Quote:

Raji took the optics over. They were all measured at 0 deg incidence angle, although we will use them at the angles required for the recycling folding mirrors.  Here's the summary from GariLynn: In general all six pieces have a radius of curvature of around -700 meters. They all fall off rapidly past 40 mm diameter.  Within the 40 mm diameter the rms is ~10 nm for most.  I can get finer analysis if you have something specific that you want to know.    All data are saved in Wyko format at the following location: http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~coreopt/40MCOC/Oct24-2012/ Gari

 After a long search, I've found a way to finally read and analyze(?)  the Wyko opd format data using Image SXM, an image analysis software working only on mac osx.

I am attaching the images (in tiff) and profile plot of all the 6 mirrors.

We removed all the folding mirrors ({P,S}R{2,3}) from the IFO and took them into the bake lab clean room.  The idea was that at the very least we would install the new dichroic mirrors, and then maybe replace the suspension wires with thinner ones.

I went in to spend some quality time with one of the tip-tilts.  I got the oplev setup working to characterize the pointing.

I grabbed tip-tilt SN003, which was at PR2.  When I set it up it  was already pointing down by a couple cm over about a meter, which is worse than what we were seeing when it was installed.  I assume it got jostled during transport to the clean room?

I removed the optic that was in there and tried installing one of the dichroics.  It was essentially not possible to remove the optic without bending the wires by quite a bit (~45 degrees).  I decided to remove the whole suspension system (top clamps and mirror assembly) so that I could lay it flat on the table to swap the optic.

I was able to put in the dichroic without much trouble and get the suspension assembly back on to the frame.  I adjusted the clamp at the mirror mount to get it hanging back vertical again.  I was able to get it more-or-less vertical without too much trouble.

I poked at the mirror mount a bit to see how I could affect the hysteresis.  The answer is quite a bit, and stochastically.  Some times I would man-handle it and it wouldn't move at all.  Sometimes I would poke it just a bit and it would move by something like a radian.

A couple of other things I noted:

• The eddy current damping blocks are not at all suspended.  The wires are way too think, so they're basically flexures.  They were all pretty cocked, so I repositioned them by just pushing on them so they were all aligned and centered on the mirror mount magnets.
• The mirror mounts are very clearly purposely made to be light.  All mass that could be milled out has been.  This is very confusing to me, since this is basically the entire problem.  Why were they designed to be so light?  What problem was that supposed to solve?

I also investigated the weights that Steve baked.  These won't work at all.  The gap between the bottom of the mirror mount and the base is too small.  Even the smalled "weights" would hit the base.  So that whole solution is a no-go.

What else can we do?

At this point not much.  We're not going to be able to install more masses without re-engineering things, which is going to take too much time.  We could install thinner wires.  The wires that are being used now are all 0.0036", and we could install 0.0017" wires.  The problem is that we would have to mill down the clamps in order to reuse them, which would be time consuming.

The plan

So at this point I say we just install the dichroics, get them nicely suspended, and then VERY CAREFULLY reinstall them.  We have to be careful we don't jostle them too much when we transport them back to the IFO.  They look like they were too jostled when they were transported to the clean room.

My big question right now is: is the plan to install new dichroics in PR2 and SR2 as well, or just in PR3 and SR3, where the green beams are extracted?  I think the answer is no, we only want to install new dichroics in {P,S}R3.

The future

If we're going to stick with these passive tip-tilts, I think we need to consider machining completely new mirror mounts, that are not designed to be so light.  I think that's basically the only way we're going to solve the hysteresis problem.

I also note that the new active tip-tilts that we're going to use for the IO steering mirrors are going to have all the same problems.  The frame is taller, so the suspensions are longer, but everything else, including the mirror mounts are exactly the same.  I can't see that they're not going to suffer the same issues.  Luckily we'll be able to point them so I guess we won't notice.

When installing the dichroics we need to pay attention to the wedge angle.  I didn't, so the ghost beam is currently point up and to the right (when facing the optic).  We should think carefully about where we want the ghost beams to go.

