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ID Date Author Type Category Subject
12682   Thu Dec 22 18:39:09 2016 KojiSummaryIOOIMC WFS tuning

Noise analysis of the WFS error signals.

Attachment 1: All error signals compared with the noise contribution measured with the RF inputs or the whitening inputs terminated.

Attachment 2: Same plot for all the 16 channels. The first plot (WFS1 I1) shows the comparison of the current noise contributions and the original noise level measured with the RF terminated with the gain adjusted along with the circuit modification for the fair comparison. This plot is telling us that the electronics noise was really close to the error signal.

I wonder if we have the calibration of the IMC suspensions somewhere so that I can convert these plots in to rad/sqrtHz...?

12683   Fri Dec 23 20:53:44 2016 KojiSummaryIOOIMC WFS tuning

WFS1 / WFS2 demod phases and WFS signal matrix

12684   Fri Dec 23 21:05:56 2016 KojiSummaryIOOIMC WFS tuning

Signal transfer function measurements

C1:SUS-MC*_ASCPIT_EXC channels were excited for swept sine measurements.

The TFs to WFS1-I1~4, Q1~4, WFS1/2_PIT/YAW, MC2TRANS_PIT/YAW signals were recorded.

The MC1 and MC3 actuation seems to have ~30Hz elliptic LPF somewhere in the electronics chain.
This effect was compensated by subtracting the approximated time delay of 0.022sec.

The TFs were devided by freq^2 to make the response flat and averaged between 7Hz to 15Hz.
The results have been summarized in Attachment 3&4.

Attachment 4 has the signal sensing matrix. Note that this matrix was measured with the input gain of 0.1.

Input matrix for diagonalizing the actuation/sensor response

Pitch

$\begin{pmatrix} -1.58983 & -0.901533 & -5592.53 \\ 0.961632 & -0.569662 & 1715.12 \\ 0.424609 & 1.60783 & -5157.38 \end{pmatrix}$

e.g. To produce pure WFS1P reaction, => -1.59 MC1P + 0.962 MC2P + 0.425 MC3P

Yaw

$\begin{pmatrix} 1.461 & -0.895191 & -4647.9 \\ 0.0797164 & 0.0127339 & -1684.11 \\ 0.223054 & -1.31518 & -4101.14 \end{pmatrix}$

12685   Sun Dec 25 14:39:59 2016 KojiSummaryIOOIMC WFS tuning

Now, the output matrices in the previous entry were implemented.
The WFS servo loops have been engaged for several hours.
So far the REFL and TRANS look straight. Let's see how it goes.

12686   Mon Dec 26 12:45:31 2016 KojiSummaryIOOIMC WFS tuning

It didn't go crazy at least for the past 24hours.

12688   Thu Dec 29 13:22:21 2016 ranaSummaryIOOIMC WFS tuning
• For the rough calibration below 10 Hz, we can use the SUS OSEM cal: the SUSPIT and SUSYAW error signals are in units of micro-radians.
• It seems from the noise plots that the demod board is now dominating over the whitening board noise.
• If the RF signals at the demod input are low enough, we can consider either increasing the light power on the WFS or increasing the IMC mod. depth.
• We should look at the out-of-lock light power on the WFS and re-examine what the 'safe' level is. We used to do this based on the dissipated electrical power (bias voltage x photocurrent).

At Hanford, there is this issue with laser jitter turning into an IMC error point noise injection. I wonder if we can try out taking the acoustic band WFS signal and adding it to the MC error point as a digital FF. We could then look at the single arm error signal to see if this makes any improvement. There might be too much digital delay in the WFS signals if the clock rate in the model is too low.

12689   Thu Dec 29 16:52:51 2016 KojiSummaryIOOIMC WFS tuning

Koji responding to Rana

> For the rough calibration below 10 Hz, we can use the SUS OSEM cal: the SUSPIT and SUSYAW error signals are in units of micro-radians.

I can believe the calibration for the individual OSEMs. But the input matrix looked pretty random, and I was not sure how it was normalized.
If we accept errors by a factor of 2~3, I can just naively believe the calibration factors.

> If the RF signals at the demod input are low enough, we can consider either increasing the light power on the WFS or increasing the IMC mod. depth.

The demod chip has the conversion factor of about the unity. We increased the gains of the AF stages in the demod and whitening boards. However, we only have the RMS of 1~20 counts. This means that we have really small RF signals. We should check what's happening at the RF outputs of the WFS units. Do we have any attenuators in the RF chain? Can we skip them without making the WFS units unstable?

12690   Thu Dec 29 21:35:30 2016 ranaSummaryIOOIMC WFS tuning

The WFS gains are supposedly maximized already. If we remotely try to increase the gain, the two MAX4106 chips in the RF path will oscillate with each other.

We should insert a bi-directional coupler (if we can find some LEMO to SMA converters) and find out how much actual RF is getting into the demod board.

12669   Tue Dec 6 16:47:40 2016 KojiUpdateIOOIMC WFS whitening filter investigation

The whitening board saids it is Rev B, but the actual component values are more like Rev. C.

The input stage (AD602) has an input resistor of 909 Ohm.
This is causing a big attenuation of the signal (x1/10) because the input impedance of AD602 is not high. And this screws up the logarithm of the gain.
I don't think this is a right approach.

12670   Tue Dec 6 17:54:08 2016 KojiUpdateIOOIMC WFS whitening filter investigation

The input resistor 909Ohm of AD602 was shorted. I've confirmed that the gain (= attenuation by voltage division) was increased by a factor of 10.
This modification was done for WFS2-I1 and WFS2-Q1. Also the thick film resistors for the WFS2-I1 channel was all replaced with thin film resistors.

Attachment 1 shows the comparison of the noise levels. The curves were all calibrated referred to the response of the original whitening filter configuration.
(i.e. measurement done after the gain change was compensated by the factor of 10.)

Now the AF chain is not limited by the noise in the whitening filter board. (Brown)
In fact, this noise level was completely identical between I1 and Q1. Therefore, I don't think we need this resistor replacement for the whitening filter board.

We can observe the improvement of the overall noise level below 10Hz. (Comparison between green and red/blue)
As the signal level goes up, the noise above 100Hz was also improved.

Now we need to take care of the n x 0.7Hz feature which is in the demod board...

12671   Tue Dec 6 22:41:49 2016 KojiUpdateIOOIMC WFS whitening filter investigation

I have implemented the same modification (shorting the input resistor of AD602) to the two whitening boards.

12676   Tue Dec 13 17:26:42 2016 KojiUpdateIOOIMC WFS whitening filter investigation

Rana pointed out that this modification (removal of 900Ohm) leave the input impedance as low as 100Ohm.
As OP284 can drive up to 10mA, the input can span only +/-1V with some nonlinearity.

Rather than reinstalling the 900Ohms, Rana will investigate the old-days fix for the whitening filter that may involve the removal of AD602s.
Until the solution is supplied, the IMC WFS project is suspended.

12678   Thu Dec 15 03:46:19 2016 ranaUpdateIOOIMC WFS whitening filter investigation

https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-D1400414

As it turns out, its not so old as I thought. Jenne and I reworked these in 2014-2015. The QPD whitening is the same as the IMC WFS whitening so we can just repeat those fixes here for the IMC.

 Quote: Rana pointed out that this modification (removal of 900Ohm) leave the input impedance as low as 100Ohm. As OP284 can drive up to 10mA, the input can span only +/-1V with some nonlinearity. Rather than reinstalling the 900Ohms, Rana will investigate the old-days fix for the whitening filter that may involve the removal of AD602s. Until the solution is supplied, the IMC WFS project is suspended.

