was not centered. The existing layout does not allow the beam centering of the Pos qpd without misaligning the MC

input. We have to add an aditional steering mirror. I will do that tomorrow morning.

 I added the steering mirror for Pos  and centered both qpds

C1:IOO-QPD_ANG_VERT beam movement  in 1 degree C temp change in 3 hrs

I was measuring things to see how big my adapter plate needs to be, and I decided that we'd had enough days of the HEPA being on full blast, so I turned it down to 50, from 100.  I think it's been on full since Katrin was working on the Y-green beat a week or so ago.

[Koji, Suresh]

8:50PM HEPA@100% for the test

8:55PM HEPA@0%

9:20-35PM HEPA level varies from 0%-50%

9:35PM HEPA@40% and left it running at this level

Nov18 1:40 AM HEPA@80% for a work around the PSL table (by KI)

Nov18 4:35 AM HEPA@40% (by KI)

I left the HEPA at the 50% level @5AM, Nov 24

PMC trans was only ~0.79, where it should be ~0.84 something.  The MC was also not stellar. 

I aligned the beam to the PMC, and am now getting PMC trans 0.837 .

Then I aligned the PSL zigzag to the MC, and got MC Refl down to ~0.6 . 

I then aligned the WFS to the unlocked MC, and the MC Trans QPD to the locked MC.

Things seem good.  MC axis is still in a good place, since we get good michelson fringes at the AS port.

I have realigned the steering mirrors for PMC because the transmitted light had been at ~ 0.741

After the alignment it went back to ~ 0.850.

I found the PSL laser has been off for four hours. Nobody seemed to know why.

I just turned it on and it is now providing about 10% lower power compared with one before the shutdown.
Let's keep the eyes on the power if it can recover as the housing gets warm.

It appears that the old PSL fast channels never made it into the new DAQ system.  We need to figure out what to do with them.

A D990155 DAQ Interface card in far right of the 1X1 PSL EuroCard ("VME") crate is supposed output various PMC/FSS/ISS fast channels, which would then connect to the 1U "lemo breakout" ADC interface chassis.  Some connections are made from the DAQ interface card to the lemo breakout, but they are not used in any RTS model, so they're not being recorded anywhere.

An old elog entry from Rana listing the various PSL DAQ channels should be used as reference, to figure out which channels are coming out, and which we should be recording.

The new ALS channels will need some of these DAQ channels, so we need to figure out which ones we're going to use, and clear out the rest.

I realigned the steering mirrors for the PMC. The trans value went up from 0.79 to 0.83.

The misalignment was largely in the pitch direction.

We removed the curved mirror behind the AOM (ROC=0.3m) on PSL table. The mirror is now in PSL lab. See PSL:905 for more detail.

[Koji, Den]

We have aligned PMC,  the WFS are not working yet.

I was interested what whitening filter do we have between MC servo and ADC. The shape is in the figure below, SR provided 1 V white noise. Before the whitening filter MC_F is measured in Volts with SR and ADC (for ADC the shape is calculated using the whitening filter form):

I also wondered if FSS or PZT servo can add noise to the mode cleaner length signal and what is their gain. It should be big, as the laser's calibration is ~1 MHz/V => to account for seismic noise of 10^-6 m at 1 Hz, the voltage given to the laser should be ~ 1 V. And it is indeed the case. The gain is ~1000. I measured the coherence between MC_F and the laser fast input. It is 1 in the range measured (0.05 - 100 Hz). FSS and PZT do not add significant noise.

Unfortunately, after the measurement when I unplugged BNS connector from the laser, I misaligned PMC. For several hours I adjusted the mirrors but could not significantly improve transmitted signal. I'll return to this issue tomorrow.

I suspect that it was just unlocked when you had disconnected the cable.

There is not reflection now. It seems that it is now misaligned after the alignment work.

So what you need is "align while scanning PZT -> lock -> align".

 No, no, it was unlocked after I connected the cable back. The beam was even not on the PMC. I'll try PZT -> lock -> align.

No matter how you connect/disconnect, touching the laser may cause the PMC unlocked.

At least, I don't see the PMC reflection on the PD.
This means that the beam towards the PMC is largely misaligned.

If you are not sure what is misaligned, stop touching the table.
Close the shutter of the laser on the laser housing and leave the optics as they are.

[Koji, Den]

Koji was right that I misaligned everything during the alignment work. I assumed that PMC should autolock and when I saw that it did not, I thought the laser is misaligned.

What we did:

1. Aligned mirrors to get the beam on the PD PMC REFL and PMCR camera. The PSL-PMC_RFPDDC was ~800 mV.

2. We disabled PMC servo, switching it to test position and changed "DC output adjust" by 0.01 in a loop

while true
do
    ezcawrite "C1:PSL-PMC_RAMP" -4.50
    ezcastep "C1:PSL-PMC_RAMP" "+0.01,450" -s "0.1"
    ezcawrite "C1:PSL-PMC_RAMP" 0.0
    ezcastep -s "0.1" -- "C1:PSL-PMC_RAMP" "-0.01,450"
done

3. While the script was running we adjusted the position of the beam on the far PMC mirror looking at an IR viewer. The goal is to align two steering mirrors to catch some resonances. We monitored them on the oscilloscope and on the PMCT camera.

4. We locked PMC and aligned steering mirrors.

 I noticed that the ion pump was turned off.