I also was using TT SN003, which I believe was being used for PR2.  However, I don't think we want to install dichroics in the PR2, and we might want to put all the tip-tilts back in the same spots they were in before.  We therefore may want to put the old optic back in SN003, and put the dichroics in SN005 (PR3) and SN001 (SR3) (see 7601).

 PEM model is running at 64K now. It turned out to be tricky to increase the rate:

• BLRMS are computationally expensive and original pem model did not start at any frequency higher then 16k ( at 16k cpu meter readings were 59/60 ). Also when we go higher then 16k, front-end gives the model less resources. I guess it is assumed that this model is iop and won't need too much time. So in the end I had to delete BLRMS blocks for all channels except for GUR2Z and MIC1.
• Foton files are modified during model compilation: lines with sampling rate and declaration of filters in the beginning of the file are changed only. Sos-representation and commands are the same. I hoped that filter commands will let me change sos-representation quickly. I've opened Foton and saved the file. However, Foton modified commands in such a way that the ratio of poles and zeros to sampling rate is preserved. I guess all filters have to be replaced or this process should be done in another way.
• BLRMS block uses low-pass filters below 0.01 Hz, increasing the sampling rate by a factor of 32 might make calculations incorrect. I'll check it.

We should also increase cut off frequency of the low-pass filter in the microphone pre-amplifier from 2 kHz up to ~20-30 kHz.

 Great, however, unless you can save the images in FITS format, we still need another reader for the opd images.

Previous phasemap data and analysis for the new 40m COC are summarized on the following page

https://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:30889/40m_phasemap/

(Use traditional LVC authentication (not albert.einstein))

The actual instance of the files can also be found on nodus below the following directory:

/cvs/cds/caltech/users/public_html/40m_phasemap

The programs for the analysis are found in

/cvs/cds/caltech/users/public_html/40m_phasemap/40m_PRM/mat

The main program is RunThis.m

Basically this program takes ascii files converted from opd by Vision32.
(i.e. You need to go to Downs)
Then the matlab program takes care of the plots and curvature analyses.

The thinner wire has a history that it did not improve the hysteresis (ask Jenne). Nevertheless, it's worth to try.

If you flip the clamp upside-down, you can lift the clamping point up. This will make the gravity restoring torque stronger.
(i.e. Equivalent effect to increasing the mass)

Luckily (or unluckily) the clamp has no defined location for the wire as we have no wire fixture.
Therefore the clamp will grab the wire firmly even without milling.

 Why not? The new dichroic mirrors have more transmission of 1064nm than G&H. Thus it will give us more POP beam and will help locking.

 The wire clamps should be taken off at the top and at the mirror holder. They need a mill touch up. It would be nice to have the centering jig from LLO for the 0.0017"

The clamps in this condition are really bad. It can sleep, it is not adjustable.

 Thank you for changing the sample rate!
Also we have to change the Anti-Aliasing filter, as Jamie said.

Now my question is, whether S/N ratio is enough at high frequencies or not. The quality of EM172 microphone is good according to the data sheet. But as you can see in previous picture, the S/N ratio around 1kHz is not so good, though we can see some peaks, e.g. the sound that a fan will make. I have to check it later.
And, is it possible to do online adaptive noise cancellation with a high sampling rate such that computationally expensive algorithms cannot be run?

  That's no good - we need BLRMS channels for many PEM channels, not just two. And the channel names should have the same name as they had in the past so that we can look at long term BLRMS trends.

I suggest:

1. Have a separate model for Mics and Magnetometers. This model should run at 32 kHz and not have low frequency poles and zeros. Still would have acoustic frequency BLRMS.
2. Have a low frequency (f_sample = 2 kHz) model for seis an acc. Seismometers run out of poop by 100 Hz, but we want to have the ACC signal up to 800 Hz since we do have optical mount resonances up to there.
3. Never remove or rename the BLRMS channels - this makes it too hard to keep long term trends.
4. Do a simple noise analysis to make sure we are matching the noise of the preamps to the noise / range of the ADCs.
5. Immediately stop using bench supplies for the power. Use ONLY fused, power lines from the 1U rack supplies.