17063   Fri Aug 5 12:42:12 2022 KojiUpdateIOOIMC WFS: Overnight observation

The IMC lock survived overnight and the WFS servo loops kept it aligned. The IMC was unlocked in the morning.
The left 6 plots are the WFS servo outputs and the right most two plot show the transmission and reflection of the IMC.

If the WFS is making the lock unstable under high seismic conditions, please turn the loops off.

14310   Tue Nov 20 13:13:01 2018 gautamUpdateVACIMC alignment is okay

I checked the IMC alignment following the vent, for which the manual beam block placed on the PSL table was removed. The alignment is okay, after minor touchup, the MC Trans was ~1200 cts which is roughly what it was pre-vent. I've closed the PSL shutter again.

15227   Wed Feb 26 22:05:06 2020 gautamUpdateIOOIMC checks

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

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

Results to follow.

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

15229   Wed Feb 26 23:50:51 2020 gautamUpdateIOOIMC checks

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

Attachment #1 - Measured gain vs requested gain.

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

Attachment #2 - Frequency dependent transfer functions

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

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

16782   Fri Apr 15 11:59:16 2022 YehonathanUpdateIOOIMC completely misaligned

Came this morning, opened the PSL and there was not even a beam on the MC REFL.

Looking at the big monitor it seems like the WFS signals went through the roof during the "auto-alignment" night session.

I restored the MC alignment from before the misalignment happen and wait for the SUS to damp. Once the RMS values went below 200 I enabled the watchdog and the coil outputs.

I opened the PSL shutter and the IMC locked immediately. I turned on the WFS servo and the MC REFL DC went down to 0.3. I run the WFS relief script.

14653   Tue Jun 4 10:56:31 2019 gautamUpdateIOOIMC diagnostics

I briefly managed to lock the IMC today - it stayed locked for ~10 minutes. Attachment #1 shows spectra of a few error and control signals for today's lock, and from a stretch yesterday before the problems surfaced*. The 60 Hz lines are much bigger, and MC_F signals broadband excess noise above a few Hz. I suspect a problem somewhere in the electronics.

*I confess the comparison isn't entirely valid because I had to tweak the FSS FAST gain from its nominal value of 22 to 25 in order to get the PC drive RMS down to the ~1.5V level. At the nominal gain setting, with the laser frequency locked to the cavity length, the PC Drive RMS was ~4 V. Still, indicative of something being off in the electronics.

14659   Thu Jun 6 22:11:53 2019 KojiUpdateIOOIMC diagnostics

As per Gautam's request, I looked at the IMC situation.

Locking path

• Acquisition: IMC IN1 Gain +4 (nominal), Boost 0, VCO Gain (-32), FSS Common +6 (nominal), FSS FAST +20
This is too low gain. So oscillate VCO Gain between -32 and ~0 until TEM00 lock is acquired
• Once lock is acquired, bring the VCO gain to +11 (new nominal), and increase the FSS FAST to +23 (new nominal). Change the IMC BOOST to 3 (nominal)

Diagnosis

• The PMC servo gain was checked. The control signal monitor for the PMC actuation was hooked up to SR785. The nominal gain was +18dB. Increasing the gain to 20dB made the servo oscillating. So the nominal gain of +18dB seems still reasonable.
• The status of NOISE EATER was checked. Both the PMC REFL and TRANS were looked at by AG4395A. The power spectrum of them did not change much around the kHz~MHz region. It made the PSD slightly (x2~3) improved below 1kHz. I also did not recognize the relaxation oscillation peak. So I could not figure out where to see. NOISE EATSER was on and is still on.
• IFO Modulation Freq: I took this chance to look at the IMC absolute length using the peak at 3.6MHz. The TP1A output of the IMC servo board was hooked up to AG4395A.
The new FSR of the IMC (and thus the modulation frequency for the IFO) is 11.066275MHz (instead of the previous 11.066209MHz).
This corresponds to 0.16mm difference in the roundtrip length.
• (*Still working) IMC SERVO configuration:
• FAST 25 (nominal) sometimes invoke the oscilattion. 24 has gain peaking ~30kHz. There is a big line peak at 35kHz so wanted to avoid the servo bump (PZT-EOM cross over). So decided to use 23dB. (This is not optimal for the CM servo as we need as much as bandwidth for CM servo.)
• IMC VCO GAIN (bad name. this is actually overall output gain for IMC) was increased from the nominal 7 to 11. Increasing this above 11 makes the servo oscillating at ~200kHz.
• (*Still working) Measured power spectrum of the error signal. Too many line peaks.
• (*Still working) Single trigger observation: Oscilloscope monitoring started from 35kHz going up and ~20kHz oscillation +/-6V of the IMC servo output was observed. Could not capture good data for this. Try the other day.

I'll complete the entry later.

14670   Thu Jun 13 18:01:18 2019 aaronUpdateIOOIMC diagnostics

Continuing this investigation of the IMC, today I am getting familiar with the PMC and FSS. I'd like to measure the frequency noise of the PSL referenced to the PMC.

I checked that the PSL shutter is off, so no light reaches the IMC.

I'm not really sure what I'm looking for on the FSS boxes. I found a few documents to guide:

I ran the FSS autolock script from C1PSL_FSS, nothing obvious changes when I do so. The FSS error signal (which I think is PSL-FSS_MIXERM) is flatlined, and the RC-RF_PD has no LO (PSL-FSS_LOCALC is nan).

14675   Fri Jun 14 13:10:00 2019 aaronUpdateIOOIMC diagnostics

The circuit diagram for the PMC servo card is D980352. From this diagram, I see that I can send an excitation from the network analyzer to FP2TEST (9.09 kOhm input impedance) where it is added to the PMC error signal before going to the loop filters.

I hook up the following

• Agilent 4395A output to SR560 (300 Hz HP, gain of 1)
• SR560 to FP2TEST and to Agilent's channel R
• PMC error signal IF (mixer box mounted to rack, I noticed the IF BNC->SMA were a bit loose/stressed by a hanging LP RF filter) to SR560 (also 300 Hz HP, gain of 2)
• SR560 to Agilent channel A

I 'Enable' Test 2 on the PSL screen, so FP2TEST gets added to the error signal.

## PDH signal

• TDS 3034B with four channels
• 1. PMC servo box external drive (split off from the function generator)
• 2. PMC servo box output monitor (mirrors the drive, shows when drive is saturating)
• 3. IF signal (split off after the mixer)
• 4. PMC Trans (long BNC from the PSL table)
• SRS DS345 function generator (into the PMC servo box' external drive)
• 100 Hz signal (there's a 10 Hz pole on the PZT drive, so any faster than this and I can't see both sidebands without the HV output mon clipping)
• 3.19 Vpp amplitude (smallest amplitude at 100 Hz such that both sidebands are well resolved)
• 1.52 V offset (center the carrier's PDH error signal at pi/2 out of phase with the drive)

I was able to see the carrier and both sidebands.

I tried to grab this data from the scope via ethernet, but was unsuccessful (timeout errors, I'm using the scripts from scripts/tektronix/tek-dump, and the GPIB box that Kruthi had been using for the GigE cam; I also tried plugging in directly scope->ethernet. Never got anything but timeout errors, so maybe I'm not specifying the port correctly. Anyway the trace is frozen on the scope for later use, or I can easily repeat this now that I know how).