It was turned ON. It showed 0.00 microA at 5kV  The current display is not sensitive enough. There must be some small outgassing or leak. It adds up if we stop pumping.

We want to keep the reference cavity in pristine condition. It required the ion pump running all times.

 Nice PSL summaries from LHO:

https://alog.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/aLOG/index.php?callRep=3187

The PMC was unlocked earlier this morning, for ~20min, presumably from the rocks next door.  I relocked it.

Then, a few min ago, the PMC suddenly decided that it wouldn't lock with a transmission greater than ~0.7 .  I found that the laser temp adjust on the FSS screen was at -1.9ish.  I put it back to zero, and now the PMC locks happily again.  I think we got into a PSL mode-hopping temperature region on accident.

Jenne, Den, Rana

The PMC transmission has been varying a lot and the MC seems unstable. Superstitious people might blame this on the El-nino or the alignment with Sagitarius, but we are ostensibly scientists.

WE found that the PMC EPICS values had not been toggled since the reboot and so the RF phase and Amplitude were totally wrong (we should replace this with a fixed oscillator box as we did with FSS).

Also, the NPRO SLOW slider was at -2 V which made the mode going into the PMC funny (although the mode was OK this morning before I started playing with the PMC sliders).

Before adjustment, there was a strong correlation between the seismic motions and the PMC reflection. This means that the PMC gain was low and it couldn't stay locked. Now, after fixing the RF and upping the gain slider it looks more stable. Let's watch it for a few days to see if there's an improvement in the trends.

The 10-minute trend of the lat 400 days shows that nothing has changed much this year; its been equally bad for a long while.

 PMC transmission is oscillating  in the range 0.5 - 0.85. PMC PZT voltage is 1-2 V.

FSS slow controls was -2.5 V. I adjusted it to 0 and PMC stabilized. PMC PZT voltage is 128, transmission is 0.845.

But most probably, slow control will drift again.

I added a subblock to the IOO model, and gave it a top_names of PSL, so the channels show up as C1:PSL-......

So far, there are just 2 channels acquired, C1:PSL-FSS_MIXER and C1:PSL-FSS_FAST, since those were already connected to the ADC.  Those signals are both on the DAQ OUT of the FSS board in the rack.  They are DQ channels now too.

 So there was a problem with the channel name C1:PSL-FSS_FAST, which conflicts with an existing slow channel.  This was causing daqd to fail to start (shockingly, with an appropriate error message!).  I renamed the channel to be C1:PSL-FSS_NPRO until we come up with something better.

After the change everthing worked and fb came back.

The PMC was locking right the way, but it's transmission would not go up.  Finally I get it back up by moving the "sticky" DC Gain slider up and down a few times.

 The FSS was -2.9, and the PMC won't lock happily unless you bring this back to 0.  The symptom that this is happening is that the PMC reflection camera is totally saturated, but the PMC still looks like it's locked on 00.

[Koji Rana]

The FSS Slow DC servo was turned off.

As MCL stabilizes the MC_F (Fast PZT), we no longer need to use the laser temp to do so.

In other word, if you like to turn off the MCL servo for some reason, we need to turn it on in order to keep the MC locked.

as usual.

PMC transmission started going down this afternoon, around 3pm-ish.  Right now it's 0.775, which is very, very low.  The new MC locking stuff is engaged, so it's not the FSS slow servo's fault. 

EDIT: I just realized that the limit of 0 counts output of the MC2 MCL filter bank was still engaged, from a time earlier this afternoon when I had switched back to the old servo, so there was no feedback going back to keep the slow drift of the laser in check.  PMC trans isn't coming back instantly, so I'll check it again when I come in tomorrow.

By adjusting the PMC steering mirrors, Jenne and I realigned the PMC input beam. Transmission is at 0.829 now. 

[Jenne, Eric]

We installed a Half Wave Plate -> Polarized Beam Splitter -> Half Wave Plate in the PSL beam line, immediately after the EOM, to be used for attenuating the beam when we vent, as in Entry 6892.

It was illuminating to discover that the optics labeled QWP0-1064-10-2 are indeed half wave plates, instead of quarter wave plates as QWP suggests. 

The PBS transmits "P"/Horizontal polarization, but the beam coming from the EOM is "S"/Vertically polarized, and we want to keep that, since we do not want the beam attenuated quite yet. 

So, we use the HWP to rotate the P from the EOM to S, so that the majority of the power passes through the PBS. The second HWP then rotates the transmitted S back into P, which continues to the mode cleaner. When we want to attenuate, we will simply rotate the first HWP to change the proportion of S polarized light that will pass straight through the PBS and towards the mode cleaner. 

After setting the proper HWP angles, we aligned the PBS via minimizing the MC reflection.

Since we have not yet attenuated the power, we have not yet changed the BS for the MC reflection, since this would damage the PD. The beam splitter will be changed out for a 100% reflectivity mirror to increase the power to the PD when we do.

We have now reduced the power being input to the MC from 1.25W to 10mW, and changed out the MC refl BS for a mirror. 

The power was reduced via the PBS we introduced in Entry 7295.

While we were in there, we took a look at the AS beam, which was looking clipped on the monitor. Jenne felt that it appears that the clipping seems to be occurring inside the vacuum, possibly on the faraday. This will be investigated during the vent.