Ayaka, Den

 C1PEM model is back to 2K.

We created a new C1MIC model for microphones that will run at 32K. C1SUS machine is full, we have to think about rearrangement.

For now, we created DQ channels for microphones inside iop model, so we can subtract noise offline.

We provided 0-25 kHz bandwidth noise to AA board and saw the same signal in the output of ADC in the corresponding channel. So cut-off frequency is higher then 25 kHz. There is a label on the AA board that all filters are removed. What does this mean?

We've turned off AA bench power supply, prepare to use fused from 1U.

I measured the transmitted power @1064nm on one of the LaserOptik mirrors labled SN6

Here is the data

The mirror is not a good reflector at 0 deg.

Jamie and I spent some time with tip tilt SN001 this afternoon.  This was installed as SR3, so I was going to put a new LaserOptik mirror in there.  I accidentally snapped one of the wires (I forgot how strong the magnets are - one zipped from the mirror holder and captured the wire).  Jamie and I put the new LaserOptik mirror in, with the wedge correct, but we need to re-resuspend it with the 0.0036" wire tomorrow.  We'll also keep working on re-pitch aligning the other optics.

PR2 needs to be put back as a G&H, and we need to put a LaserOptik mirror into PR3.

 We now stop using bench DC power supplies for microphone preamp and PEM AA board. DC power is wired from 1x5 rack suppliers. I've installed a beam to mount fuse houses in the 1x7 as we did not have one.

Now that I read Koji's last elog about phase maps, I am not sure if these are still required, but here they are (the tilt-removed phase maps of the Laser Optik mirrors), first 1, 2, 3:

Then 4,5,6:

So they all have an elevated center. I am not sure why the phase maps of mirrors 5 and 6 are slightly smaller in dimension. Anyhow, all mirrors have quite strong aberrations. Also, there is no big difference between the mirrors. Check for yourself, but be careful with the colors since the scales are all different.

Are these maps drawn from the data we extracted using Image SXM??

 Indeed. So the only manipulation that I did was to remove the tilt (since this should usually be seen as an artifact of the measurement, or better, we can assume that tilt is compensated by alignment). I did not remove the curvature.

 We resuspended SN001 this morning with 0.0036" wire.  We did as Koji suggested, and flipped the wire clamp so the suspension point is a little higher, so we'll see if that helps.  We put LaserOptik mirror SN1 into this TT001.

We put the G&H mirror back into TT004, which is PR2.  We also put a LaserOptik mirror (SN5) into TT005, which is SR3.

Jamie is working on re-pitch aligning TT004 and TT005 (we already did 001), then we can re-install them in the vacuum system later this afternoon.

 The tip tilts have all been pitch-adjusted now, and they have all been put back onto the tables, with the same serial numbers in the same places as we took them out.  Jamie also re-leveled the BS table.

Raji and I will align things after I finish measuring the MC spot positions.

[Raji, Jenne]

After lunch we began where Raji and Jamie had left things.  PR2 was unfortunately pitched down so far that it was almost hitting the table just in front of PR3.  I loosened the 4 clamp screws that hold the wire clamp assembly to the mirror holder, and tapped it back and forth until I was within hysteresis range, re-tightened, then tapped the top and bottom until we were at the correct beam height just in front of PR3.  I also had to unclamp it from the table and twist the base a tiny bit, since the beam was closer to hitting the beam tube than the optic.  Finally, however, PR2 is adjusted such that the beam hits the center of PR3.

Moving on to PR3, the pitch looked good while we were looking at the aperture placed near the face of ITMY, so we left that alone.  The beam is off in yaw though.  Several times I unclamped the tip tilt from the table, and twisted it one way or another, but every time when I tighten the dog clamps, I'm too far off in yaw.  The beam points a little too far south of the center of ITMY, so we were putting the beam a little north of the center before I clamped it, but even tightening the screws in the same order, by the same amount each time, causes a different amount of slipping/twisting/something of the TT mount, so we never end up directly in the center of the ITM.  It seems a little like a stochastic process, and we just need to do it a few more times until we get it right. 