## Spectrum

Next, I locked the PMC (Test1 is off, tune DC output adjust until I get some transmission, turn on the loop at Test1, increase the gain to before the loop goes unstable). I'm sending the following channels to SR560 (gain = 2, no filtering, high dynamic reserve, 50 Ohm outputs), and reading spectra from the Agilent 4395A:

• R-- PMC TRANS PD
• A-- PDH IF
• B-- PMC PZT HV MON

The HV mon was always saturating the preamp, so I disconnected it; I added a 50 Hz (6db) high pass to the Trans PD signal, since it has a DC component.

I got to take a look at the traces on the spectrum analyzer front panel, but too tired to do the GPIB for now. There are peaks, things look reasonable.

14677   Mon Jun 17 12:37:16 2019 aaronUpdateIOOIMC diagnostics

### Grabbed the PMC data

I went to set up the spectrum analyzer measurements through GPIB, but inadvertently deleted the contents of ~/Agilent/netgpibdata/ (made a soft link in my folder, decided I wanted it gone but rm'ed instead of unlink). I copied what I think was in that folder back (from /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/general/labutils/netgpibdata).

Again, the spectra are:

• R-- PMC TRANS PD into SR560 with G=2 DC coupled, no filtering
• A-- PDH IF into SR560 with G=2, DC coupled, no filtering
• B-- PMC PZT HV MON into SR560 with G=2, AC coupled, no filtering

I recorded the three spectra with the following parameters:

• Three separate spans:
• 10 Hz to 150 kHz
• 100 to 550 kHz
• 500 kHz to 2.5 MHz
• bwSpanRatio = 0.1 %
• averages: 10
• number of points: 801
• spec type: noise (PSD units)

I then ran AGmeasure with the above parameters in the yaml, with the rest following the defaults in AgilentTemplate.yaml. I saved the data in /users/aaron/40m/data/PMC/190617/

Looks like the header contains all of the parameters, so I shouldn't have trouble distinguishing the spectra. I didn't get the instant plotting working, but the data seem to be there.

I'm still having trouble getting the data from the oscilloscope. I'm not sure why the tektronix scrips I've used before aren't working, I'm checking it now.

update: Grabbed the data, the issue was just using the wrong IP address.

14681   Tue Jun 18 20:35:07 2019 aaronUpdateIOOIMC diagnostics

I made a script (/users/aaron/40m/GPIB/tds_dump.py) that grabs data from a Tektronix scope and packages into a pickled dict with the following structure:

1. ch1
1. times ("ts")
2. values ("vals")
3. channel info ("info")
2. ch2
1. ""
3. etc

I made a python notebook that does the following:

1. Grab the data from the pickle above
2. Fit a triangle wave to the drive signal
3. Determine the (change in Volts) / second from the triangle wave, as well as define the times of a single sweep of the PDH error signal
4. Trim the error signal data to contain the PDH signal from the carrier and two sidebands only (the original trace was for three periods).
5. Fit the functional form of the PDH signal to the trimmed error signal.
1. The sideband frequency is fixed at 35.5 MHz, and the scaling of Volts-to-Hz is left free, so this fit gives the calibration of IF volts to Hz.
6. Grab the spectra (already saved from the Agilent with the netgpib scripts) and apply this V-to-Hz scaling
7. Plot the spectra

The fit in step (5) is still looking quite bad, despite the fitted values being close to the expected. Since we really just want a calibrated spectrum, I'll instead fit a line to the linear portion of the PDH error signal for the carrier and both sidebands, then determine the scaling from that.

14683   Wed Jun 19 19:12:51 2019 aaronUpdateIOOIMC diagnostics

Here are the results from the fit. Data can be found on nodus in /users/aaron/40m/data/PMC/190617/. I've put a jupyter notebook with the analysis in /users/aaron/40m/analysis/PDH_calibrate.ipynb (might be some filename issues due to different directory structure on my laptop).

Here's a summary of the current measurement. I'll be referencing the diagram for the PMC servo card.

1. With the PMC servo loop open, sweep the PMC PZT by sending a triangle wave in to J5 (external drive on the servo card).
1. I used a 100Hz drive, but should use something slower so my drive isn't filtered out by the 100Hz pole on the servo card and the 10Hz pole on the PZT.
2. Monitor the voltage at the HV drive, as well as at "mixer out" (J8 on the servo board)
1. Note that I took this PDH error signal from FP2TEST rather than "mixer out", which means my error signal was not low pass filtered.
3. Calibrate the HV mon in units of Hz by fitting the PDH signal. The sidebands should be 35.5Mhz away from the carrier peak.
1. This part needs to be done differently to account for thermal locking in the PMC.
4. You now have the PDH error signal as a function of PMC resonance in Hz, and can use that to calibrate the PDH error spectrum.
1. The spectrum is taken when the PMC is locked, so the Hz/V scaling is the slope of the PDH error signal.

In the figures below, I obesrved that for fast (100Hz) drives, the PDH error signal had a pi/2 phase shift relative to the triangle wave, which means even though the resonance appears near the turnaround of the triangle, it is actually occuring near the center of the range.

There are several problems with this data:

• PMC error signal spectrum is not properly calibrated, even according to the process described above
• The drive was faster than the response of the PZT.
• I was driving with a ~1V excitation, so I've lost a factor of 10 somewhere on the way to the external drive curve. Probably just a problem with how I've read the data dump from the scope.
14686   Fri Jun 21 19:36:26 2019 KojiUpdateIOOIMC diagnostics

The IMC REFL error signal was measured to compare it with the other spectra (if we have).

The blue curve is the in-loop IMC error and the red is the dark noise. So they are not an apple-to-apple comparison. But the red noise is going to be suppressed by the loop, and still the red is below blue. This means that the blue curve is the measured noise rather than the readout noise.

We suspect that the current issue is the PC drive saturation (as usual). Does this indicate that the laser freq noise is actually increased?

----

Another suspect was that the degradation of the LO level. We used to have the issue of slowly dying ERA-5 (ERA-5SM indeed). The RF levels on the demod board were measured using an active probe.

The LO input: 0dBm, ERA-5 input: -2.7dBm and -2.1dBm for I and Q. I found that the outputs of the ERA-5SM were +10.5dBm and +10.6dBm.
This lead me to replace the chips but the situation was not changed. Then I realized that the LO levels should have been measured with the load replaced from the mixers to a 50Ohm load. Somehow these mixers lower the apparent LO levels. So I decided to say this is OK.

14693   Mon Jun 24 15:49:05 2019 aaronUpdateIOOIMC diagnostics

aI went to repeat these measurements using the mixer out channel from the servo box, and with a slower sweep for the PDH calibration.

I had trouble getting the PDH signal, here are some notes:

• I added a 50 Ohm terminator to BNC T on the mixer box. This had been terminated before I started, but I noticed no terminator today.
• Noticed some distortion of my driving triangle wave if I measured it on ch3 and 4 of the tektronix scope, not present on ch 1/2
• Initially wasn't finding a signal because I was opening the loop by turning off the Test 1 switch, but this meant the mixer mon on the servo box also did not receive the PDH signal. Instead, I cut the loop with the "BLANK" switch on the PMC screen, which instead blanks out the op amp between the mixer mon and the PMC drive conditioning (so the external drive still reaches the PZT).

attachment 1 is the configuration of the PMC screen when I was trying to get some PDH signal; I did move the DC output adjust to 0V, but found that this led to the output being railed; this makes sense, the op amp at U9 has a negative bias at GND.

Rana came by and gave me some tips.

