This is proving much more challenging than I thought - while Cut #1 was easy to identify and execute, my initial plan for Cut #2 seems to not have isolated the input of the second opamp (as judged by DMM continuity). Koji pointed out that this is actually not a robust test, as the switches are in an undefined state while I am doing these tests with the board unpowered. It seems rather complicated to do a test with the board powered out here in the office area though - and I'd rather not desolder the 16 and 20 pin ICs to get a better look at the tracks. This PCB seems to be multilayered, and I don't have a good idea for what the hidden tracks may be. Does anyone know of a secret place where there is a schematic for the PCB layout of this board? The DCC page only has the electrical schematic drawings, and I can't find anything useful on the elog/wiki/old ilog on a keyword search for this DCC document number. The track layout also is not identical for all channels. So I'm holding off on exploratory cuts.

*I've asked Ben Abbott/Mike Pedraza about this and they are having a look in Dale Ouimette's old drives to see if they can dig up the Altium/Protel files.

I quickly put together some code that calculates the THD from CDS data and generates a plot (see e.g. Attachment #1).

Algorithm is:

1. Get data (for now, offile file, but can be readily adapted to download data live or from NDS).
2. Compute power spectrum using scipy.signal.periodogram. I use a Kaiser window with beta=38 based on some cursory googling, and do 10 averages (i.e. nfft is total length / 10), and set the scaling to "spectrum" so as to directly get a power spectrum as opposed to a spectral density.
3. Find fundamental (assumed highest peak) and N harmonics using scipy.signal.find_peaks_cwt. I downsample 16k data to 2k for speed. A 120second time series takes ~5 seconds.
4. Compute THD as where V_i denotes an rms voltage, or in the case of a power spectrum, just the y-axis value.

I conducted a trial on the Y arm ALS channel whitening board (while the X arm counterpart is still undergoing surgery). With the whitening gain set to 0dB, and a 1Vpp input signal (so nothing should be saturated), I measure a THD of ~0.08% according to the above formula. Seems rather high - the LT1125 datasheet tells us to expect <0.001% THD+N at ~100Hz for a closed loop gain of ~10. I can only assume that the digitization process somehow introduces more THD? Of course the FoM we care about is what happens to this number as we increase the gain.

I have been puzzled as to why the duty cycle of the EX green locks are much less than that of the EY NPRO. If anything, the PDH loop has higher bandwidth and comparable stability margins at the X end than at the Y end. I hypothesize that this is because the EX laser (Innolight 1W Mephisto) has actuation PZT coefficient 1MHz/V, while the EY laser (Lightwave 125/126) has 5MHz/V. I figure the EX laser is sometimes just not able to keep up with the DC Xarm cavity length drift. To test this hypothesis, I disabled the LSC locking for the Xarm, and enabled the SLOW (temperature of NPRO crystal) control on the EX laser. The logic is that this provides relief for the PZT path and prevents the PDH servo from saturating and losing lock. Already, the green lock has held longer than at any point tonight (>60mins). I'm going to leave it in this state overnight and see how long the lock holds. The slow servo path has a limiter set to 100 counts so should be fine to leave it on. The next test will be to repeat this test with LSC mode ON, as I guess this will enhance the DC arm cavity length drift (it will be forced to follow MCL).

Why do I care about this at all? If at some point we want to do arm feedforward, I thought the green PDH error signal is a great target signal for the Wiener filter calculations. So I'd like to keep the green locked to the arm for extended periods of time. Arm feedforward should help in lock acquisiton if we have reduced actuation range due to increased series resistances in the coil drivers.

As an aside - I noticed that the SLOW path has no digital low pass filter - I think I remember someone saying that since the NPRO controller itself has an in-built low pass filter, a digital one isn't necessary. But as this elog points out, the situation may not be so straightforward. For now, I just put in some arbitrary low pass filter with corner at 5Hz. Seems like a nice simple problem for optimal loop shaping...

gautam noon CNY2018: Looks like the green has been stably locked for over 8 hours (see Attachment #1), and the slow servo doesn't look to have railed. Note that 100 cts ~=30mV. For an actuation coefficient of 1GHz/V, this is ~30MHz, which is well above the PZT range of 10V-->10MHz (whereas the EY laser, by virtue of its higher actuation coefficient, has 5 times this range, i.e. 50MHz). Supports my hypothesis.

Having implemented the changes to the audio amplifier stage, I re-installed this unit at the LSC rack, and did some testing. The motivation was to determine the shape of the ALS error signal spectrum, so that I can design a whitening preamp accordingly. Attachment #1 is the measurement I've been after. The measurement was taken with EX NPRO PDH locked to the arm via green, and Xarm locked to MC via POX. Slow temperature relief servo for EX NPRO was ON. Here are the details:

1. Mode-matching into the BeatMouth PSL light fiber had deteriorated dramatically - it was ~1mW out of 4.4mW. I spent 5 mins getting it back to 3.2mW (72% efficiency) and then moved on... I am a little surprised the drift was so large, but perhaps, it's not surprising given that there has been a lot of work on and around the PSL table in the last couple of weeks. There is a 300mm focusing lens after the last steering mirror so the effect of any alignment drifts should be attenuated, I don't really understand why this happened. Anyways, perhaps a more intelligent telescope design would avoid this sort of problem.
2. I removed the ND filter in the PSL pickoff to BeatMouth path (this was not responsible for the reduced power mentioned in #1). I verified that the total power reaching the photodiode was well below its rated damage threshold of 2mW (right now, there is ~620uW). I will update the BeatMouth schematic accordingly, but I think there will be more changes as we improve mode matching into the fibers at the end.
3. Hooked up the output of the fiber PD to the Teledyne amp, routed the latters output to the LSC rack. Measured RF electrical power at various places. In summary, ~6dBm of beat reaches the splitter at the LSC rack. This is plenty.
4. The main finding tonight was discovered by accident.
   • For the longest time, I was scratching my head over why the beat note amplitude, as monitored on the control room SA (I restored it to the control room from under the ITMX optical table where Koji had temporarily stored it for his tests on the PSL table) was drifting by ~10-15dB!
   • So each time, having convinced myself that the power levels made sense, I would come back to the control room to make a measurement, but then would see the beat signal level fluctuate slowly but with considerable amplitude.
   • The cause - See Attachment #2. There is a length of fiber on the PSL table that is unshielded to the BeatMouth. While plugging in RF cables to the BeatMouth, I found that accidentally brushing the fiber lightly with my arm dramatically changed the beat amplitude as monitored on a scope.
   • For now, I've "strain relieved" this fiber as best as I could, we should really fix this in a better way. This observation leads me to suspect that many of the peaky features seen in Attachment #1 are actually coupling in at this same fiber...
   • The beat note amplitude has been stable since, in the ~90 mins while I've been making plots/elogs.
   • Surely this is a consequence of differential polarization drift between the PSL and EX beams?
5. There are prominent powerline harmonics in these signals - how can we eliminate these? The transmission line from PSL table to LSC rack already has a BALUN at its output to connect the signal to the unbalanced input of the demod board.
6. Not sure what to make of the numerous peaks in the LO driven, RF terminated trace.
7. The location of the lowest point in the bucket also doesn't quite match previous measured out-of-loop ALS noise - we seem to have the lowest frequency noise at 150-200Hz, but in these plots its more like 400Hz.

Conclusion: In the current configuration, with x10 gain on the demodulated signals, we barely have SNR of 10 at ~500Hz. I think the generic whitening scheme of 2 zeros @15Hz, 2poles@150Hz will work just fine. The point is to integrate this whitening with the preamp stage, so we can just go straight into an AA board and then the ADC (sending this signal into D990694 and doing the whitening there won't help with the SNR). Next task is to construct a test daughter board that can do this...

Attachment #1 shows the ALS noise measurement today. Main differences from the spectrum posted last week is that

1. I have tried to align the input polarization axis (p-pol) to the fast axis of the fiber, and believe I have done it to ~75dB.
2. Steve and I installed some protective tubing for the vertical lengths of fiber going into the beat mouth.
3. Today, I decided to measure the noise at the differential rear panel outputs rather than the single-ended front panel outputs. For the test, I used a DB25 breakout board and some pomona mini-grabber to BNC clips to connect to the SR785.

For comparison, I have plotted alongside today's measurement (left column) the measurement from last week (right column).

Conclusions:

• The clear daylight between red and green traces in the left column give me confidence that I am measuring real laser frequency noise in the red trace. It even has the right shape considering the bandwidth of the EX PDH servo.
• The installation of protective tubing doesn't seem to have reduced the heights of any of the peaks in the red traces. I hypothesize that some of these are acoustic coupling to the fiber. But if so, either the way we installed the protective tubing doesn't help a whole lot, or the location of the coupling is elsewhere.
• Judging by the control room analyzer, there doesn't seem to be as large drifts in the RF beat amplitude tonight () as I saw the last couple of times I was testing the BeatMouth®. For a more quantitative study, I'm gonna make a voltage divider so that the ~10V output I get at the rear panel power monitor output (for a LO level of ~0dBm, which is what I have) can be routed to some ADC channel. I'm thinking I'll use the Y ALS channels which are currently open while ALS is under work.
• Still have to make preamp prototype daughter board with the right whitening shape... This test suggests to me that I should also make the output differential sending...