We left it clamped to the table, but not in it's final place, and left for JClub.  On Monday morning we need to go back to it.  As long as we're pretty close to centered, we should probably also have someone at ETMY checking the centering, because we need to be centered in both ITMY and ETMY.

We have not touched the SR tip tilts, so those will obviously need some attention when we get to that point.

[Raji, Ayaka]

Thanks to Den, power supplies for microphone circuit are changed.
So I measured the microphone noise again by the same way as I did last time.

  solid lines: acoustic noise
 dashed lines: un-coherent noise
black line: circuit noise (microphone unconnected)

The circuit noise improves so much, but many line noises appeared.
Where do these lines (40, 80, 200 Hz...) come from?
These does not change if we changed the microphones...

Anyway, I have to change the circuit (because of the low-pass filter). I can check if the circuit I will remake will give some effects on these lines.

I do not think that 1U rack power supply influenced on the preamp noise level as there is a 12 V regulator inside. Lines that you see might be just acoustic noise produced by cpu fans. Usually, they rotate at ~2500-3000 rpm => frequency is ~40-50 Hz + harmonics. Microphones should be in an isolation box to minimize noise coming from the rack. This test was already done before and described here. 

I think we need to build a new box for many channels (32, for example, to match adc). The question is how many microphones do we need to locate around one stack to subtract acoustic noise. Once we know this number, we group microphones, use 1 cable with many twisted pairs for a group and suspend them in an organized way.

 Maybe we have already discarded this idea, but why not do the alignment without the MC?

Just lock the green beam on the Yarm and then use the transmitted beam through the ITMY to line up the PRC and the PZTs? I think our estimate is that since the differential index of refraction from 532 to 1064 nm is less than 0.01, using the green should be OK. We can do the same with the Xarm and then do a final check using the MC beam.

In this way, all of the initial alignment can be done with green and require no laser Goggles (close the shutter on the PSL NPRO face).

 I do not think they are acoustic sounds. If so, there should be coherence between three microphones because I placed three at the same place, tied together. However, there are no coherence at lines between them.

 [Jan, Manasa]

Below are phasemaps for the tip-tilts with both tilt and RoC removed. We have not used Koji's code; but tweaked the earlier code to remove curvature.

The RoC values matched approximately to that quoted by Gari Lynn ~700m.

Phasemaps

The color scale for height are not the same for all mirrors.

SN1, SN2 and SN3

SN4, SN5 and SN6

 The posted residual phase maps show circular contours since the data came with relatively low resolution in height. This is ok for what we want to do with these phase maps (i.e. simulating higher-order mode content in the PRC using Finesse). Better resolution is only required if you want to understand in detail optical scattering out of the cavity. Anyhow, the circular artifacts can be removed by first interpolating the phase maps to a higher lateral resolution, and then performing tilt and curvature subtraction. So we will soon have better looking phase maps posted. Then we should think about what type of Finesse simulation we could run. Certainly one simulation is to look at the beam shape in the PRC, but more interesting could be how sensitive the shape is to mirror alignments. The current simulation shows a mode that resembles the TEM01, but I have not yet tried to find optimal alignment of the mirrors (in simulation) to search for the TEM00 mode.

 We've received all parts that we need for eddy current damping. I've made an estimate of Q with dirty tip-tilt. It looks fine (Q~1)

We need to check ring magnets for vacuum compatibility. Bob start baking on Friday.

[Jamie, Jenne, Raji, with consultation from Nic, Ayaka and Manasa]

We went back and re-looked at the input alignment, and now we're "satisfied for the moment" (quote from Jamie) with the PRC alignment.  Also, by adjusting the PR folding mirrors, we are almost perfectly aligned to the Yarm.

What we did:

Set PRM DC biases to 0 for both pitch and yaw.

Aperture was attached to PRM cage, double aperture was attached to BS cage, free-standing aperture was placed in front of PR2. 