• I'd been using the wrong servo board diagram, it should be in D1400221
• We removed the LP filter from the mixer output (before going to FP1TEST on the servo board), since the board itself already is filtering the IF.
• We might have observed the thermal locking? See for yourself, the trans and refl signals while sweeping the PZT drive at 5 Hz and 30 Hz respectively are in attachments 2 and 3.
• Rather than using an SR560, I should use an RF coupler between the mixer and FP1TEST to measure the error signal spectrum. I found a ZFDC-20-5-S+ (0.1-2000 MHz) and sent an SMA cable from the coupled port to channel R of the Agilent 4395.

We finally got the PDH signal again, and I recorded the PDH signal while driving with the following settings on the Siglent function generator.

• 1.1 Hz triangle wave, 6Vpp, -7Vdc offset, high impedance mode

I tried getting a spectrum using the coupler, the mixer mon is seeing a DC offset though and causing the PZT to rail. Will try to understand why, but in the meantime removing the coupler (still no LP filter) lets us lock the PMC again.

RXA: Kruthi thinks all of our subsequent IMC locking problems are Aaron's fault (she was quick to give him up as soon as the thumb screws were tightened...)

14721   Tue Jul 2 19:36:18 2019 aaronUpdateIOOIMC diagnostics

The latest in my fling with the PMC. Though PMC trans is back to nominal levels (~0.713 V), we'd still like to understand the PMC noise.

Last time, I took some spectra with the RF probe (Agilent 41800A). I had already measured the PDH error signal by sweeping the PZT at ~1 Hz. The notebook I used for analysis has been updated in /users/aaron/analysis/PDH_calibrate.ipynb. The analysis was the following:

• fit the PDH error signal, assuming a 35.5MHz modulation frequency. Here are the (approximate) fit parameters:
• Mapping of PZT mon voltage to Hz: 5.92 Hz/V_{PZT_mon}
• P_carrier*P_signal: 0.193 W^2
• HV mon voltage on resonance: 0.910 V
• Error signal far off resonance: 0.249 V
• Transmission: 0.00238
• ​yikes. The nominal transmission is T=0.003. I let this parameter be free as a check, and to avoid overconstraining the data; is this consistent with measurements of the PMC optics' transmission?
• Length: 0.0210 m
• This is consistent with the nominal PMC length
• Using the fit of the full PDH error signal, I am able to plot error signal vs frequency, and fit the linear portion of the carrier PDH signal. The results of this fit are:
• -9.75e-7 V_PDH per Hz
• 0.105 V error signal at DC
• I then divide the power spectra by the squared slope of the linear fit above (V_PDH^2/Hz^2) to get the spectra in Hz^2/rtHz
• I've plotted both the spectrum I took directly at the mixer I using the agilent probe, as well as the spectrum taken by sending the PMC servo card's mixer mon to an SR560 (G=2) then to the spectrum analyzer

There are a few problems remaining:

• There should be a gain of 100 between the mixer I and the servo board's mixer out. It's not clear to me that this is reflected in the spectra. Moreover, the header files on the spectra I grabbed from the Agilent say that the R (mixer I) channel has 20dB of input attenuation, which is also not reflected. If I have swapped the two spectra and not accounted for either the gain of the servo card or the attenuation of the spectrum analyzer, these two gains would cancel, but I'm not confident that's what's going on.
11561   Thu Sep 3 00:14:09 2015 ranaConfigurationIOOIMC fast gain change for lock acq

The IMC often was making that scratchy noise when first catching lock and sometimes breaking. Thinking of the crappy crossover sit that EQ showed in his latest plots, I decided that it didn't make sense to acquire lock with an unstable PZT/EOM crossover, so I have changed mcdown to acquire with +13 dB Fast Gain and its much fast now and no longer makes that sound.

I also changed the caput command from 'caput -l' to 'caput -c -l' to see if the async 'wait for callback' feature will insure that the commands get sent. I witnessed the mcdown not actually writing all of its commands once or twice tonight. With the MC Boost left on its never going to lock.

mcdown has been committed to SVN. Please, if you have recently edit mcup and Autolock, commit them to the SVN or else I will delete them and do an svn up.

12751   Wed Jan 25 01:27:45 2017 gautamUpdateIMCIMC feedforward checkup

This is probably just a confirmation of something we discussed a couple of weeks back, but I wanted to get more familiar with using the multi-coherence (using EricQs nice function from the pynoisesub package) as an indicator of how much feedforward noise cancellation can be achieved. In particular, in light of our newly improved WFS demod/whitening boards, I wanted to see if there was anything to be gained by adding the WFS to our current MCL feedforward topology.

I used a 1 hour data segment - the channels I looked at were the vertex seismometer (X,Y,Z) and the pitch and yaw signals of the two WFS, and the coherence of the uncorrelated part of these multiple witnesses with MCL. I tried a few combinations to see what is the theoretical best achievable subtraction:

1. Vertex seismometer X and Y channels - in the plot, this is "Seis only"
2. Seis + WFS 1 P & Y
3. Seis + WFS 2 P & Y
4. Seis + WFS 1 & 2 P
5. Seis + WFS 1 & 2 Y

The attached plot suggests that there is negligible benefit from adding the WFS in any combination to the MCL feedforward, at least from the point of view of theoretical achievable subtraction

I also wanted to put up a plot of the current FF filter performance, for which I collected 1 hour of data tonight with the FF on. While the feedforward does improve the MCL spectrum, I expected better performance judging by previous entries in the elog, which suggest that the FIR implementation almost saturates the achievable lower bound. The performance seems to have degraded particularly around 3Hz, despite the multi-coherence being near unity at these frequencies. Perhaps it is time to retrain the Weiner filter? I will also look into installation of the accelerometers on the MC2 chamber, which we have been wanting to do for a while now...

11794   Sat Nov 21 00:45:30 2015 KojiUpdateIOOIMC fix

Based on the observation of the PMC error signal, I started measuring the IMC OLTF. Immediately, it was found that the overall IMC loop gain was too low.
The UGF was ~40kHz, which was really marginal. It had been >100kHz when I have adjusted it about a year ago. (Next entry for the detail)

The first obvious thing was that the SMA cables around the IMC servo have visible degradation (Attatched photos).
I jiggled the signal cable from the demodulator Q_out to the MC servo. The openloop gain seemed fluctuating (increased) based on the cabling.
I decided to repair these cables by adding solder on the shield.

Even after the repair, the open loop TF didn't show any improvement. I checked the LO level and found that it was -16.7dBm.

I traced the problem down to the frequency generator unit (T1000461). The front panel of the unit indicates the output power for the 29.5MHz output is 13dBm,
while measurement showed it was 6~8dBm (fluctuating). The T1000461 document describes that there is only a wenzel oscillator inside. Does this mean the oscillatorwas degraded??? We need to open the box.

I was not sure what was the LO level. I naively assumed the input is 0dBm. Reducing the attenuation of the dial on the AM Stabilizer unit from 12dB attn to 0dB.
This made the LO level -3.3dBm.

Later at home, I thought this nominal LO level of 0dBm could have been wrong.

The demodulator circuit (D990511) has the amplifier ERA-5 (G=~20dB) at the input. Between the input and the ERA-5 there is a pattern for an attenuator.
Assuming we have no attenuator, the ERA-5 has to spit out 20dBm. That is too much for this chip. I need to pull out the box to see how much is the nominal LO for this box using an active probe.

This decrease/increase of the LO level affects the WFS demod too. According to D980233-B, the input stage has the comparator chip AD96687, which can handle differential voltage of 5.5V.
Therefore the effect is minimal.