I thought a little bit about the design of the preamp we want for the demodulated ALS signals today. The requirements are:

1. DC gain that doesn't cause ADC saturation.
2. Audio frequency gain that allows the measured beat signal spectrum to be at least 20dB the ADC noise level.
3. Electronics noise such that the measured beat signal spectrum is at least 20dB above the input-referred noise of this amplifier.
4. Low pass filtering at the input to the differential receiving stages, such that the 2f product from the demodulation doesn't drive the AD829 crazy. For now, I've preserved the second-order inductor based LPF from the original board, but if this proves challenging to get working, we can always just go for a first-order RC LPF. One challenge may be to find a 2.2uH inductor that is compatible with prototype PCB boards...
5. Differential sending, since this seems to be definitively the lower noise option compared to the single-ended output (see yesterday's measurement). The plan is to use an aLIGO AA board that has differential receiving and sending, and then connect directly to the differential receiving ADC.

Attachment #3 shows a design I think will work (for now it's a whiteboard sketch, I''ll make this a computer graphic tomorrow). I have basically retained the differential sending and receiving capabilities of the existing Audio I/F amplifier, but have incorporated some whitening gain with a pole at ~150Hz and zero at ~15Hz. I've preserved the DC gain of 10, which seems to have worked well in my tests in the last week or so. Attachments #1 and #2 show the liso modelled characteristics. Liso does not support input-referred noise measurements for differential voltage inputs, so I had to calculate that curve manually - I suspect there is some subtlety I am missing, as if I plot the input referred noise out to higher frequencies, it blows up quite dramatically.

Next step is to actually make a prototype of this. I am wondering if we need a second stage of whitening, as in the current config, we only get 20dB gain at 150Hz relative to DC. Yesterday's beat spectrum measurement shows that we can expect the frequency noise of the ALS signal at ~100Hz to be at the level of ~1uV/rtHz, but this is is around the ADC noise level? If so, 20dB of whitening gain may be sufficient?

*Side note: I was wondering why we need the differential receiving stage, followed by a difference amplifier, and then a differential sending stage. After discussing with Koji, we think this is to suppress any common-mode noise from the mixer outputs.

Using one of the prototype PCB boards given to me by Johannes, I put together v1 of this board and tested it. 

Attachment #1 - Schematic with stages grouped by function and labelled. 

Attachment #2 - Measured vs modelled Transfer function.

Attachment #3 - Measured vs modelled noise. Measurement shown only between positive output and ground, the other port is basically the same. I will update this attachment to reflect the expected signal level in comparison to the noise, but suffice it to say that given the measured input referred noise, we will have plenty of SNR between 0.1Hz and 10kHz. The single stage of whitening should also be sufficient to amplify the signal above ADC noise in the same frequency band

Attachment #4 - Positive output as viewed on a fast (300 MHz) scope using a Tektronix x1 voltage probe.

Attachment #5 - Daughter board noise with measured ALS noise overlaid (the gain of x10 on the existing audio pre-amp has been divided out). 

Comments:

• I may have overlooked the GBW of the OP27 in the design - specifically, the negative feedback is wired for gain x100 at high frequencies, and so the input signal should be filtered above 8MHz/100 ~80kHz. But the LC poles are at ~500kHz. I wonder if the small deviation seen between modelled and masured TFs is reflecting this. Practically, the easier fix is to add a feedback capacitor that rolls off the gain at high frequencies. 300pF WIMA should do the trick, and we have these in stock.
• I don't understand why the modelled response starts to roll off around 5kHz, even though the poles of the LC filter at the input stage are at 500kHz. This happens because at low frequencies, the 1.5uH inductor is basically a short - so the RC divider at the input of the Op27 has a pole at 1/2/pi/R/C ~5kHz for R=499, C = 68nF.
• I am not sure what to make of the peaky comb seen in Attachment #3, but I'm pretty sure it's electronic pickup from something. The GPIB adapter power suppy is not to blame. The peaks are 10 Hz spaced.
• From Attachment #4, I don't suspect any opamp oscillations given that the signal seen is tiny, but I don't know what amplitude is characteristic of an oscillating op amp, so I am not entirely confident about this conclusion. 
• Initially while thinking about the design, I was trying to think of making the design generic enough that we could use these signals for high-bandwidth ALS control (a.k.a. Fast ALS) but in the current incarnation, no consideration was given to minimizing phase lag at high frequencies. 
• Putting the PCB board together was more painful than I imagined as the board is configured for 4 single op amps whereas my design requires 5 - so I needed to do some trace cutting surgery. Rather than make 3 more of these, I'm just going to finish the characterization, and if the design looks good, we can get some custom PCBs printed.
• Power decoupling caps (47nF) are added to all op amp power pins, but is not shown in the schematic.

Given the overall good agreement between model and measurement, I am going to test this with the actual RF beat. For this test, we will need a differential receiving AA board to interface the output of the daughter board with the ADC input. 

Looks good.

* for bypass type applications, you don't have to use Wima caps (which are bigger and more expensive). You can just use any old ceramic SMD cap.

* This seems like a classic case to use the 3 op-amp instumention amplifier config. This is similar, but not quite.

* Ought to use output resistors of ~50 Ohms by default in the output of any circuit. SInce this is a daughter board, maybe 10 Ohms is enough, but the eventual PCB should have pads for it.

I thought a little bit about the next steps in testing the daughter board. The idea is to install this into the existing 1U chassis and tap the differential output from the FET Mixers as inputs to the daughter board. Looking at the D0902745 schematic, I think the best way to do this is to simply remove L3, L4, C10, C11, C15 and C16. I will then use the pads for L3 and L4 to pipe the differential output of the FET mixer to the differential input of the daughter board. 

The daughter board takes care of whitening the ALS signal.

Then we need to pipe the differential output of the daughter board into the differential input of a differential receiving AA board. Koji and Johannes surveyed the available stockpile from the WB workshop. The best option seems to be to use the available v5 of D070081 and install 4 of them into a 1U chassis unit (also available from WB EE shop). The v5s can be upgraded to v6 by replacing the set of input and output buffer OpAmps with AD8622, as per the revision history notes. Koji ordered 100pcs of these today. 

The input to the proposed 1U chassis housing these 8 AA boards (each with 8 channels) is a DB9 connector. The aLIGO demod board chassis that we use to demodulate the ALS signals has a nice DB25 output connector that supplies all the differential I and Q demodulated signals. But since we will install a daughter board, we will hae to hack together some connector solution anyways. I propose using a DB9 connector to pipe the outputs of the daughter board to the inputs of the AA board. Space is tight in the LSC rack, but I think we have space for a 1U chassis (see Attachment #3).

Finally - how to interface the AA board with the ADC? Koji and I discussed options, and seems like the least painful way will be to install a new ADC in the c1lsc expansion chassis in 1Y3. I checked the computer hardware cabinet and there seems to be 1 spare general standards 16bit ADC in there (see Attachment #1). Its health/providence is unknown. But Koji and I will test it after the meeting tomorrow. I also have another ADC card that Jamie and I removed from c1ioo sometime ago. I have labelled it as "GPIO0 LED RED", though I don't remember exactly what the problem was and can't find any elog about it. Incidentally, there are also 2 spare DAC cards available in the cabinet, although their health/rpovidence too is unknown. There are sufficient free slots in the c1lsc expansion chassis (see Attachment #2 though we will need a LIGO ADC adaptor card). Then we can just change the input ADC channels for the ALS signals in the c1lsc model.

In the short term, while the hardware for this plan is being put together, I can test the uncalibrated noise performance of the demod + daughter board combo (uncalibrated because I will make a measurement of voltage noise with an SR785 as opposed to frequency noise). A second daughter board will also need to be assembled - I'm just going to do it on another prototyping board as figuring out how to use Altium will probably take me longer. There is also the matter of fine tuning the polarization axes alignment of the input to the EX fiber coupler.

[koji, gautam]

we did a bunch of tests to figure out the feasibility of the plan I outlined last night. Bottom line is: we appear to have a working 64 channel ADC (but with differential receiving that means 32 channels). But we need an aLIGO ADC adaptor card (I'm not sure of the DCC number but I think it is D0902006). See attached screenshot where we managed to add an ADC block to the IOP model on c1lsc, and it recognizes the additional ADC. The firmware on the (newly installed) working card is much newer than that on the existing card inside the expansion chassis (see Attachment #1).

Details:

• Watchdogged all optics because we expected messing around with c1lsc to take down all the vertex FEs. Actually, only c1sus was killed, c1ioo survived.
• Closed PSL shutter. Shut down c1lsc FE machine.
• Started out by checking the functionality of the two ADC cards I found.
• Turns out the one Jamie and I removed from c1ioo ~6months ago is indeed broken in some way, as we couldn't get it to work.
• Took us a while to figure out that we require the adaptor board and a working ADC card to get the realtime model to run properly. A useful document in understanding the IO expansion chassis is this one.
• Another subtlety is that the ADC card we installed today (photo in previous elog) is somewhat different from the ones installed in c1sus and c1lsc expansion chassis. But a similar one is installed at the Y-end at least. Point is, this ADC card seems to need an external power supply via a 4-pin Molex connector to work properly.
• We borrowed an adapter card from c1iscey expansion chassis (after first shutting down the machine).
• It seems like a RED GPIO0 LED on these ADC cards isn't indicative of a fault.
• Added an ADC part from CDS_PARTS library. Added an ADC selector bus and an "MADC" block that sets up the 64k testpoints as well as the EPICS readbacks.
• We were able to see sensible numbers (i.e. ~0 since there is no input to the ADC) on these readback channels.
• To restore everything, we first shutdown c1lsc, then restored the adaptor card back to c1iscey, and then rebooted c1iscey, c1lsc and c1sus. Recompiled c1x04 with the added ADC block removed as it would otherwise complain due to the absence of an adapter board.
• Did rtcds restart <model> on all machines to bring back all models that were killed. This went smoothly.
• IMC and Yarm locked smooth.

Note that we have left the working ADC card inside the c1lsc expansion chassis. Plan is to give Rolf the faulty ADC card and at the same time ask him for a working adapter board.