Adjusted PZT1, PZT2 such that we were centered on PZT2, and through apertures at PRM and PR2.   This was mainly for setting beam height in PRC.

Checked centering on PZT1, MMT1, MMT2, PZT2.

Adjusted PRM pitch bias and PZT2 yaw such that REFL beam was retro-reflected from PRM.

Checked that REFL beam came nicely out of Faraday.

Checked that beam was still going through center of PRM aperture, and pitch height at PR2 was good.

Moved PR2 sideways until beam hit center in yaw of PR2.

Twisted PR2 such that beam was hitting center of PR3.

Moved and twisted PR3 (many times) so that beam went through BS input and output apertures, and through center of ITMY aperture.

Found that beam was just getting through black glass aperture at ETMY, top left corner, if looking at the face of ETM from ITM.

Locked down dog clamps on PR2.

This required some re-adjustment of PR3.  Re-did making sure going through BS apertures and ITMY aperture, locked down PR3 dog clamps.

Found that we are centered in yaw at ETMY, a little high in pitch on ETMY.

Replaced all of the light doors, to take a break.  4 hours in bunny suits seemed like enough that we earned a break.

This all sounds more straighforward than it was.  There was a lot of iteration, but we finally got to a state that we were relatively happy with.

What we will do:

Tweak PZT2 a *tiny* bit in pitch, ~0.5 mrad, so that the beam goes through the ETMY aperture.

See if we can align EMTY and ITMY to get multiple bounces through the Yarm.

Remove ETMX heavy door, steer BS such that we're getting through the center of an aperture at ETMX.

Align ETMX and ITMX such that we get multiple bounces through the Xarm.

Check SRM, AS path alignment.

Check REFL out of vac alignment.

Check other pickoffs.

Check all oplevs.

Check IPPOS/IPANG

We have a open-sided 2" mirror mount that we are considering using for the POY pick-off mirror.  This might help us get a little more clearance in the Y-arm of the Michelson.  Problem is the mount is not steerable, so we need to determine if that's doable or not.

[Raji, Jenne]

We tweaked PZT2, PZT1 (yaw only), and PR3 (pitch only) to get the beam ~centered on the BS aperture, the ITMY aperture, and the ETMY aperture.

After lunch I'll tweak up the MC alignment, since, although the spots are in the right places, the transmitted beam could be higher power.  This will make it easier to check our pointing, especially since the ETMY spot is larger than our aperture, but the beam is dim.

We're getting there!

 Jenne, Den

We looked at beam spots on ITMY and ETMY. We switched to smaller apertures on the other side of the rulers. For ITMY beam spot was 1mm below and 1mm south (right if you look in the direction ITMY -> ETMY) from the aperture center, for ETMY - 4 mm up and 3mm north from the aperture center. We made a correction for this using PZT 1 and 2. Now beam spots are in the middle of the apertures on ITMY and ETMY.

We tried to look at reflected beam from ETMY but it was hard to see the dependence between ETMY DC offset and reflected beam. We'll continue tomorrow.

 More data on the transmission. Measured the tranmission as a funtion of incidence angle at 1064nm

High particle count confirmed with #2 counter

jamie, nic, jenne, den, raji, manasa

We were doing pretty well with alignment, until I apparently fucked things up.

We were approaching the arm alignment on two fronts, looking for retro-reflection from both the ITMs and the ETMs.

Nic and Raji were looking for the reflected beam off of ETMY, at the ETMY chamber.  We put an AWG sine excitation into ETMY pitch and yaw.  Nic eventually found the reflected beam, and they adjusted ETMY for retro-reflection.

Meanwhile, Jenne and I adjusted ITMY to get the MICH Y arm beam retro-reflecting to BS.

Jenne and I then moved to the X arm.  We adjusted BS to center on ITMX, then we moved to ETMX to center the beam there.  We didn't both looking for the ETMX reflected beam.  We then went back to BS and adjusted ITMX to get the MICH X arm beam retro-reflected to the BS.

At this point we were fairly confident that we had the PRC, MICH, and X and Y arm alignment ok.