11796   Sun Nov 22 07:09:01 2015 ranaUpdateIOOIMC fix

On the demod board there is a 10 dB attenuator (AT1), which lowers the level to -10 dBm before the ERA-5. Then it should be 10 dBm before going to the rest of the parts. But I guess the ERA-5 chips which come later on in the circuit could be decaying like the ones in the PMC LO board.

 Quote: Later at home, I thought this nominal LO level of 0dBm could have been wrong.
11797   Sun Nov 22 12:07:09 2015 KojiUpdateIOOIMC fix

TO DO

Done (Nov 23, 2015) - Check if the attenuator is still there in the input chain

Done (Nov 23, 2015) - Check if the actual LO levels at the 17dBm mixers are reasonable.

- Check if the actual LO levels for the LSC demods are OK too

15897   Wed Mar 10 15:35:25 2021 Paco, AnchalSummaryIMCIMC free swinging experiment set to trigger at 5:00 am

A tmux session named "MCFreeSwingTest" will run on Rossa. This session is running script scripts/SUS/freeSwingMC.py (also attached) which will trigger at 5:00 am to impart 30000 counts kick to MC1, MC2, and MC3 after shutting PSL shutter and disabling the MC autolocker. It will let them freely swing for 1050 sec and will repeat 15 times to allow some averaging. In the end, it will undo all the changes it does and switches on autolocker on IMC. The script is set to restore any changes in case it fails at any point or a Ctrl-C is detected.

15893   Wed Mar 10 11:46:22 2021 Paco, AnchalSummaryIMCIMC free swinging prep

[Paco, Anchal]

# Initial State
- MC is locked. The PRM monitor shows some oscillations.
- POP monitor shows light flashing once in a while.
- AS monitor shows one beam along with some other flashing beam around it.
- PRM Watchdog is tripped and shutdown. Everything else is normal except for overload on SRM OpLevs.
- Donatella got a mouse promotion

# Reenabling PRM watchdog:
- The custom reEnablePRMWatchdog.py has been deleted.
- Tried enabling the coil outputs manually and switching watchdog to Normal.
- Again saw large fluctuations like yesterday.
- Probably still the same issue of how current calculated actuations to the coils is in range -600 to -900 and gives and impulse to the optics when suddenly turned on.
- Waiting for PRM to damp down a little.
- Today we plan to change the position bias on PRM C1:SUS-PRM_POS_OFFSET instead of changing biases in pitch and yaw.
- Changing C1:SUS-PRM_POS_OFFSET from 0 to +/- 100 without enabling the coils, it seems upper and lower coils are anticorrelated with just changing the position. So going back to changing pitch.
- Changing C1:SUS-PRM_PIT_OFFSET from 0 -> 780. Switched on watchdog to normal.
- PRM damped down. OpLev errors are also within range.
- Enabled both OpLevs.

# Try locking Y-Arm
- IFO>CONFIGURE>YARM>Restore YARM (POY) using Donatella. See a bunch of python error messages in the call complaining about unable to find some python 2 files. Closed it with Ctrl-C after a stuck state.
- Tried running it on Pianosa, the script ran without error but Y-Arm didn't lock.

# Try locking X-Arm
- IFO>CONFIGURE>XARM>Restore XARM (POX) on Donatella. Again a bunch of OSError messages. Donatella is not configured properly to run scripts.
- Tried running it on Piasnosa, the script ran without error but X-Arm didn't lock.
- This might mean that both arms are misaligned or the BS/PRM is misaligned.
- Moving around C1:SUS-PRM_PIT_OFFSET and C1:SUS-PRM_YAW_OFFSET in order to see if the transmitted light is misalgined. Both arms are set to acquire lock if possible. No luck.

# Hypothesis: The Arm cavity is not aligned within itself (ITM-ETM)
- Will try to lock X-Arm with green light while tuning the ETMX. Hopefully the BS and ITM are aligned so that once we align ETMX to get a green lock, the IR will also lock from the other side.
- Running IFO>CONFIGURE>XARM>Restore XARM (ALS) on Pianosa. No lock, moving forward with tunning ETMX pitch and yaw offsets. Nothing changed. Brought back to same values.

[Rana joined, Anchal moved to Rossa from Pianosa]

# Moving on to IMC suspensions characterization:
- Closed the PSL shutter, to our suprise, the MC was still locked. We thought this would take away any light from IMC but it doesn't. Maybe the IFO Overview needs to show the schematic in a way where this doesn't happen: "No light from any laser entering the MC but it still is locked with a resonating field inside."
- Shutting IMCR shutter (hoping that would unlock the IMC), still nothing happend.
- Tried shutting PSL shutter from Rossa, nothing happened to MC lock still.
- Closed shutter IOO>Lock MC> Close PSL and this unlocked the IMC. Found out that this shutter channel is C1:PSL-PSL_ShutterRqst while the one from the sitemap>Shutter>PSL changes C1:AUX-PSL_ShutterRqst. Some clarification on these medm screens would be nice.
- Disabled the MC autolocked from IOO>Lock MC screen (C1:IOO-MC_LOCK_ENABLE).
- Checked the scripts/SUS/freeswing.py to understand how kick is delivered and optic is left to swing freely.
- Next, we are looking at the C1SUS_MC1 screen to understand what channels to read during data acquisition.
- In sensor matrix, we see INMON for each sensor which is probably raw counts data from the OSEMs. Rana mentioned that OSEM data comes out in units of microns. These are C1:SUS-MC1_ULSEN_OUTPUT (and so on for UR, LL, LR, SD).

- In prep for finishing, recovered Autolocker by first opening the PSL mechanical shutter, then re-enabling the Autolocker. The IMC lock didn't immediately recover, and we saw some fuzz on the PSL-FSS_FAST trace, so we closed the shutter again, waited a minute, then re-opened it and MC caught its lock.

15895   Wed Mar 10 15:00:16 2021 gautamSummaryIMCIMC free swinging prep

Did you fix this issue? It is helpful to post a screenshot of the offending MEDM screen in addition to witticisms. The elog says "sitemap>Shutter>PSL" but I can't find PSL under the dropdown for shutters from Sitemap.

 # Moving on to IMC suspensions characterization: - Closed the PSL shutter, to our suprise, the MC was still locked. We thought this would take away any light from IMC but it doesn't. Maybe the IFO Overview needs to show the schematic in a way where this doesn't happen: "No light from any laser entering the MC but it still is locked with a resonating field inside."
15896   Wed Mar 10 15:29:58 2021 AnchalSummaryIMCIMC free swinging prep

No we didn't fix the issue. We'll post some screenshots tomorrow. From "sitemap>Shutter>PSL" we meant in Shutter medm window, we clicked on the PSL close button. As pointed later, it switches C1:AUX-PSL_ShutterRqst while the PSL shutter switch on Lock MC medm screen switches C1:PSL-PSL_ShutterRqst. We were not sure if this was intentional, so we didn't change anything.

15546   Sat Aug 29 18:52:42 2020 ranaUpdateIOOIMC gain change

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

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

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

14691   Mon Jun 24 11:48:35 2019 gautamUpdateIOOIMC in-loop error spectra and OLTF

Attachment #1 - In loop error spectra, measured as Koji posted end of last week.

