[Koji, Johannes, gautam]

With Koji's and Johannes' help, I managed to resolve the coupling the pick-off IR beam into the fiber at the X end. I will put up a more detailed elog about how this was done - but in summary, we have about 31% coupling efficiency into the fiber, which isn't stellar, but I felt this was adequate to find a beatnote. Koji also pointed out that the collimation telescope attached to the fiber at the X-end is poorly mounted - this is something to fix when we swap endtables, but this was not addressed right now because if we were to adjust this, we would also have to adjust the mode matching into the fiber.

I then attempted to tune the temperature to find the IR beatnote. While doing so, I noticed some strange features of the controller - there are essentially two display modes relevant to laser crystal temperature, one which allows us to change the setpoint and one which is an actual readback of the temperature (this one can't be adjusted). While tuning the temperature, I noticed that the latter display ("LT") did not change in value. On a hunch, I disconnected the "SLOW" control BNC on the front panel, and voila, I was able to tune the setpoint and observe the measured temperature shift accordingly. I was thus able to find a reasonably strong IR beatnote (-9dBm) at T ~ 44.6 deg C (the beat PD was set to 0dB attenuation, i.e. high gain mode). However, the moment I reconnected the SLOW control BNC, the beatnote vanished (it gradually shifted out of range of the HP network analyzer), and the same thing happens if I terminate the SLOW control BNC connector! I don't understand this behaviour, as the manual says that the range of voltages accepted to this input is +/-10V, so I would assume 0V means do nothing, but clearly this isn't the case, as the beatnote is being shifted in frequency by > 1GHz, and the tuning coefficient is listed as 5GHz/V in the manual. This situation needs further investigation.

Since I had a reasonable IR beatnote setup, I returned the HP analyzer to the control room and tried to see if a green beatnote was present as well - I first ran ASS, then maximized the green transmission using the PZT mirrors, but no beatnote is evident. The contrast isn't great, the ratio of AUX power to PSL power on the green beat PD is something like 5:1, so this probably requires some tuning as well. I will update this elog after today evening's activities...

I've been a little behind on my elogs so here is an update of the end laser situation.

IR beat for X-end recovered

• The issue was optimizing the alignment into the fiber at the end table.
• Using Fluke fiber illuminator helped in aligning IR pickoff into mount. Useful note: there is an unused fiber running between the X-end and the PSL table, by connecting these at the PSL table, I was able to monitor the coupled power while remaining at the X-end.
• Another major issue was that one of the steering mirrors (marked "Y1" in Attachment #1) was mounted with AR coated side facing the beam. This was fixed by simply rotating the post, the mirror was not removed from its mount. I can only assume that this mirror is in this kind of mount because of space constraints.
• The fiber has a collimating telescope attached to the end of it. In principle, this gives us more angular acceptance while coupling the beam into the fiber, but as I found out, the acceptance is still tiny (I don't have a number to quantify it). Furthermore, the Fluke visual fault locator revealed that the lens in the collimating telescope is not set up great - when re-doing the X end table, we should fix this situation so as to have a fairly large collimated beam coming out of the fiber when illuminated from the other end, this would make the mode matching much easier.
• Bottom line: we have ~1.2 mW of IR light incident on the coupler at the end table, and ~400uW of IR power at the PSL table => coupling efficiency is ~30%, not stellar, but sufficient for now I guess. After the various splitters etc, there is about 160uW of EX IR light and ~300uW of PSL IR light incident on the beat PD, and the beat amplitude is about -9dBm.