Unrelated to this work: we have also scavenged 4 pcs of v2 of the differential receiving AA board from WB EE shop, along with a 1U chassis for the same. These are under my desk at the 40m for the moment. We will need to re-stuff these with appropriate OpAmps (and also maybe change some Rs and Cs) to make this board the same as v6, which is the version currently in use.

I spent today making another daughter board (so that we can use the new scheme for I and Q for one arm), testing it (i.e. measuring noise and TF and comparing to LISO model), and arranging all of this inside the 1U demod chassis. To accommodate everything inside, I decided to remove the 2 unused demod units from inside the box. I then drilled a few holes, installed the daughter boards on some standoffs, removed the capacitors and inductors as I outlined yesterday, and routed input and output signals to/from the daughter board. The outputs are routed to a D-sub on the rear panel. More details + better photo + results of testing the combined demod+daughter board signal chain tomorrow...

I did a quick test of the noise of the new ALS electronics with the X arm ALS. Attachment #1 shows the results - but something looks off in the measurement, especially the "LO driven, RF terminated" trace. I will have to defer further testing to tomorrow. Of course the real test is to digitize these signals and look at the spectrum of the phase tracker output, but I wanted a voltage noise comparison first. Also, note that I have NOT undone the whitening TFs of (z,p) = (15,150) on these traces. I wonder if these noisy signals (particularly the 10Hz multiple harmonics) are an artefact of measurement, or if something is wonky in the daughter board circuits themselves. I am measuring these with the help of a DB9 breakout board and some pomona minigrabbers. Reagrdless, the sort of ripple seen in the olive green trace for the I channel wasn't present when I did the same test with RF signal generators out on the electronics workbench, so I am inclined to think that this isn't a problem with the circuit. I'm measuring with the SR785 with the "A" input setting, but with the ground set to "Float". I need to look into what the difference is between this mode, and the "A-B" mode. At first glance, both seem to be equivalent differential measurements, but I wonder if there is some subtlety w.r.t. pickup noise.

Perhaps I can repeat the test at the output of the AA board. I looked into whether there is a spare +/- 24V DC power supply available at the LSC rack, to power the 1U AA chassis, but didn't see anything there.

I am almost ready for a digital test of the new ALS electronics. Today, Koji and I spent some time tapping new +/-24VDC DIN terminal blocks at the LSC rack to facilitate the installation of the 1U differential receiving AA chassis (separate elog entry). The missing piece of the puzzle now is the timing adapter card. I opted against trying a test tonight as I am having some trouble bringing c1lsc back online.

Incidentally, a repeat of the voltage noise measurement of the X arm ALS beat looked much cleaner today, see Attachment #1 - I don't have a good hypothesis as to why sometimes the signal has several harmonics at 10Hz multiples, and sometimes it looks just as expected. The problem may be more systematically debuggable once the signals are being digitally acquired.

I made a LISO fit of the measured TF of the daughter board, so that I can digitally invert the daughter board whitening. Results attached. (Inverse) Filters have been uploaded to the ALS X Foton filter banks.

• Locked single arms, dither aligned, and saved offsets to EPICS (slow) sliders in anticipation of having to reboot all vertex FEs.
• Shutdown ETMY watchdog, stopped all models on c1iscey, and shutdown that frontend.
• Walked down to Y-end, powered of c1iscey expansion chassis, and removed the ADC adaptor card.
• Stopped all models on c1lsc. Shutdown watchdog on all optics in anticipation of c1sus model failing. Shutdown the c1lsc frontend.
• Powered off the c1lsc expansion chassis. Installed the borrowed adapter card from c1iscey in c1lsc expansion chassis. Connected it to the "spare" ADC card Koji and I had installed in c1lsc expansion chassis last Wednesday.
• Connected differential output of demod board to differential input of AA chassis. Connected SCSI connector from output of AA chassis to the newly installed adapter card.
• Powered the c1lsc expansion chassis back on. Then powered c1lsc FE on.
• Walking back out to the control room, I saw that all vertex FEs had crashed. I had to go back in and hard-reboot c1sus.
• Before bringing back any models, I backed up the existing c1lsc model, and then modified c1x04 and c1lsc to use the newly acquired ALS signals for the X arm ALS signal chain.
• Restarted all vertex FE models. Everything came back up smooth. DC light is still red on c1oaf but I didn't bother trying to rectify it tonight for these tests.
• Reset appropriate LSC offsets with PSL shutter closed. Locked X arm on IR. Reset phase tracker servo gain for X arm ALS. Engaged slow temperature servo on EX laser.

Then I looked at  the spectrum, see Attachment #1. Disappointingly, it looks like the arm PDH servo is dominating the noise, and NOT unsuppressed EX laser frequency noise,. Not sure why this is so, and I'm feeling too tired to debug this tonight. But encouragingly, the performance of the new ALS signal chain looks very promising. Once I tune up the X arm loop, I'm confident that the ALS noise will be at least as good as the reference trace.

I am leaving c1iscey shutdown until this is fixed. So ETMY is not available for the moment.

Random factoid: Trying to print a DTT trace with LaTeX in the label text on pianosa causes the DTT window to completely crash - so if you dont save the .xml file, you lose your measurement.

[koji, gautam]

I was going to head out but then it occurred to me that I could do another simple test, which is to try and lock the X arm on ALS error signal (i.e. actuate on MC length to keep the beat between EX laser and PSL fixed, while the EX frequency is following the Xarm length). Comparing the in loop (i.e. ALS) error signal with the out-of-loop sensor (i.e. POX), it seems like POX is noisy. The curves were lined up by eye, by scaling the blue curve to match the red at the ~16Hz peaks. This supports my hypothesis in the previous elog. On the downside, could be anything. Electronics in the POX chain? The demod unit itself? Will look into it more tomorrow..

As an aside, controlling the arm with ALS error signal worked quite well, and the lock was maintained for ~1 hour.

[kevin, gautam]

we tested my noisy POX hypothesis tonight. By locking the single arm with POX, the arm length is forced to follow PSL frequency, which is itself slaved to IMC length. From Attachment #1, there is no coherence between the arm control signal and MC_F. This suggests to me that the excess noise I am seeing in the arm control signal above 30 Hz is not originating from the PSL. It also seems unlikely that at >30Hz, anything mechanical is to blame. So I am sticking with the hypothesis that something is wonky with POX. For reference, a known "normal" arm control signal spectrum looks like the red curve in this elog.

[kevin, gautam]

Kevin suggested I shouldn't be so lazy and test the POY spectrum as well. So we moved the timing card back to c1iscey, went through the usual dance of vertex machine reboots, and then got both single arm locks going. Attached spectrum shows that both POX and POY are noisy. I'm not sure what has changed that could cause this effect. The fact that both POX and POY appear uniformly bad, but that there is no coherence with MC_F, suggests to me that perhaps this has something to do with the work I did with Koji w.r.t. the power situation at the LSC rack. But we just checked that

1. All the demod board front panel LED indicators are green.
2. Marconi and all RF amplifier boxes are on (but we didn't actually measure any RF power levels yet tonight).
3. We checked the KEPCO power supplies in the little cabinet along the Yarm, and all of them are reporting the correct voltages/currents as per Steve's (recently updated) labels.
4. Checked the expansion chassis at the LSC rack for any red lights, there were none.

Another observation we made: note the huge bump around 70Hz in both arm control signals. We don't know what the cause of this is. But we occassionally noticed harmonics of this (i.e. 140, 210 Hz etc) appear in the control signal spectra, and they would grow with time - eventually, the X arm would lose lock (though the Y arm stayed locked).

I'm short on ideas for now so we will continue debugging tomorrow.

Unrelated to this work: Kevin reminded me that the high-pitched whine from the CRT TVs in the control room (which is apparently due to the flyback transformer) is DEAFENING. It's curious that the "chirp" to the eventual 15kHz whine is in opposite directions for the QUAD CRTs and the single display ones. Should be a Ph6 experiment maybe.

Update 2:30pm Mar 13: The furthest back I seem to be able to go in time with Frames is ~Jan 20 2018. Looking for a time when the arms were locked from back then, it seems like whatever is responsible for a noisy POX and POY was already a problem back in January. See Attachment #2. So it appears that the recent work at 1Y2 is not to blame...

The working hypothesis, since the excess noise in single arm locks is coherent between both arms, the excess sensing noise is frequency noise in the IMC locking loop (sensing because it doesn't show up in MC_F). I've started investigating the IMC sensing chain, starting with the power levels of the RF modulation source. Recall that we had changed the way the 29.5MHz signal was sent to the EOM and demod electronics in 2017. With the handheld RF power meter, I measured 13.2dBm coming out of the RF distribution box (this is routed straight from the Wenzel oscillator). This is amplified to 26dBm by an RF amplifier (ZHL-2-S) and sent to the EOM, with a coupled 16dBm part sent to a splitter that supplies the LO signal to the demod board and also the WFS boards. Lydia made a summary of expected RF power levels here, and I too seem to have labelled the "nominal" LO level to the MC_REFL demod board as +5dBm. But I measured 2.7dBm with the RF power meter. But looking closely at the schematic of the splitting circuitry, I think for a (measured) 16.7dBm input to it, we should in fact expect around 3dBm of output signal. So I don't know why I labelled the "nominal" signal level as 5dBm.

Bottom line: we are driving a level 17 mixer with more like +14dBm (a number inferred from this marked up schematic) of LO, which while isn't great, is unlikely to explain the excess noise I think (the conversion loss just degrades by ~1dB). So I will proceed to check further downstream in the signal chain.