• Main difference is that the line noise seems much lower.
• For the "dark" measurement, I set the IN1 gain of the servo board to the value of +4 dB, which is what it is in lock.
• As Koji mentioned, this isn't an apple-to-apple comparison as the IMC loop will squish the plotted orange trace.
• Nevertheless, the fact that the blue trace is above orange everywhere gives confidence that we are in fact measuring frequency noise.
• For the higher frequency measurement, I used the AG4395 analyzer, which has 50 ohm input impedance. So to get the measurements with the SR785 to line up, I multiplied these by x2.
• For the frequency axis calibration, I used the value of 13 kHz/V for the PDH discriminant, which was what I measured it to be last year (but I didn't check again today).
• Note that the IMC locking loop OLTF has not been undone, so this isn't the actual laser frequency noise on the transmitted beam. In order to measure the latter, we'd have to use (for example) an arm cavity as an analyzer.

Attachment #2 - OLTF of the IMC loop.

• Measurement was made using the IN1/IN2 method, injection was done at the "A EXC" front panel BNC input.
• For comparison, I've overlaid a measurement from the 2017 IMC loop investigations. Doesn't seem to be significantly different.
• UGF and phase margin are in the ballpark of what they were reported to be in the past.

Attachment #3 - Photo courtesy Koji showing the bank of BNC connectors used for these measurements.

Clearly, these measurements were taken in a time when the IMC was "well behaved". How to characterize what's happening when this isn't the case?

12896   Tue Mar 21 15:13:44 2017 gautamUpdateIMCIMC input beam mode matching

[valera, gautam]

Last night, Valera and I looked into two aspects of the IMC:

1. How can we accurately set the offset at the error point of the PDH servo such that we lock to the true center of the resonance?
2. What's up with the large common mode offset on the WFS?

I will post a more detailed elog about last night's work, but Valera also thought it might be a good idea to try and improve the mode-matching into the IMC. I couldn't find anything on the wiki/elog about the mode matching situation on the PSL table, so I quickly went over yesterday to measure some lengths. From looking at the MCREFL DC levels when the mode cleaner is locked (~0.37V) and unlocked (~5.7V), the current mode matching efficiency seems to be about 88%, so there is definitely some headroom for improvement.

Here is my cartoon of the situation on the PSL table. All lengths are measured in mm, and I would say correct to +/- 5 mm, so there could be considerable error here...

(L1 : f=+200mm. L2: f=-150mm. L3:  f=+400mm)

I extracted the lengths from the edge of the PSL table to IM1 and MC1 from (what I think are) the latest CAD drawings on the DCC. I then put all this into an a la mode script [Attachment #5] - I assumed a waist of 370um at the PMC output mirror, and a waist of 1.78mm at MC1. I neglected the passage through the in-vac Faraday, EOM and BS1 (on the sketch above) and the MC1 substrate. I was able to achieve a theoretical mode-matching efficiency of 1 by just moving the positions of L2 and L3.

Given that there are probably errors of the order 0.5cm in the lengths on the PSL table, and also the in-vacuum distance to MC1, I figured it would be ideal to just move one lens and see if we can improve the efficiency. It looks like it may be more effective to move L2 than L3. The plot on the right shows that the sensitivity is approximately equal to the positioning of L2 and L3. Judging by this plot, looks like w.r.t. the coordinates in this plot, we are somewhere around (0.02,-0.02).

It looks like if we want to do this, moving L2 (f = -150mm) may be the best way to go.

12898   Tue Mar 21 21:59:48 2017 gautamUpdateIMCIMC input beam mode matching

[valera, gautam]

We implemented the plan outlined in the previous elog. The visibility (Pmax-Pmin)/(Pmax+Pmin) calculated with the MC REFL PD levels with the MC locked/unlocked is now ~96% (up from 88%). The MC REFL DC level in lock is now ~0.12V (compared to 0.4V). Assuming a modulation depth of 0.1 @ 29.5MHz, about 25% of this (i.e. 0.03V) is from sideband light.

The procedure followed was (see sketch in previous elog for various optic labels):

1. Move L2 back (towards PMC) by ~2cm.
2. Walk the beam using M3 and M4 to minimize MCREFL, re-lock IMC, run WFS.
3. Move L3 back (towards PMC) by ~2cm.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3, the latter with smaller steps, monitor MCREFL DC level.

We could probably tweak the fine positioning of L2 and L3 and improve the efficiency a little more, but the primary objective here was to see if there was any effect on the large common mode offset on the WFS demodulated "SUM" output. Unfortunately, we saw no effect.

Here are two photos of the relevant section of the PSL table before (left) and after (right) our work there:

16886   Thu Jun 2 20:05:37 2022 yutaConfigurationPSLIMC input power recovered to 1W, some alignment works

[Paco, Yuta]

We have increased the output power from the PSL table to 951 mW (it was 96.7 mW).
IMC was recovered including WFS, and both arms are flashing nicely in IR.
We tweaked the alignment of GRX and GRY injection to align them with IR, but it was hard.
Right now IR beams are not centered on TMs. We should center them first.

What we did:
Power increase and IMC recovery
- Replaced a beam splitter which splits the beam into IMC REFL RF PD path and WFS path from R=98% to R=10% one. Reflection goes to RF PD.
- Put a R=98% beam splitter back into WFS path.
- We also tried to put a window in front of IMC REFL camera to recover the arrangement in 40m wiki, but the beam reflected from the window was too weak for us to align. So, we decided not to place a window in front of the camera.
- Attached photos are the IMC REFL path before and after the work.
- Measured the PSL output power as Koji did in elog 40m/16672. It was measured to be 96.7+/- 0.5 mW.
- Rotated the HWP using the Universal Motion Controller (it was not possible for us to do it from the MEDM screen). The position was changed from 73.99 deg to 36.99 deg. Output power was measured to be 951 +/- 1 mW
- IMC locked without any other changes.
- Changed C1:IOO-WFS_TRIGGER_THRESH_ON to 5000 (was 500). IMC WFS also worked.
- After running MC WFS relief script, WFS DC offsets and RF offsets are adjusted following the steps in elog 40m/16835. Below are the results.

C1:IOO-WFS1_SEG1_DC.AOFF => -0.0008882080010759334
C1:IOO-WFS1_SEG2_DC.AOFF => -0.0006527877490346629
C1:IOO-WFS1_SEG3_DC.AOFF => -0.0005847311617496113
C1:IOO-WFS1_SEG4_DC.AOFF => -0.0010395992663688955
C1:IOO-WFS2_SEG1_DC.AOFF => -0.0025944841559976334
C1:IOO-WFS2_SEG2_DC.AOFF => -0.003191715502180159
C1:IOO-WFS2_SEG3_DC.AOFF => -0.0036688060499727726
C1:IOO-WFS2_SEG4_DC.AOFF => -0.004011172490815322

IOO-WFS1_I1         :  +1977.7 ->    +2250 (Significant change)
IOO-WFS1_I2         :  +3785.8 ->  +3973.2
IOO-WFS1_I3         :  +2014.2 ->  +2277.7 (Significant change)
IOO-WFS1_I4         :  -208.83 ->  +430.96 (Significant change)
IOO-WFS1_Q1         :  +2379.5 ->  +1517.4 (Significant change)
IOO-WFS1_Q2         :  +2260.4 ->  +2172.6
IOO-WFS1_Q3         :  +588.86 ->  +978.98 (Significant change)
IOO-WFS1_Q4         :  +1654.8 ->  +195.38 (Significant change)
IOO-WFS2_I1         :  -1619.9 ->  -534.25 (Significant change)
IOO-WFS2_I2         :  +1610.4 ->  +1619.8
IOO-WFS2_I3         :  +1919.6 ->  +2179.8 (Significant change)
IOO-WFS2_I4         :    +1557 ->  +1426.6
IOO-WFS2_Q1         :   -62.58 ->  +345.56 (Significant change)
IOO-WFS2_Q2         :  +777.01 ->  +805.41
IOO-WFS2_Q3         :  -6183.6 ->  -5365.8 (Significant change)
IOO-WFS2_Q4         :  +4457.2 ->  +4397.