We then moved on the signal recycling cavity.  Having removed and reinstalled the SRC tip-tilts, and realigning everything else, they were not in the correct spot.  The beam was off-center in yaw on SR3, and the SR3 reflected beam was hitting low and to the right on SR2.  I went to loosen SR3 so that I could adjust it's position and yaw, and that when things went wrong.

Apparently I hit something BS table and completely lost the input pointing.  I was completely perplexed until I found that the PZT2 mount looked strange.  The upper adjustment screw appeared to have no range.  Looking closer I realized that we somehow lost the gimble ball between the screw and the mount.  Apparently I somehow hit PZT2 hard enough to separate from the mirror mount from the frame which caused the gimble ball to drop out.  The gimble ball probably got lost in a table hole, so we found a similar mount from which we stole a replacement ball.

However, after putting PZT2 back together things didn't come back to the right place.  We were somehow high going through PRM, so we couldn't retro-reflect from ITMY without completely clipping on the PRM/BS apertures.  wtf.

Jenne looked at some trends and we saw a big jump in the BS/PRM osems.  Clearly I must have hit the table/PZT2 pretty hard, enough to actually kick the table.  I'm completely perplexed how I could have hit it so hard and not really realized it.

Anyway, we stopped at this point, to keep me from punching a hole in the wall.  We will re-asses the situation in the morning.  Hopefully the BS table will have relaxed back to it's original position by then.

Here is a two hour set of second trends of 2 sensors per mirror, for BS, PRM, ITMY and MC1.  You can see about an hour ago there was a big change in the BS and PRM suspensions, but not in the ITMY and MC1 suspensions.  This corresponds as best we can tell with the time that Jamie was figuring out and then fixing PZT2's mount.  You can see that the table takes some time to relax back to it's original position.  Also, interestingly, after we put the doors on ~10 or 20 minutes ago, things change a little bit on all tables. This is a little disconcerting, although it's not a huge change.

...Looks like the coating is out of spec at any angle for 1064nm. E11200219-v2

 what's going on with those jumps on MC1?  It's smaller, but noticeable, and looks like around the same time.    Did the MC table jump as well?

more looking tomorrow.

Microphone preamp box had a low-pass filter at 2kHz, Ayaka changed it to 20 kHz by replacing 100pF capacitor with a 10pF.

We've measured frequency response of the box. Signal from the microphone was split into two. One path went to the box, while another was amplified by the gain 20 (and bandpass filter 1Hz - 300kHz) and sent to spectrum analyzer. Coherence and frequency response were measured using box output and amplified input. Low-pass filter in the box does not limit our sensitivity.

Acoustic noise significantly decreases at frequencies higher then 2kHz. So we need to modify the circuit by adding whitening filter.

I've plugged in PMC length channel into PEM board CH15 through and amplifier (gain=200) that is AC coupled to avoid ~2.5 DC V coming from PMC servo.  I measured coherence with microphone that was located ~30 cm higher. Measurements show contribution of acoustic noise to PMC length in the frequency range 20-50 Hz. In this range PMC length / MC length coherence is ~0.5.

Acoustic noise couples to PMC length in a non-stationary way. 5 minutes after the first measurement I already see much higher contribution. This was already discussed here. I've made C1:X02-MADC3_TP_CH15 a DQ channel at 64kHz. This a fast PMC length channel.

Next step will be to use several microphones located around PMC for acoustic noise cancellation.

  But these jumps in the OSEMs are all at the level of 10-20 microns. Seems like that wouldn't be enough to account for anything; 20 microns / (pend length) ~ 50-60 microradians.

 BS table and suspensions are fine.

The coating should have very low 1064nm p transmission at 45 degrees, which the plot seems to indicate that it does.  That's really the only part of the spec that this measurement is saying anything about.    What makes you say it's out of spec?

Ok, yes, sorry, the data itself does indicate that the transmission is way too high at 45 degrees for 1064 p.