Summary:

1. Today, the measured IR ALS noise for the X arm was dramatically improved. The main change was that I improved the alignment of the PSL pickoff beam into its fiber coupler.
2. The noise level was non-stationary, leading me to suspect power modulation of the RF beat amplitude.
3. I am now measuring the stability of the power in the two polarizations coming from EX table to the PSL table, using the PSL diagnostic connector channels.
4. The EX beam is S-polarized when it is coupled into the fiber. The PSL beam is P-polarized. However, it looks like I have coupled light along orthogonal axes into the fiber, such that when the EX light gets to the PSL table, most of it is in the P-polarization, as judged by my PER measurement setup (i.e. the alignment keys at the PSL table and at the EX table are orthogonal). So it still seems like there is something to be gained by trying to improve the PER a bit more.

Details:

Today, I decided to check the power coupled into the PSL fiber for the BeatMouth. Surprisingly, it was only 200uW, while I had ~3.15mW going into it in January. Presumably some alignment drifting happened. So I re-aligned the beam into the fiber using the steering mirror immediately before the fiber coupler. I managed to get ~2.9mW in without much effort, and I figured this is sufficient for a first pass, so I didn't try too much more. I then tried making an ALS beat spectrum measurement (arm locked to IMC length using POX, green following the arm using end PDH servo). Surprisingly, the noise performannce was almost as good as the reference! See Attachment #1, in which the red curve is an IR beat (while all others are green beats). The Y arm green beat performance isn't stellar, but one problem at a time. Moreover, the kind of coherence structure between the arm error signal and the ALS beat signal that I reported here was totally absent today.

Upon further investigation, I found that the noise level was actually breathing quite significantly on timescales of minutes. While I was able to successfully keep the TEM00 mode of the PSL beam resonant inside the arm cavity by using the ALS beat frequency as an error signal and MC2 as a frequency actuator, the DC stability was very poor and TRX was wandering around by 50%. So my new hypothesis is that the excess ALS noise is because of one or more of

• Beam jitter at coupling point into fiber.
• Polarization drift of the IR beams.

While I did some work in trying to align the PSL IR pickoff into the fiber along the fast (P-pol) axis, I haven't done anything for the X end pickoff beam. So perhaps the fluctuations in the EX IR power is causing beatnote amplitude fluctuations. In the delay line + phase tracker frequency discriminator, I think RF beatnote amplitude fluctuations can couple into phase noise linearly. For such an apparently important noise source, I can't remeber ever including it in any of the ALS noise budgets.

Before Ph237 today, I decided to use my polarization monitoring setup and check the "RIN" of power in the two polarizations coming out of the fiber on the PSL table. For this purpose, I decided to hijack the Acromag channels used for the PSL diagnostics connector Attachment #2 shows that there is fluctuations at the level of ~10% in the p-polarization. This is the "desired" polarization in that I aligned the PSL beam into the fiber to maximize the power in this polarization. So assuming the power fluctuations in the PSL beam are negligible, this translates to sqrt(10) ~3% fluctuation in the RF beat amplitude. This is at best a conservative estimate, as in reality, there is probably more AM because of the non PM fibers inside the beatmouth.

All of this still doesn't explain the coherence between the measured ALS noise and the arm error signal at 100s of Hz (which presumably can only happen via frequency noise in the PSL).

Another "mystery" - yesterday, while I was working on recovering the Y arm green beat signal on the PSL table, I eventually got a beat signal that was ~20mVpp into 50ohms, which is approximately the same as what I measured when the Y arm ALS performance was "nominal", more than a year ago. But while viewing the Y arm beats (green and IR) simultaneously on an o'scope, I wasn't able to keep both signals synchronised while triggering on one (even though the IR beat frequency was half the green beat frequency). This means there is a huge amount of relative phase noise between the green and IR beats. What (if anything) does this mean? The differential noise between these two beats should be (i) phase noise at the fiber coupler/ inside the fiber itself, and (ii) scatter noise in the green light transmitted through the cavity. Is it "expected" that the relative phase noise between these two signals is so large that we can't view both of them on a common trigger signal on an o'scope? Also - the green mode-matching into the Y arm is abysmal.

Anyways - I'm going to try and tweak the PER and mode-matching into the X end fiber a little and monitor the polarization stability (nothing too invasive for now, eventually, I want to install the new fiber couplers I acquired but for now I'll only change alignment into and rotation of the fiber coupler on the EX table). It would also be interesting to compare my "optimized" PSL drift to the unoptimized EX power drift. So the PSL diagnostic channels will not show any actual PSL diagnostic information until I plug it back in. But I suspect that the EPICS record names and physical channel wiring are wrong anyways - I hooked up my two photodiode signals into what I would believe is the "Diode 1 Power" and "Laser crystal temperature" monitors (as per the schematic), but the signals actually show up for me in "Diode 2 Power" (p-pol) and "Didoe 1 Temperature" (s-pol).

Annoyingly, there is no wiring diagram - on my todo list i guess...

@Steve - could you please take a photo of the EX table and update the wiki? I think the photo we have is a bit dated, the fiber coupler and transmon PDs aren't in it...

Attachment #1 shows the drift of the polarization content of the light from EX entering the BeatMouth. Seems rather large (~10%). I'm going to tweak the X end fiber coupling setup a bit to see if this can be improved. This performance is also a good benchmark to compare the PSL IR light polarization drift. I am going to ask Steve to order Thorlabs K6XS, which has a locking screw for the rotational DoF. With this feature, and by installing some HWPs at the input coupling point, we can ensure that we are coupling light into one of the special axes in a much more deterministic way. 

THIS CALCULATION IS WRONG FOR THE OVERCOUPLED CAV.

Summary:

Mode-matching efficiency of EX green light into the arm cavity is ~70*%, as measured using the visibility. 

Details:

I wanted to get an estimate for the mode-matching of the EX green beam into the arm cavity. I did the following:

1. Locked arm cavities to IR. Ran dither alignment servos to maximize the transmission of IR on both arms. The X arm dither alignment servo needs some touching up, I can achieve higher TRX by hand than by running the dither.
2. Aligned green PZT mirrors so as to maximize GTRX. Achieved level as 0.47.
3. Went to EX table and tweaked the two available mode-matching lens positions on their translational stages. Saw a quadratic maximum of GTRX about some equilibrium position (where the lenses are now).
4. Measured average value of the green PDH reflection DC level whiel green TEM00 mode was locked. .
5. Misaligned ITMX macroscopically. Measured the average value of the green PDH reflection DC level again. .
6. Closed EX Green shutter. Measured the average value of the green PDH reflection DC level. .
7. Modulation depth of the EX PDH was determined to be 90mrad. Based on this, power in sideband is negligible compared to power in the carrier, so I didn't bother correcting for sideband power in reflection.
8. Mode-matching efficiency calculated as .

Comments:

This amount of mode-matching is rather disappointing - using a la mode, the calculated mode-matching efficiency is nearly 100%, but 70% is a far cry from this. The fact that I can't improve this number by either tweaking the steering or by moving the MM lenses around suggests that the estimate of the target arm mode is probably incorrect (the non-gaussianity of the input beam itself is not quantified yet, but I don't believe this input beam can account for 30% mismatch). For the Y-arm, the green REFL DC level is actually higher when locked than when ITMY is misaligned. WTF?? Only explanation I can think of is that the PD is saturated when green is unlocked - but why does the ADC saturate at ~3000cts and not 32000?

This data is almost certainly bogus as the AA box at 1X9 is powered by +/-5VDC and not +/-15VDC. I didn't check but I believe the situation is the same at the Y-end.

3000 cts is ~1V into the ADC. I am going to change the supply voltage to this box (which also reads in ETMX OSEMS) to +/-15V so that we can use the full range of the ADC.

gautam Apr 26 630pm: I re-did the measurement by directly monitoring the REFLDC on a scope, and the situation is not much better. I calculate a MM of 70% into the arm. This is sensitive to the lens positions - while I was working on the EX fiber coupling, I had bumped the lens mounted on a translational stage on the EX table lightly, and I had to move that lens around today in order to recover the GTRX level of 0.5 that I am used to seeing (with arm aligned to maximize IR transmission). So there is definitely room for optimization here.

I swapped the EX fiber for the PSL fiber in the polarization monitoring setup. There is a lot more power in this fiber, and one of the PDs was saturated. I should really have put a PBS to cut the power, but I opted for putting an absorptive ND1.0 filter on the PD instead for this test. I want to monitor the stability in this beam and compare it to the EX beam's polarization wandering.

It looks like the drift in polarization content in the PSL pickoff is actually much higher than that in the EX pickoff. Note that to prevent the P-pol diode from saturating, I put an ND filter in front of the PD, so the Y axis actually has to be multiplied by 10 to compare power in S and P polarizations. If this drift is because of the input (linear) polarization being poorly matched to one of the fiber's special axes, then we can improve the situation relatively easily. But if the polarization drift is happening as a result of time-varying stress (due to temp. fluctuations, acoustics etc) on the (PM) fiber from the PSL fiber coupler to the BeatMouth, then I think this is a much more challenging problem to solve.

I'll attempt to quantify the contribution (in Hz/rtHz) of beat amplitude RIN to phase tracker output noise, which will tell us how much of a problem this really is and in which frequency bands. In particular, I'm interested in seeing if the excess noise around 100 Hz is because of beat amplitude fluctuations. But on the evidence thus far, I've seen the beat amplitude drift by ~15 dB (over long timescales) on the control room network analyzer, and this drift seems to be dominated by PSL light amplitude fluctuations.