IFO Alignment
- Aligned both arms using IR. Both arm flashes at the following, which is consistent with the power increase.
C1:SUS-ETMX_TRX_OUT_DQ ~1.1
C1:SUS-ETMY_TRY_OUT_DQ ~0.6
- With this, we tried to tweak GRX and GRY injection. The following is after the work. We could increase GTRX to 0.204 when the Xarm is aligned to green. This suggests that GRX injection is not aligned nicely yet. But the beams are also not centered on TMs. We should center them first.
C1:ALS-TRX_OUT_DQ ~0.13
C1:ALS-TRY_OUT_DQ ~0.07
- GTRX and GTRY cameras are adjusted to have nicer images. In GRX path, the second and last lens before the PD and CCD was pulled ~ 1 cm behind its original position and both beams realigned. Then, on GRY path, the beam was re-centered on the first and only lens, the whole assembly pushed forward by ~ 2 cm and the beams re-centered.

Next:
- Center the IR beam on TMs (first by our eyeballs; better to use A2L after arm locking is recovered and coils are balanced)
- Tweak GRX and GRY injection (restore GRY PZTs?)
- Install ETMXT camera (if it is easy)
- Lock Xarm and Yarm (C1:LSC-TRX/Y_OUT needs to be fixed for triggering. Can we use other PDs for triggering?)
- MICH locking (REFL and AS PDs might need to be re-aligned; they are not receiving much light)
- RTS model for BHD needs to be updated

14688   Sun Jun 23 09:36:32 2019 gautamUpdateIOOIMC is locking normally again

After typing up the elog, I decided to try locking the IMC again - now it locks again with the "OLD" gain settings. I tested it ~5 times, the autolocker brings the lock back and the PC drive levels are normal. IMC transmission and MC REFL DC light levels in lock are normal. The PC Drive RMS voltage is <1V. What's more, there is no longer any evidence of 60 Hz line harmonics any more in the PMC diagnostics channels. Compare attachment #1 to this elog.

WTF.

I undid the changes Koji made to the autolocker gains, and am trying the old settings again. Let' see how stable or otherwise the config is. I must've jiggled some poor cable connection back into a good spot while working on the PSL table?

Anyway, this helps Kruthi and Milind.

14689   Sun Jun 23 14:43:14 2019 KojiUpdateIOOIMC is locking normally again

Note that I have removed an SR785, an oscilloscope, some SRS instruments from the PSL and PMC last night.

But they (and RF Network Analyzer) were not there when the problem started.

We should record the IMC error (at test point monitor) too? If the IMC locks on Monday too, I'll do it.

14690   Mon Jun 24 08:12:10 2019 gautamUpdateIOOIMC is locking normally again

Over the last 24 hours, the IMC autolocker was able to keep the MC locked ~60% of the time. This is not particularly good, but is an improvement on ~2 weeks ago when the IMC couldn't be locked.

There are two periods, which I've indicated by vertical cursors, between which the autolocker was doing something strange - usually this kind of trend is caused by one or more of the VME crates being unresponsive and the autolocker gets stuck, but I confirmed that both c1psl and c1iool0 are telnet-able. So I conclude that the stability and reliability of the IMC loop is still not as good as it used to be.

Note also that while the PC drive RMS level mostly hovers around 1 V, there are several excursions above that level. This in itself isn't a new phenomenon. I will do some more characterization by measuring the in-loop error signal spectrum and maybe the OLTF of the IMC locking loop.

 Quote: Let' see how stable or otherwise the config is. I must've jiggled some poor cable connection back into a good spot while working on the PSL table? Or the NPRO decided to be less noisy on Sunday.
12824   Mon Feb 13 13:34:44 2017 gautamUpdateIMCIMC length loop - bad SMA cable replaced

I was a little confused why the In1 Gain had to be as high as +10dB - before the changes to the RF chain, we were using +27dB, and we expect the changes made to have increased the modulation depth by a factor of ~25, so I would have expected the new In1 Gain to be more like 0dB.

While walking by the PSL table, I chanced upon the scope monitoring PMC transmission, and I noticed that the RIN was unusually high (see the scope screenshot below). We don't have the projector on the wall anymore, but it doesn't look like this has shown up in the SLOW monitor channel anyways. Disabling the MC autolocker / closing the PSL shutter had no effect. I walked over to the amplifier setup in 1X2, and noticed that the SMA cable connecting the output of the amplifier to the EOM drive was flaky. By touching the cable a little, I noticed that the trace on the scope appeared normal again. Turning off the 29.5MHz modulation source completely returned the trace to normal.

So I just made a new cable of similar length (with the double heat shrink prescription). The PMC transmission looks normal on the scope now. I also re-aligned the PMC for good measure. So presumably, we were not driving the EOM with the full +27dBm of available power. Now, the In1 Gain on the MC servo board is set to +2dB, and I changed the nominal FSS FAST gain to +18dB. The IMC OLTF now has a UGF of ~165kHz, though the phase margin is only ~27 degrees..

 Quote: MC Servo Board​ After some tweaking, I settled on +10dB "In1 Gain". Here, locking was much more reliable, and I was able to smoothly turn on the Super Boosts. The attached OLTF measurement suggests a UGF of ~118kHz and phase margin of a little more than 30 degrees. There is room for optimization here, since we have had UGFs closer to 200kHz in the recent past.
12822   Sun Feb 12 01:16:57 2017 gautamUpdateIMCIMC length loop - summary of changes

29.5 MHz RF Modulation Source

• The +13dBm from the Wenzel oscillator gets amplified to +27dBm by a ZHL-2-S. There is a 5dB attenuator on the input to the amplifier to avoid compression/saturation.
• The amplified output goes to the EOM (+26dBm measured at the rack, no measurement done at the input to the triple-resonant circuit box yet), while a 10dB coupled part goes to the RF distribution box which splits the input into 16 equal parts. The outputs were measured to spit out +5dBm.
• 2 of these go to the WFS demod boards - it was verified that this level of drive is okay for the comparator chips on the demod board.
• A third output goes to the IMC Demod board. The demod board was modified so that the nominal LO input level is now +5dBm (details below).
• The remaining outputs are all terminated with 50ohms.

IMC Demodulation Board

• The input attenuator, amplifier and power splitter were removed.
• Schematic with changes marked and power levels measured, along with a high-res photograph (taken with our fancy new Macro lens + LED light ring) has been uploaded to a page I made to track changes for this part on the DCC (linked to 40m document tree).
• After making the changes, it was verified that the power levels in the signal chain were appropriate up till the input to the ERA-5SM amplifier directly before the LO. These levels were deemed appropriate, and also scaled in a predictable manner with the input power. As Koji mentions in the previous elog, the dynamically changing input impedance of the mixer makes it difficult to measure the LO level at this point, but I am satisfied that it is within ~1dBm of the nominal +17dBm the mixer wants.
• The board was further checked for gain imbalance and orthogonality of the I and Q outputs. The graphic below show that there is negligible gain imbalance, but the relative phase between the I and Q channels is ~78 degrees (they should be 90 degrees). Of course this doesn't matter for the IMC locking as we only use the I phase signal, but presumably, we want to understand this effect and compensate for it.