Here's a plot of the BS, PRM, and MC1 suspension shadow sensor trends over the last 24 hours.  I tried to put everything on the same Y scale:

There definitely was some shift in the BS table that is visible in the BS and PRM that seems to be settling back now.  The MC1 is there for reference to show that it didn't really move.

Suprema- SS clear edge mirror mount 2" diameter is modified for 40m vacuum use. One left and one right handed one. It's adjustment screw housing is bronze! It is not ideal for out gassing.

It will be baked and scanned. If it passes we should use it.

We may need these to bring out some pick-off beams.

Jamie, Jenne, Nic, Manasa, Raji, Ayaka, Den

We basically walked through the entire alignment again, starting from the Faraday.  We weren't that far off, so we didn't have to do anything too major.  Here's basically the procedure we used:

• Using PZT 1 and 2 we directed the beam through the PRM aperture and through an aperture in front of PR2.  We also got good retro-reflection from PRM (with PRM free-hanging).  This completely determined our input pointing, and once it was done we DID NOT TOUCH the PZT mirrors any more.
• The beam was fortunately still centered on PR2, so we didn't touch PR2.
• Using PR3 we direct the beam through the BS aperture, through the ITMY aperture, and to the ETMY aperture.  This was accomplished by loosening PR3 and twisting it to adjust yaw, moving it forward/backwards to adjust the beam translation, and tapping the mirror mount to affect the hysteresis to adjust pitch.  Surprisingly this worked, and we were able to get the beam cleanly through the BS and Y arm apertures.  Reclamped PR3.
• Adjusted ITMY biases (MEDM) to get Michelson Y arm retro-reflecting to BS.
• Adjusting BS biases (MEDM) we directed the beam through the ITMX and ETMX apertures.
• Adjusted ITMX biases (MEDM) to get Michelson X arm retro-reflecting to BS.

At this point things were looking good and we had Michelson fringes at AS.  Time to align SRC.  This is where things went awry yesterday.  Proceeded more carefully this time:

• Loosened SR3 to adjust yaw pointing towards SRM.  We were pretty far off at SRM, but we could get mostly there with just a little bit of adjustment of SR3.  Got beam centered in yaw on SR2.
• Loosened and adjusted SR2 to get beam centered in yaw on SRM.
• Once we were centered on SR3, SR2, and SRM reclamped SR2/SR3.
• Pitch adjustment was the same stupid stupid jabbing at SR2/3 to get the hysteresis to stick at an acceptable place.**
• Looked at retro-reflection from SRM.  We were off in yaw.  We decided to adjust SRM pointing, rather than go through some painful SR2/3 iterative adjustment.  So unclamped SRM and adjusted him slightly in yaw to get the retro-reflection at BS.

At this point we felt good that we had the full IFO aligned.  We were then able to fairly quickly get the AS beam back out on the AS table.

We took at stab at getting the REFL beam situation figured out.  We confirmed that what we thought was REFL is indeed NOT REFL, although we're still not quite sure what we're seeing.  Since it was getting late we decided to close up and take a stab at it tomorrow, possibly after removing the access connector.

The main tasks for tomorrow:

• Find ALL pick-off beams (POX, POY, POP) and get them out of the vacuum.  We'll use Jenne's new Suresh's old green laser pointer method to deal with POP.
• Find all OPLEV beams and make sure they're all still centered on their optics and are coming out cleanly.
• Center IPPOS and IPANG
• Find REFL and get it cleanly out.
• Do a full check of everything else to make sure there is no clipping and that everything is where we expect it to be.

Then we'll be ready to close.  I don't see us putting on heavy doors tomorrow, but we should be able to get everything mostly done so that we're ready on Monday.

** Comment: I continue to have no confidence that we're going to maintain good pointing with these crappy tip-tilt folding mirrors.

After everyone else did the hard work, I moved the AS first-on-the-table steering mirror sideways a bit so the AS beam is on the center of the mirror, then steered the beam through the center of the lens, onto the 2" 99% BS.  I also moved the camera from it's normal place (the 1% transmitted through that BS) to the AS110 PD path, as we did last vent.  We'll need to put it back before we go back to high power.