A follow-up on the discussion from today's lunch meeting - Rana pointed out that rotation of the fiber in the mount by ~5degrees cannot account for such large power fluctuations. Here is a 3 day trend from my polarization monitoring setup. Assuming the output fiber coupler rotates in its mount by 5 degrees, and assuming the input light is aligned to one of the fiber's special axes, then we expect <1% fluctuation in the power. But the attached trend shows much more drastic variations, more like 25% in the p-polarization (which is what I assume we use for the beat, since the majority of light is in this polarization, both for PSL and EX). I want to say that the periodicity in the power fluctuations is ~12hours, and so this fluctuation is somehow being modulated by the lab temperature, but unfortunately, we don't have the PSL enclosure temperature logged in order to compare coherence.

Steve: your  plots look like temperature driven

The "beat length" of the fiber is quoted as <=2.7mm. This means that a linearly polarized beam that is not oriented along one of the special axes of the fiber will be rotated through 180 degrees over 2.7mm of propagation through the fiber. I can't find a number for the coefficient of thermal expansion of the fiber, but if temperature driven fluctuations are changing the length of the fiber by 300um, it would account for ~12% power fluctuation between the two polarizations in the monitoring setup, which is in the ballpark we are seeing...

Summary:

I think the dominant cause for the fact that we were seeing huge swing in the power coupled into the fiber was that the beam being sent in was in fact not linearly polarized, but elliptically polarized. I've rectified this with the help of a PBS. Fiber has been plugged into my polarization monitoring setup. Let's monitor for some long stretch and see if the situation has improved.

Details:

• The new fiber mount I ordered, K6XS, arrived today. I like it - it has little keys with which all DoFs can be locked. Moreover, it is compatible with the fixed collimators which IMO is the easiest way to achieve good mode-matching into the fiber. It is basically a plug-and-play replacement for the mounts we were using. Anyways, we can evaluate the performance over the coming days.
• I installed it on the PSL table (started work ~10pm, HEPA turned up to maximum, PSL shutter closed).
• But even with the new rotational DoF locking feature, I saw that slight disturbances in the fiber caused wild fluctuations in my polarization monitoring setup PD outputs. This was a useful tool through the night of checking the polarization content in the two special axes - Aidan had suggested using a heat gun but shaking the fiber a bit works well too I think.
• The PM980 fiber has an alignment key that is aligned with the slow axis of the fiber - so it is a useful alignment reference. But even by perturbing the roational alignment about the vertical by +/-15 degrees, I saw no improvement in this behavior. So I began to question my assumption that the input beam itself had clean polarization content.
• Since my pickoff beam has gone through a QWP and two PBSs, I had assumed that the beam was linearly polarized.
• But by putting a PBS just upstream of the input fiber coupler, I could see a beam at the S-port with an IR card (while I expected the beam to be P-polarized).
• OK - so I decided to clean up the input polarization by leaving this PBS installed. With this modification to the setup, I found that me shaking the fiber around on the PSL table didn't affect the output polarization content nearly as dramatically as before!!
• The state I am leaving it in tonight is such that there is ~100x the power in the P-polarization output monitor as the S-polarization (PER ~ 20dB). I didn't try and optimize this too much more for now, I want to observe some long term trend to see if the wild power fluctuations have been mitigated.
• The output coupler is mounted on the inferior K6X mount, and so there is the possibility that some drift will be attributable to rotation of the output coupler in it's mount. Thermally driven length changes / time varying stresses in the fiber may also lead to some residual power fluctuations. But I don't expect this to be anywhere near the ~25% I reported in the previous elog.
• The rejected beam from the PBS was measured to be ~300 uW. I haven't dumped this properly, to be done tomorrow.
• HEPA turned back down to 30%, PSL enclosure closed up, PSL shutter re-opened ~0030am.
• Note that the EX and EY fiber coupled beams are also likely subject to the same problem. We have to double check. I think it's better to have a PBS in front of the input fiber coupler as this also gives us control over the amount of light coupled into the fiber.

Power budget:

Seems like there is still a bit of variation in the power in the two polarizations, though it is much smaller now, at the ~5% level (see Attachment #1). Since the pattern is repeating itself over the day timescale, I think this effect is not because of rotation of the output coupler in the mount, but is in fact a temperature driven waveplate effect because of imperfect alignment at the input coupler (which itself is locked down). I'm going to rotate the input coupler by 5 degrees (old = 110 degrees, new=115degrees) to see if the situation improves...

gautam Apr 24 2pm: Steve suggested confirming the correlation by hooking up the PSL table temperature sensor. This used to be logged but since the c1psl ADC card failure, has not been recorded. Assuming the sensor and preamp still work fine, we can use the PSL diagnostic Acromag (whose channels I have hijacked to monitor polarization stability already) to at least temporarily monitor the temperature inside the PSL enclosure. I am in need of a DB25 breakout board for this purpose which I am missing right now, as soon as I obtain one, I'll hook this up...

Motivation: I want to make another measurement of the out-of-loop ALS beat noise, with improved MM into both the PSL and EX fibers and also better polarization control. For this, I want to make a few changes at the EX table. 

1. Replace existing fiber collimator with one of the recently acquired F220-APC-1064 collimators.
   • This gives an output mode of diameter 2.4mm with a beam divergence angle of 0.032 degrees (all numbers theoretical - I will measure these eventually but we need a beam path of ~5m length in order to get a good measurement of this collimated beam).
   • I believe it will be easier to achieve good mode matching into this mode rather than with the existing collimator. 
   • Unfortunately, the mount is still going to be K6X and not K6XS. 
2. Improve mode-matching into fiber.
   • I used my measurement of the Innolight NPRO mode from 2016, a list of available lenses, and some measured distances to calculate a solution that gives theoretical 100% overlap with the collimator mode, that has beam diameter 2.4mm, located 80cm from the NPRO shutter head location (see Attachment #1).
   • The required movement of components is schematically illustrated in Attachment #2.
   • One of the required lens positions is close to the bracket holding the enclosure to the table, but I think the solution is still workable (the table is pretty crowded so I didn't bother too much with trying to find alternative solutions as all of them are likely to require optics placed close to existing ones and I'd like to avoid messing with the main green beam paths.
   • I will attempt to implement this and see how much mode matching we actually end up getting.
3. Install a PBS + HWP combo in the EX fiber coupling path.
   • This is for better polarization control.
   • Also gives us more control over how much light is coupled into the fiber in a better way than with the ND filters in current path.
4. Clean EX fiber tip.
5. Dump a leakage IR beam from the harmonic separator post doubling oven, which is currently just hitting the enclosure. It looks pretty low power but I didn't measure it.
6. Re-install EX power monitoring PD.

Barring objections, I will start working on these changes later today.

I started working on the EX table. Work is ongoing so I will finish this up later in the evening, but in case anyone is wondering why there is no green light...

1. EX laser shutter was closed.
2. Disconnected EX input to the beat mouth at the PSL table in order to avoid accidentally frying the PDs.
3. Prepared new optomechanics hardware
   • To my surprise, I found a bubble-wrapped K6XS mount (the one with locking screws for all DoFs) on the SP table. No idea where this came from or who brought it here, or how long it has been here, but I decided to use it nevertheless.
   • Prepared f = 200mm and f = -200mm lenses on traveling mounts (Thorlabs DT12, lenses are also Thorlabs, AR1064).
   • Made a slight translation of the beam path towards the north to facilitate going through the center of the mounted lenses.
   • Temporarily removed a beam dump from next to the final steering mirror before the Green REFL PD, and also removed one of the brackets between the enclosure and the table for ease of laying out components. These will be replaced later.
4. Installed this hardware on the PSL table, roughly aligned beam path.
   • Beam now goes through the center of all lenses and is hitting the collimator roughly in the center.

To do in the eve:

1. Clean fiber and connect it to the collimator.
2. Optimize mode-matching as best as possible.
3. Attenuate power using PBS and HWP so as to not damage the BeatMouth PD (Pthresh = 2mW). These are also required to make the polarizations of the EX coupled light (S-pol) and PSL (P-pol) go along the same axis of the PM fiber.
4. Re-install temporarily removed beam dump and bracket on EX table.
5. Re-install EX power monitoring PD.
6. Measure beat frequency spectrum.

gautam 1245am: Fiber cleaning was done - I'll upload pics tomorrow, but it seems like the fiber was in need of a good cleaning. I did some initial mode-matching attempts, but peaked at 10% MM. Koji suggested not going for the final precisely tunable lens mounting solution while trying to perfect the MM. So I'll use easier to move mounts for the initial tuning and then swap out the DT12s once I have achieved good MM. Note that without any attenuation optics in place, 24.81mW of power is incident on the collimator. In order to facilitate easy debugging, I have connected the spare fiber from PSL to EX at the PSL table to the main EX fiber - this allows me to continuously monitor the power coupled into the fiber at the EX table while I tweak lens positions and alignment. After a bit of struggle, I noticed I had neglected a f=150mm lens in my earlier calculation - I've now included it again, and happily, there seems to be a solution which yields the theoretical 100% MM efficiency. I'll work on implementing this tomorrow..

Summary:

I implemented most of the things outlined in my previous elog. Implementing the a la mode solution after including all lenses, I managed to achieve >90% mode-matching into the fiber. Power monitor PD has not been re-installed yet, neither has the bracket I removed. The polarization monitoring setup on the PSL table has now been hooked up to the EX fiber, let's see how it does overnight. All quoted power measurements in this elog were made with the Ophir power meter (filter off).

Details:  

Attachment #1 shows the implemented MM solution. I did not include the PBS substrate in the calculation, maybe that will help a little.

Attachment #2 shows the new layout. The beam is a little low on the PBS and HWP - I will swap these out to mounts with slightly lower height, that should improve the situation a little. There is no evidence of clipping, and the beam clears all edges by at least 3 beam diameters.

Attachments #3 and #4 show the EX fiber before and after cleaning respectively. Seems like the cleaning was successful.