• The label on the front panel has been updated to reflect the fact that the nominal LO input is now +5dBm
• The demodulation phase had changed since the RF signal change was modified - Rana and I investigated this effect on Monday morning, and found that a new ~1.5m long cable was needed to route the signal from the RF distribution box to the LO input of the demod board, which I made. Subsequent modifications on the demod board meant that an extra ~10cm length was needed, so I just tacked on a short length of cable. All of the demodulated signal is now in the I output of the demod board (whereas we had been using the Q output).
• The graphics below confirms that claim above. Note the cool feature on the digital scopes that the display persistence can be set to "infinity"!

I wanted to do a quick check to see if the observed signal levels were in agreement with tests done on the workbench with the Marconi. The mixers used, JMS-1H, have an advertised conversion loss of ~7dB (may be a little higher if we are not driving the LO at +17dBm). The Lissajous ellipse above is consistent with these values. I didn't measure powers with the MC REFL PD plugged into the demod board, but the time series plot above suggest that I should have ~0dBm power in the MC REFL PD signal at 29.5MHz for the strongest flashes (~0.3Vpp IF signal for the strong flashes).

MC Servo Board

• As mentioned above, we now use the I phase signal for lMC PDH locking.
• This has resulted in an overall sign change of the servo. I have updated the MEDM screen to reflect that "MINUS" is the correct polarity now..
• To set the various gains, I measured the OLTF for various configurations using the usual IN1/IN2 prescription on the MC Servo Board (using the Agilent analyzer).
• I started at 0dBm "In1 Gain", and the nominal (old) values for "VCO gain", "FSS Common Gain" and "FSS FAST gain"  and found that though I could lock the MC, I couldn't reliably turn on the boosts.
• After some tweaking, I settled on +10dB "In1 Gain". Here, locking was much more reliable, and I was able to smoothly turn on the Super Boosts. The attached OLTF measurement suggests a UGF of ~118kHz and phase margin of a little more than 30 degrees. There is room for optimization here, since we have had UGFs closer to 200kHz in the recent past.
• I didn't get around to measuring the actual PZT/EOM crossover yesterday. But I did measure the OLTF for various values of the FSS gains. At the current value of +20dBm, the PC drive signal is hovering around 1.5V. This bit of optimization needs to be done more systematically.
• I've edited mcup and mcdown to reflect the new gains.

Some general remarks

• The whole point of this exercise was to increase the modulation depth for the 29.5MHz signal.
• By my estimate, assuming 8mrad/V modulation index for the EOM and a gain of 0.6 at 29.5 MHz in the triple resonant box, we should have 100mrad of modulation after installing the amplifier (compared to 4mrad before the change).
• The actual RF power at 29.5 MHz at the input/output of the triple resonant box has not yet been measured.
• The WFS input error signal levels have to be re-measured (so I've turned off the inputs to the digital WFS filters for now)
12823   Mon Feb 13 11:55:14 2017 ranaUpdateIMCIMC length loop - summary of changes

I would think that we want to fix the I/Q orthog inside the demod board by trimming the splitter. Mixing the Q phase signal to the I would otherwise allow coupling of low frequency Q phase junk from HOMs into the MC lock point.

 Quote: Of course this doesn't matter for the IMC locking as we only use the I phase signal, but

12899   Wed Mar 22 00:33:00 2017 gautamUpdateIMCIMC length offset nulling

[valera, gautam]

Motivation: see this elog

I was fiddling around for a few days trying to implement the method outlined in this paper to null this offset - I will post a separate elog about my efforts but Valera pointed out that we could try injecting an AF modulation at the IN2 input of the MC Servo Board. Last night, we hooked up an SR function generator (f = 312Hz, A = 0.01Vpp, IN2 gain = -5dB) to the unused BNC IN2 input of the MC Servo board. To avoid any additional offsets from the AO path during this measurement, I disconnected the LEMO cable (it is labelled).

We looked at the spectrum of the MC transmission around 312Hz and also 2*f = 624Hz. As a result of this modulation, we expect in the transmitted power, dP/P, a 2f term with amplitude ~(X_mod/X_0)^2 and a term at f with amplitude ~(X_offset * X_mod / X_0^2) - I may have missed out some numerical factors of order 1. So the latter should vanish if the offset at the error point is truly zero and the lock-point is the center of the resonance. Last night, we found that an offset in the range of -0.25 V to -0.19 V nulled this peak in the DTT spectrum. Today, the number was -0.05V. So the true offset seems to vary from lock to lock. Here are spectra around f=312Hz for a few different values of the offset slider (the center of the resonance seems to be -0.05V on the MEDM slider at this time).

Do these numbers make sense? Some time ago, I had pulled out the MC Servo board to find out what exactly is going on at this offset summing point. The MEDM slider goes from -10V to 10V, and by measuring the voltage at TP5 (see schematic below), I found that there is a 1/40 scaling factor between what is actually applied and the number on the MEDM slider (so for example, the numbers in the legend in the above plot have to be divided by 40). I've modified the MC Servo Board MEDM screen to reflect this. When I had pulled the board out, I noticed that in addition to the offset voltage applied via the backplane connector, there was also a potentiometer (R50 in the schematic below). I had nulled the voltage at TP5 using this potentiometer, but I guess drifts of ~5mV are possible.

Discussion on calibration of offset slider in Hz/V:

I've yet to do a rigorous calibration of this slider into Hz, but looking at the spectrum of the transmitted intensity at 2f, we estimated the coefficient (X_mod/X_0) ~ 3e-3 for an offset of 0.2V. dP/P ~1 when the applied modulation equals the linewidth of the cavity, which is 3.6kHz. So 0.2V of offset slider corresponds to ~ 10Hz frequency offset. In other words, I estimate the slider calibration to be 50Hz/V. So with the full range of +/- 10V, we should be able to scan ~1kHz of frequency offset. What does this imply about the variation of the offset slider value that removes the peak at 1f between locks? As mentioned above, this variation is ~0.2V over a day - with the calibration mentioned above, this corresponds to a change in cavity length of ~10um, which seems reasonable to me...

So how did all of this tie in with WFS SUM offsets? We did the following:

• After nulling the length offset using the procedure detailed above, we noticed non-zero offsets on both WFS1 and WFS2 "I" SUM outputs
• So we set the dark offsets and RF offsets for the WFS, with no light incident on the WFS (PSL shutter closed).
• Re-locking the IMC and closing the WFS loops, we noticed that WFS2 SUM offset was still hovering around 0, but WFS1 SUM offset was ~ -2000cts.
• Looking at some trends on dataviewer, this offset seems to drift around over a few days timescale by a few thousand counts - for example, the WFS1 offset today was +2000cts. Moreover, the WFS1 offset seems to drift around by ~factor of 3 times as much as WFS2 offset in the 24 hour period I looked up (plot to follow)...
• Misaligned MC2 and looked at the sum offset with just the single bounce beam off MC1 onto the WFS

I neglected to screenshot the StripTool from the times we were doing these trials but I have the times, I will pull up some dataviewer plots and upload them here tomorrow...

13139   Mon Jul 24 19:57:54 2017 gautamUpdateCDSIMC locked, Autolocker re-enabled

Now that all the front end models are running, I re-aligned the IMC, locked it manually, and then tweaked the alignment some more. The IMC transmission now is hovering around 15300 counts. I re-enabled the Autolocker and FSS Slow loops on Megatron as well.

Quote:

### MX/OpenMX network running

Today I got the mx/open-mx networking working for the front ends.  This required some tweaking to the network interface configuration for the diskless front ends, and recompiling mx and open-mx for the newer kernel.  Again, this will all be documented.

ELOG V3.1.3-