We've subtracted acoustic noise from PMC using 1 EM 172 microphone. We applied a 10 Hz high-pass filter to PMC length signal and 100,200,300:30,30 to whiten the signal.We used ~10 minutes of data at 2048 Hz as we did not see much coherence at higher frequencies.

We were able to subtract acoustic noise from PMC length in the frequency range 10-700 Hz. In the range 30-50 Hz error signal is less by a factor of 10 then target signal.

 I vote against it. We don't know about the grease inside the screw bushings - scans are not everything if adjusting the screw loosens up the grease. If we need more pick off mirrors lets just make some of the kind that we already use inside for the 2" optics.

Hi everyone,

I've been on break this week, so in addition to working at my lab here, I've done some NN stuff. In response to Den's response to my last post, I've included learning curve plotting capabilities, 

I've explored all of the currently documented capabilities of FANN (Fast Artificial Neural Network - it's a C library) (most likely, there are additions to the library floating around in open-source communities, but I have yet to look into those). There is extensive FANN documentation on the FANN website (http://leenissen.dk/fann/html/files/fann-h.html), but I'll cut it down to the basics here:

FANN Neural Network Architectures

standard: This creates a fully connected network, useful for small networks, as in the reference plant case 

sparse: This creates a sparsely connected network (not all of the connections between all neurons exist at all times), useful for large networks, but not useful in the reference plant case, since the number of neurons is relatively small

shortcut: This creates some connections in the network which skip over various hidden layers. Not useful in the harmonic oscillator case since there are no hidden layers. Probably won't be useful in a better-modeled referrence plant since this reduces the non-linear capabilities of the model.

FANN Training  

TRAIN_INCREMENTAL: updates the weights after every iteration, rather than after each epoch. This is faster than the other algorithms for the reference plant.

TRAIN_BATCH: updates the weights after training on the whole set. This should not be used on batches of data for the reference plant, seeing as the time history dependence of the plant is smaller than the size of the entire data set. 

TRAIN_RPROP: batch training algorithm which updates the learning parameter.

TRAIN_QUICKPROP: updates the learning parameter, and uses second derivative information, instead of just first derivative, for backpropagation. 

FANN Activation Functions

FANN offers a bunch of activation functions, including a function FANN_ELLIOT, which is essentially the "signmoid like" activation function Den and I used this summer, which runs in the order of multiplication and addition. The function parameters (steepness) can also be set.

FANN Parameters

As usual, the learning parameter can be set. While over the summer we worked with lower learning parameters, in the case of the harmonic oscillator reference plant, since the error is low after the first iteration, higher learning parameters (0.9, for example), work better. However, this is a very isolated case, and, in general, lower parameters, though convergence is slower, produce more optimal results. 

The learning momentum is another parameter that can be set - the momentum factor is a coefficient in the weight adjustment equation which allows for the difference in weights beyond the previous weight to be factored in. In the case of the reference plant, a higher learning momentum (0.9) is optimal, although in most cases, a lower learning momentum is optimal so that the learning curve doesn't oscillate terribly. 

FANN does not explicitly include regularization, but this can be implemented by checking the MSE  at each iteration against the MSE at the n previous iterations, where n is the regularization parameter, and stopping training if there is no significant decrease (also determined by a parameter). The error bound I specified during training was 0.0001

The best result for the reference plant was obtained using FANN_TRAIN_INCREMENTAL, a "standard" architecture, a learning rate of 0.9 (as explained above) and a learning momentum of 0.9 (these values should NOT be used for highly non-linear and more complicated systems). 

I have included plots of the learning curves - each title includes the architecture, the learning algorithm, the learning parameter, and the learning momentum if I modified it explicitly.

All of my code (and more plots!) can be found in /users/masha/neural_plant

On the whole, FANN has rather limited capabilities, especially in terms of learning algorithms, where it only has 4 (+ all of the changes one can make to parameters and rates). It is, however, much more intuitive to code with and faster han the Matlab NN library, although the later has more algorithms. I'll browse around for more open-source packages. 

Best,

Masha