Attachment #5 shows the beam incident on the coupler with on an IR card. This beam only goes through a QWP, lens, BS and 45 degree steering mirror, so I'm not sure what's responsible for the large halo around the main beam. There is significant power in the halo too - I measured 25mW right before the coupler, but if I use an iris to try and cut off the halo, the power is measured to be ~19mW.

Alignment Procedure:

• Connect spare fiber such that I can monitor coupled power (minus fiber losses and joint loss) at EX table.
• Use Fluke fault analyzer to align input and collimator modes coarsely.
• Monitored coupled power continuously using Fiber Power Meter (although MM calculations were made with Ophir, this was more convenient for "Live" viewing).
• Tweaked one available steering mirror and K6XS axes to maximize coupled power. 
• Tweaked lens positions slightly to see if significant improvement could be made.
• After optimizing, I measured 17.1mW coming out of the EX fiber at the PSL table. As mentioned earlier, the input power is tricky to measure given the large amount of junk light around the main mode. But I measured 18.6 mW after the iris. So this is ~95%. In any case, safe to say that we are waaaay better than the previous situation of 380uW out of 1.9mW. 
• Added PBS and HWP to cut the incident power to 1.6mW. I measured 1.2mW on the PSL table. Probably adding the PBS screwed up the MM a bit, to be tweaked tomorrow. 
• I had moved the Green shutter a bit during this work - as a result, the Green REFL was not making it back to the REFL PD. I remedied this, and EX Green TEM00 mode was locked to the arm. GTRX of ~0.4 was recovered, which is around the number I'm used to seeing.

Here is a first look at the overnight stability. For the temperature, I used the calibration I found in the old psl database file, seems to give sensible results. It's only 15 hours of data plotted, so we don't see the full 24 hour temperature swing, but I think it is safe to say that for the EX fiber, the dominant cause of the "waveplate effect" is not in fact temperature drift. The polarization extinction is still better than 10dB in the entire period of observation though... I'm going to push ahead with a beat spectrum measurement, though there is room for improvement in the input coupling alignment to fiber special axes.

The apparent increase in these plots towards the end of the 15 hour period is because the lights on the PSL table were switched on.

Annoyingly, it seems like the PSL NPRO channels (which I have hijacked to do this test) do not have minute trend data directly accessible from NDS2. Not sure whether this is an NDS2 problem, or something missing in the way the channels are setup with Acromag. Probably the former, as I am able to generate minute trend plots with dataviewer. I forget whether this is the same as the infamous minute trend problem. Second trend data is available though, and is what I used to make these plots...

Summary:

My goal was to do some further characterization of the IR ALS system tonight. With POX as an OOL sensor, I measured an RMS displacement noise of  8 pm with the arm under ALS control. I calculated the CARM linewidth to be 77 Hz (=10.3 pm) for the 40m parameters, assuming 30ppm arm loss. Fuurthermore, this number is 3x better than the 24 pm RMS quoted in the Izumi et. al. paper. Of course I am quoting the best results from my efforts tonight. Conclusions:

1. [Attachment #1] --- With XARM locked using POX, the ALS beat noise (i.e. Phase Tracker output noise) lines up well with the reference we have been using for some time now (and indeed, is better in some places).
2. [Attachment #2] --- With the arm locked on ALS and POX as an OOL sensor, I measured performance comparable to this measurement we did sometime last year. Anomalies in this measurement and the one above were what precipitated the IMC noise investigation.
3. [Attachment #3] --- The above two attachments are not the whole story. During the day, I get significantly worse performance (so much so that I couldn't even do the handoff to ALS control). But in 5 minutes of measurement, the ALS noise seems quite stationary.
4. [Attachment #4] --- This is really the same as Attachment #2, but I wanted to overlay some vlines. Maybe this is a clue to some 60 Hz / ground loop issues, but the RMS has significant contribution from these harmonics. Tmrw, I will add the old measurement overlaid to this plot (and for what its worth, the Izumi et. al. spectrum as well).
5. [Attachment #5] --- With the arm under ALS control, I was able to maintain the lock for a solid hour (and more as I write up this elog). Somehow inkscape screwed up the fonts, but main point here is that TRX is stable to within 10% throughout the observation time.

Since the stability and noise seemed quite good, I decided to collect some arm scan data to give to our modeSpec SURFs to practice fitting (which is the short dip in TRX in Attachment #4). Although after the discussion with Rana today, I think it may be that we want to do this measurement in reflection and not transmission, and look for a zero crossing in the PDH signal. In any case, I was able to scan 7 FSRs without any issues. I will upload the data to some git repo. GPS start time is 1208850775, sweep was 3mins long.

I think the next step here is to noise-budget this curve. At least the DFD noises

The new K6XS mounts I ordered have arrived. I want to install one of them at the Y-end. I can't find a picture of the current layout but it exists as there is a hardcopy affixed to the ETMY chamber door, Steve, can we dig this up and put it in the wiki? In any case, the current beam going into the fiber is the pickoff from the post-SHG harmonic separator. I'd like to change the layout a bit, and use a pickoff before the doubling oven, but looking at the optical table, this seems like a pretty involved task and would probably require large scale optical hardware rearrangement. In any case, the MM of the green beam into the Y-arm is <50%, so I would like to redo that as well. Does anyone know of a measurement of the mode from the Lightwave NPRO that is installed at EY? I think Annalisa is the one who installed this stuff, but I can't find an actual NPRO mode measurement in her elog thread.

Found it: elog4874, elog8436. I updated the laser inventory page to link the lasers in use to the most recent mode measurements I could find on the elog. I guess ideally we should also link the AM/PM response measurements.

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SV  ETMY optical table layout  

     as of 3-31-2016

The oplev path was optimized with AR coated lenses and new He/Ne laser Jan 24, 2017

I have been puzzled about the beat note level we get out of the BeatMouth for some time.

• The beat PD used is the Menlo FPD310.
• But the version we have is an obsolete version of the product, for which a manual is hard to find.
• Hence, I don't know the transimpedance/electrical characteristics of this PD.
• The optical damage threshold of the PD is quoted as 2mW, which is a number I have been careful not to exceed.
• But I've felt that the beat amplitude level we get out of this PD is far too low considering the amount of DC optical power (as measured with a fiber power meter) incident on the PD.
• After some emailing and online hunting, I've gathered some numbers for the PD which are now on the wiki.
• The fiber beam splitters we use inside the BeatMouth don't have PM fibers. There are 3 such splitters inside the BeatMouth. So the overlap efficiency on the PD is unknown.
• But even so, the beat levels I was seeing were too low.

I have pulled the box out in order to re-characterize the DC power levels incident on the PD, and also to change the gain setting on the PD to the lower gain which is more compatible with the level of optical power we have going into the BeatMouth. The modern catalog for the FPD310 (see wiki) suggests that the maximum output voltage swing of the PD is 1Vpp driving a 50ohm load. With 50% overlapping efficiency between the PSL and AUX beams, and 400 uW of optical power from each beam, I expect an output of 0.5Vpp. Even with perfect overlap, I expect 0.8Vpp. So these numbers seem reasonable.

I also plan to check the scaling of electrical beat amplitude to optical power for a couple of levels to see that these scale as expected...

Summary:

I did some more BeatMouth characterization. My primary objective was to do a power budget. Specifically, to measure the insertion loss of the mating sleeves and of the fiber beam splitters. All power numbers quoted in this elog are measured with the fiber power meter. Main takeaways:

• Measured insertion loss of all mating sleeves, which are ADAFCPMB2, are in agreement with the < 1dB spec. 1 dB in power is ~20%.
• But there is large variance in the above number, between different supposedly identical connectors.
• Measured insertion loss from input port to coupled ports of the fiber beamsplitters are slightly larger than spec (~3.5dB), when measured after mating the fiber beamsplitter (which has Hi1060 flex fiber) and PM980 fiber (which is what brings light to the BeatMouth).
• But measured insertion loss when mating is between Hi1060 flex fiber ends is more in line with the expected value of ~3.5dB.
• Isolation of fiber beam splitters seems to match the spec of >55dB.

Results:

• I used the fiber bringing 416uW of IR light from EY for this test.
• Insertion loss was measured by injecting the fiber light at one port and measuring the transmitted power at various other ports.
• In order to couple the fiber power meter across a single mating sleeve, I used a short (~1m) patch cable from newport (F-SY-C-1FCA). Technically, this is single mode fiber with the correct type of connector, FC/APC, but is not PM.
• See Attachment #2 for the labeling of the connectors which is how I refer to them in the table below.
• Lest there be confusion, I use the definition of insertion loss  .

Remarks / Questions:

1. Is there any way to systematically reduce the insertion loss? Like getting a better mating part?
2. Question for the fiber experts: How do we deal with the unused port of the beam-splitters? Right now, they are just capped. But as you can see in Attachment #1, the caps certainly don't block all the light. What are the implications of back-scattered light into the fiber on the ALS noise? I guess the beamsplitter itself has the spec'd 55dB directivity, so do we not care about this?

Summary:

1. The DFD noise floor is ~0.5Hz/rtHz at 100Hz (see Attachment #2).
2. I cannot account for the measured noise floor of the DFD system. The Marconi noise and the AA noise contributions should be neglibible at 100Hz.
3. This SURF report would lead me to believe that the delay line cable length is 50m. But my calibration suggests it is shorter, more like 40m (see Attachment #1). I had made some TF measurements of the delay sometime ago, need to dig up the data and see what number that measurement yields.

Details and discussion: (diagrams to follow)

• Delay line linearity was checked by driving the input with Marconi, waiting for any transient to die down, and averaging the I and Q inputs to the phase tracker servo (after correcting for the daughter board TF) for 10 seconds. The deg/MHz response was then calculated by trigonometry. Not sure what to make of the structure in the residuals, need to think about it.
• DFD noise was checked by driving the DFD input with a Marconi at 50MHz, RF level = 8dBm, which are expected parameters for nominal ALS operation. In this configuration, I measured the spectrum of the phase tracker output. I then used the calibration factor from the above bullet to convert to Hz/rtHz.
• The electronics noise contribution of the daughter board was calibrated to Hz/rtHz by using the Marconi to drive the DFD input with a known FM signal (mod depth ~0.05), and using the SR785 to measure the power of the FM peak. This allows one to back out the V/Hz calibration constant of the delay line. I tweaked the carrier frequency until the ratio of power in I channel to Q channel (or the other way around) was >20dB before making this measurement.
• I have no proof - but I suspect that the whole host of harmonics in the noise spectrum is because the 1U AA chassis sits directly on top of some Sorensen power supplies. These Sorensens power the frequency distribution box in the LSC rack, so the simplest test to confirm would be to turn off the RF chain, and then Sorensens, and see if the peaky features persist.

Summary:

• DC light power incident on beat PD is ~400uW from the PSL and ~300uW from EX.
• These numbers are consistent with measured mating sleeve and fiber coupler losses.
• However, I measure an RF beatnote of 80mVpp (= -18dBm). This corresponds to a mode matching efficiency of ~15%, assuming InGaAs efficiency of 0.65A/W.

I find this hard to believe.

Details:

• I took this opportunity to clean the fiber tips on the PSL table going into the BeatMouth.
• PSL light power going into the BeatMouth is 2.6mW. Of which ~400uW reaches the Beat PD (measured using my new front panel monitor port).
• Similarly, 1mW of EX light reaches the PSL table, of which ~300uW reaches the Beat PD.
• The RF amplifier gain is 20dB, and RF transimpedance is 50 ohms.
• Using the (electrical) 20dB coupled port on the front panel, I measured a beat signal with 8mVpp. So the actual beat note signal is 80mVpp.

Discussion:

As I see it, the possibilities are:

1. My measurement technique/calculation is wrong.
2. The beat PD is broken has optoelectronic different that is significantly different from specifications.
3. The non-PM fiber lengths inside the beat box result in ~15% overlap between the PSL and EX beams. Morever, there is insignificant variation in the electrical beat amplitude as monitored on the control room analyzer. So there is negligible change in the polarization state inside the BeatMouth.

I guess #3 can be tested by varying the polarization content of one of the input beams through 90 degrees.

A couple of months ago, I took 21 measurements of the delay line transfer function. As shown in Attachment #2, the unwrapped phase is more consistent with a cable length closer to 45m rather than 50m (assuming speed of light is 0.75c in the cable, as the datasheet says it is).

Attachment #1 shows the TF magnitude for the same measurements. There are some ripples consistent with reflections, so something in this system is not impedance matched. I believe I used the same power splitter to split the RF source between delayed and undelayed paths to make these TFs as is used in the current DFD setup to split the RF beatnote.

I want to use the Fiber Coupled laser from the PDFR system to characterize the response of the fiber coupled PDs we use in the BeatMouth. The documentation is pretty good: for a first test, I did the following in this order:

• Removed the input fiber to the 1x16 splitter located in the rack near the OMC chamber.
• Connected aforementioned fiber to a collimator.
• Aligned the output of the collimator onto a razor beam dump.
• Turned on the laser controller - it came on with a TEC temperature of 22.5 C and I_diode 0 mA, and the "output shorted" LED was ON (red).
• Turned up the diode current to 80 mA, since the "threshold current" is stated as 75 mA in the manual. In fact, I could see a beam using an IR card at 30 mA already.
• At 80mA, I measured 3.5 mW of output power using the Ophir.

Seems like stuff is working as expected. I don't know what the correct setpoint for the TEC is, but once that is figured out, the 1x16 splitter should give me 250 uW from each output for 4mW input. This is well below any damage threshold of the Menlo PDs. Then the plan is to modulate the intensity of the diode laser using the Agilent, and measure the optoelectronic response of the PD in the usual way. I don't know if we have a Fiber coupled Reference Photodiode we can use in the way we use the NF1611 in the Jenne laser setup. If not, the main systematic measurement error will come from the power measurement using a Fiber Power Meter.

Summary:

Neither of the Menlo FPD310 fiber coupled PDs in the beat mouth have an optoelectronic response (V/W) as advertised. This possibly indicates a damaged RF amplification stage inside the PD.

Motivation:

I have never been able to make the numbers work out for the amount of DC light I put on these PDs, and how much RF beat power I get out. Today, I decided to measure the PD response directly.

Details:

In the end, I decided that slightly modifying the Jenner laser setup was the way to go, instead of futzing around with the PDFR laser. These PDs have a switchable gain setting - for this measurement, both were set to the lower gain such that the expected optoelectronic response is 409 V/W.

[Attachment #1] - Sketch of the experimental setup. 

[Attachment #2] - Measured TF responses, the RF modulation was -20dBm for all curves. I varied the diode laser DC current a little to ensure I recovered identical transfer functions. Assumptions used in making these plots:

1. NF1611 and FPD310 have equal amounts of power incident on them.
2. The NF1611 transimpedance is 700V/A.

[Attachment #3] - Tarball of data + script used to make Attachment #2.

Conclusions:

• The FPD310 does not have a DC monitor port. 
  • So the dominant uncertainty in these plots is that I don't know how much power was incident on the PD under test.
  • The NF1611 DC power level could be measured though, and seemed to scale with DC pump current linearly (I had only 3 datapoints though so this doesn't mean much).
• Neither PD has transimpedance gain as per the specs.
  • The X PD shows levels ~x10 lower than expected.
  • The Y PD shows levels ~x3 lower than expected.
• I will repeat the measurement tomorrow by eliminating some un-necessary patch fiber cables, and also calibrating out the cable delays.
  • The setup shown in Attachment #1 was used because I didn't want to open up the BeatMouth.
  • But I can pipe the port of the BS not going to the FPD310 directly to the collimator, and that should reduce the systematic uncertainty w.r.t. power distribution between FPD310 and NF1611.

I did the measurement with the BeatMouth open today. Main changes:

• Directly pipe the RF output of the Menlo PDs to the Agilent, bypassing the 20dB coupler inside the BeatMouth.
• Directly pipe the unused port of the Fiber Beamsplitter used to send light to the Menlo PD to an in-air collimator, which then sends the beam to the NF1611 reference detector.

So neglecting asymmetry in the branching ratio of the fiber beamsplitter, the asymmetry between the test PD optical path and the reference PD optical path is a single fiber mating sleeve in the former vs a collimator in the latter. In order to recover the expected number of 409 V/W for the Menlo PDs, we have to argue that the optical loss in the test PD path (fiber mating sleeve) are ~3x higher than in the NF1611 path (free space coupler). But at least the X and Y PDs show identical responses now. The error I made in the previously attached plot was that I was using the 20dB coupled output for the X PD measurement .

Revised conclusion: The measured optoelectronic response of the Menlo PDs at 10s of MHz, of ~130 V/W, is completely consistent with the numbers I reported in this elog. So rogue polarization is no longer the culprit for the discrepancy between expected and measured RF beatnote power, it was just that the expectation, based on Menlo PD specs, were not accurate.#2 of the linked elog seems to be the most likely, although "broken" should actually be "not matching spec".

While killing time b/w measurements, I looked on the ITMY optical table and found that the NF1611 I mentioned in this elog still exists. It is fiber coupled. Could be a better substitute as a Reference PD for this particular measurement.

Summary:

Last year, I worked on the ALS delay line electronics, thinking that we were in danger of saturation. The analysis was incorrect. I find that for RF signal levels between -10 dBm and +15 dBm, assuming 3dB insertion loss due to components and 5 dB conversion loss in the mixer, there is no danger of saturation in the I/F part of the circuit.

Details:

The key is that the MOSFET mixer used in the demodulation circuit drives an I/F current and not voltage. The I-to-V conversion is done by a transimpedance amplifier and not a voltage amplifier. The confusion arose from interpreting the gain of the first stage of the I/F amplifier as 1 kohm/10 ohm = 100. The real figures of merit we have to look at are the current through, and voltage across, the transimpedance resistor.  So I think we should revert to the old setup. This analysis is consistent with an actual test I did on the board, details of which may be found here.

We may still benefit from some whitening of the signal before digitization between 10-100 Hz, need to check what is an appropriate place in the signal chain to put in some whitening, there are some constraints to the circuit topology because of the MOSFET mixer.

One part of the circuit topology I'm still confused by is the choice of impedance-matching transformer at the RF-input of this demod board - why is a 75 ohm part used instead of a 50 ohm part? Isn't this going to actually result in an impedance mismatch given our RG405 cabling?

Update: Having pulled out the board, it looks like the input transformer is an ADT-1-1, and NOT an ADT1-1WT as labelled on the schematic. The former is indeed a 50ohm part. So it makes sense to me now.

Since we have the NF1611 fiber coupled PDs, I'm going to try reviving the X arm ALS to check out what the noise is after bypassing the suspect Menlo PDs we were using thus far. My re-analysis can be found in the attached zip of my ipynb (in PDF form).

Summary:

The restoration of the delay-line electronics is complete. The chassis has not been re-installed yet, I will put it back in tomorrow. I think the calculations and measurements are in good agreement.

Details:

Apart from restoring the transimpedance of the I/F amplifier, I also had to replace the two differential-sending AD8672s in the RF Log detector circuit for both LO and RF paths in the ALS-X board. I performed the same tests as I did the last time on the electronics bench, results will be uploaded to the DCC page for the 40m version of the board. I think the board is performing as advertised, although there is some variation in the noise of the two pairs of I/Q readouts. Sticking with the notation of the HP Application Note for delay line frequency discriminators, here are some numebrs for our delay line system:

•   - measured by driving the LO/RF inputs with Fluke/Marconi at 7dBm/0dBm (which are the expected signal levels accounting for losses between the BeatMouth and the demodulator) and looking at the Vpp of the resulting I/F beat signal on a scope. This is assuming we use the differential output of the demodulator (divide by 2 if we use the single-ended output instead).
•  [see measurement]
•  (to be confirmed by measurement by driving a known FM signal with the Marconi)
• Assuming 1mW of light on our beat PDs and perfect contrast, the phase noise due to shot noise is which is ~ 5 orders of magnitude lower than the electronics noise in equivalent frequency noise at 100 Hz.
• The noise due to the FET mixer seems quite complicated to calculate - but as a lower bound, the Johnson current noise due to the 182 ohms at each RF input is ~ 10 pA/rtHz. With a transimpedance gain of 1 kohm, this corresponds to ~10 nV/rtHz. 

In conclusion: the ALS noise is very likely limited by ADC noise (~1 Hz/rtHz frequency noise for 5uV/rtHz ADC noise). We need some whitening. Why whiten the demodulated signal instead of directly incorporating the whitening into the I/F amplifier input stage? Because I couldn't find a design that satisfies all the following criteria (this was why my previous design was flawed):

1. The commutating part of the FET mixer must be close to ground potential always.
2. The loading of the FET mixer is mostly capacitive.
3. The DC gain of the I/F amplifier is low, with 20-30dB gain at 100 Hz, and then rolled off again at high frequencies for stability and sum-frequency rejection. In fact, it's not even obvious to me that we want a low DC gain - the quantity  is directly proportional to the DC transimpedance gain, and we want that to be large for more sensitive frequency discriminating.

So Rich suggested separating the transimpedance and whitening operations. The output noise of the differential outputs of the demodulator unit is <100 nV/rtHz at 100 Hz, so we should be able to saturate that noise level with a whitening unit whose input referred noise level is < 100 nV/rtHz. I'm going to see if there are any aLIGO whitening board spares - the existing whitening boards are not a good candidate I think because of the large DC signal level.

This Hanford alog may be of relevance as we are using the aLIGO AA chassis for the IR ALS channels. We aren't expecting any large amplitude high frequency signals for this application, but putting this here in case it's useful someday.

This test was done, and I determine the frequency discriminant to be  (for an RF signal level of ~2 dBm). 

Attachment #1: Measured and predicted value of the DFD discriminant for a few RF signal levels.

• Methodology was to drive an FM (deviation = 25 Hz, fMod = 221 Hz, fCarrier ~ 40 MHz) with the Marconi, and look at the IF spectrum peak height on a SR785
• The "Design" curve is calculated using the circuit parameters, assuming 4dB conversion loss in the mixer itself, and 3dB insertion loss due to various impedance matching transformers and couplers in the RF signal chain. I fudged the insertion/convertion loss numbers to get this curve to line up with the measurements (by eye).
• For the measurement, I assume the value for FM deviation displayed on the Marconi is an RMS value (this is the best I can gather from the manual). I'll double checking by looking at the RFmon spectrum directly on the Agilent NA.
• X axis calibrated by reading off from the RF power monitor using a DMM and using the calibration data from the bench.
• I could never get the ratio of peak heights in Ichan/Qchan (or the other way around) to better than ~ 1/8 (by moving the carrier frequency around). Not sure I can explain that - small non-orthogonality between I and Q channels cannot explain this level of leakage.

Attachment #2: Measured noise spectrum in the 1Y2 (LSC) electronics rack, calibrated to Hz/rtHz using the discriminant from Attachment #1.

• Something funky with the I channel for X, I'll re-take that spectrum.

I'm still waiting on some parts for the new BeatMouth before giving the whole system a whirl. In the meantime, I'll work on the EX and EY green setups, to try and improve the mode-matching and better characterize the expected suppressed frequency noise of the end NPROs - the goal here is to rule out the excess low-frequency noise that was seen in the ALS signals coming from unsuppressed frequency noise.

Bottom lines: 

1. The DFD noise is at the level of ~ 10mHz/rtHz above 10 Hz. This justifies the need for whitening before ADC-ing.
2. The measured signal/noise levels in the DFD chain are in good agreement with the "expected" levels from circuit component values and typical insertion/conversion loss values.
3. Why are there so many 60 Hz harmonics???

Attachment #1 shows the schematic of the test setup. Signal generator (Marconi) was used to supply the RF input. We observed the IF output in the following three test conditions.

1. Observed the spectrum with FM modulation (fcarrier of 40 MHz and fmod of 221 Hz )- a peak at 221 Hz was observed.
2. Observed the noise spectrum without FM modulation.
3. Observed the noise spectrum after disconnecting the delayed output of the delay line. 

• It is observed that the broad band noise level is higher without FM modulation (2) compared to that we observed after disconnecting the delayed output of the delay line (3).
• It is also observed that the noise level is increasing with increase in RF input power. 
• We need to find the reason for increase in broad band noise .

Summary:

Per the manual (pg12) of the NF 1611 photodiode, the "Input Noise Current" is 16 pA/rtHz. It also specifies that for "Linear Operation", the max input power is 1 mW, which at 1um corresponds to a current shot noise of ~14 pA/rtHz. Therefore,

1. This photodiode cannot be shot-noise limited if we also want to stay in the spec-ed linear regime.
2. We don't need to worry so much about the noise figure of the RF amplifier that follows the photodiode. In fact, I think we can use a higher gain RF amplifier with a slightly worse noise figure (e.g. ZHL-3A) as we will benefit from having a larger frequency discriminant with more RF power reaching the delay line.

Details:

Attachment #1: Here, I plot the expected voltage noise due to shot noise of the incident light, assuming 0.75 A/W for InGaAs and 700V/A transimpedance gain. 

• For convenience, I've calibrated on the twin axes the current shot noise (X) and equivalent amplifier noise figure at a given voltage noise, assuming a 50 ohm system (Y).
• The 16 pA/rtHz input current noise exceeds the shot noise contribution for powers as high as 1 mW.
• Even at 0.5 mW power on the PD, we can use the ZHL-3A rather than the Teledyne:
  • This calculation was motivated by some suspicious features in the Teledyne amplifier gain, I will write a separate elog about that. 
  • For the light levels we have, I expect ~3dBm RF signal from the photodiode. With the 24dB of gain from the ZHL-3A, the signal becomes 27dBm, which is smaller (but close to) the spec-ed max output of the ZHL-3A, which is 29.5 dBm. Is this too close to the edge?
  • I will measure the gain/noise of the ZHL-3A to get a better answer to these questions.
• If in the future we get a better photodiode setup that reaches sub-1nV/rtHz (dark/electronics) voltage noise, we may have to re-evaluate what is an appropriate RF amplifier.

We characterized the power splitter ( Minicircuit- ZAPD-2-252-S+). The schematic of the measurement setup is shown in attachment #1. The network/spectrum/impedance analyzer (Agilent 4395A) was used in the network analyzer mode for the characterisation. The RF output is enabled in the network analyser mode. We used an other spliiter (Power splitter #1) to splitt the RF power such that one part goes to the network analzer and the other part goes to the power spliiter (Power splitter #2) . We are characterising power splitter #2 in this test. The characterisation results and comparison with the data sheet values are shown in Attachment # 2-4.

Attachment #2 : Comparison of total loss in port 1 and 2

Attachment #3 : Comparison of amplitude unbalance

Attachment #4 : Comparison of phase unbalance

• From the data sheet: the splitter is wideband, 5 to 2500 MHz, useable from 0.5 to 3000 MHz. We performd the measurement from 1 MHz to 500 MHz (limited by the band width of the network analyzer).
• It can be seen from attachment #2 and #4 that there is a sudden increase below ~11 MHz. The reason for this is not clear to me
• The mesured total loss value for port 1 and port 2 are slightly higher than that specified in the data sheet.From the data sheet, the maximum loss in port 1 and port 2 in the range at 450 MHz are 3.51 dB and 3.49 dB respectively. The measured values are 3.61 dB and 3.59 dB respectively for port 1 and port 2, which is higher than the values mentioed in the data sheet. It can also be seen from attachment #1 (b) that the expected trend in total loss with frequency is that the loss is decreasing with increase in frequency and we are observing the opposite trend in the frequency range 11-500 MHz. 
• From the data sheet, the maximum amplitude balance in the 5 MHz-500 MHz range is 0.02 dB and the measured maximum value is 0.03 dB
• Similary for the phase unbalance, the maximum value specified by the data sheet in the 5 MHz- 500 MHz range is 0.12 degree and the measurement shows a phase unbalance upto 0.7 degree in this frequency range
• So the observations shows that the measured values are slighty higher than that specified in the data sheet values.

The goal was to characterise the new amplifier (AP1053). For a practice, I did the characterisation of the old amplifier.This test is similar to that reported in Elog ID 13602.

• Attachment #1 shows the schematic of the setup for gain characterisation and Attachment #2 shows the results of gain characterisation. 
• The gain measurement is comparable with the previous results. From the data sheet, 10 dB gain is guaranteed in the frequency range 10-450 MHz. From our observation, the gain is not flat pver this region. We have measured a maximum gain of 10.7 dB at 6 MHz and it has then decreased upto 8.5 dB at 500 MHz
• Attachement #3 shows the schematic of the setup for the noise characterisation and Attachment # 4 shows the results of noise measurment. 
• The noise measurement doesn't look fine. We probably have to repeat this measurement.