AM/PM characterization of newly installed Lightwave

• Having recovered the IR beat, I set out to do the PM characterization for the end laser.
• Attachment #2 shows the electrical setup. The IR beat was piped to the X-end via an existing long cable that runs between the vertex and the endtable. Not shown in the diagram, but I used a 20dB coupler to keep track of the beat frequency on the HP spectrum analyzer while doing this measurement.
• I restricted myself to the range between 100kHz and 500kHz to do the scan, because it takes quite a while to do the scan with fine resolution (IF bandwidth = 10Hz).
• To calibrate the magnitude response to rad/V, I divided the output of the network analyzer (converting dB to absolute magnitude first) by the amplitude of the signal seen on the monitoring oscilloscope while the PLL is unlocked. This number was 96mV/rad.
• To confirm that the error signal spectrum is indeed a good approximation of the "plant" transfer function (i.e that 100kHz >> UGF of loop transfer function of the PLL), I measured the loop TF of the PLL - Attachment #3 suggests a UGF of ~ 16kHz, which means the assumption is reasonable.
• Excitation amplitude was -25dBm (which gave reasonable SNR), and 3 averages were taken.
• The AM measurement was done using the same procedure as detailed here - the DC block was used. The DC level of the PD output was 2.72 V. The excitation amplitude was 0dBm.
• Attachment #4 shows the AM response, PM response and PM/AM ratio
• The peak in the PM/AM ratio at 256620 Hz is compelling because it is not too sharp (and so we can be reasonably confident we are at a good operating point) and the PM response of 23.83 rad/V is also acceptable. 
• As a consistency check, the PM response of ~30rad/V at 100kHz => PZT actuator gain is ~3MHz/V, which is in the region we expect it to be...

Next steps in recovering ALS and trying to lock again

• Having set the PDH modulation frequency to 256.62kHz, I took the spectrum of ALS noise using the IR beat (i.e. by piping the IR beat signal through the electronics the green beats usually go through - 6dB and 10dB attenuators were placed immediately after the beat PDs for the X and Y arms respectively, to make the signal levels compatible with the electronics), Attachment #5 unfortunately suggests that the noise performance is still poor, and I suspect the situation will be similar using the green beat (though I have not measured this yet).
• The modulation depth could be sub-optimal for the X-end PDH, I have to measure this and check that it is at an acceptable level. This will also tell me if I need to change the sum+HPF pomona box used to send the PDH control signal + piezo dither signal to the laser PZT. In order to do this, I need to know what the input impedance to the FAST control BNC is - the manual isn't very helpful, it just says the piezo has a capacitance less than 10,000pF. I suppose I will have to actually measure this.
• PDH loop OLTFs have to be re-measured for both ends to check that the servo gain's are appropriately placed.
• We know that the mode-matching into the arm for the X end is poor (I have yet to quantify this) - I suspect that the beam ellipticity is the main culprit. However, the DC transmitted power levels at the PSL table are comparable to (even slightly better than) the Y arm numbers, and so this cannot be the sole reason why the X-arm ALS noise is so much worse... I will continue my investigations next week...

I continued the hunt for a green beatnote today - I decided to take the output from the RF amplifiers sitting on the PSL table and directly connect it to the analyzer in the control room while I swept the temperature of the end laser 10,000 counts on either side of a temperature at which I had taken this measurement - so I expect the beatnote should be found somewhere in this neighbourhood. But I did not see any peaks throughout the sweep. I re-checked that the mode overlap onto the BBPD is reasonable. We have considerably less transmitted green power from the arm now than we did before the laser swap (by a factor of ~3) but I still expected to see some sort of beat signal.

It would be handy to have the IR beat set up as well for this process, but as mentioned in a previous elog, I was getting only ~0.1 mW of IR power incident on the coupler at the end table last week. As I had suspected, tweaking the alignment of the steering optics for the pick-off IR beam after the doubler improved the situation somewhat, and I am now getting about 1mW of IR power incident on the coupler at the end table. But I've not been able to adjust the alignment into the fiber at the end such that I get any IR light at the PSL table.  

Some updates on the laser swap situation:

1. Mode-matching calculation: 

• I should have caught this earlier, but it was an oversight - the 35um waist that Andres used in his calculation is the waist size of the green beam. So I've been off by a factor of sqrt(2) all this while, and it works out that the desired waist size is indeed 50um, consistent with Kiwamu's elogs. Furthermore, as he has detailed in that elog, we actually want the free-space waist of the input beam to the doubling crystal to be ~6.7mm from the geometric center of the PPKPT crystal. 
• I redid the calculation using these updated numbers. Attachment #1 shows the results (optimized for the X-waist, Y-profile plotted for comparison and to see what mode-matching efficiency we get). The way I've set up the code is for a la mode to rank the solutions in order of increasing sensitivity to the positions of the lenses. It turns out the least sensitive solution doesn't actually achieve the desired waist size of 50um - moreover, it requires us to change both lenses currently in the path. The next lease sensitive solution, however, achieves the desired waist (i.e. 100% theoretical mode-matching efficiency for the X mode) and only requires us to swap the 125mm lens we put in yesterday for a 150mm lens (and the positions of the lenses change slightly compared to what we had yesterday as well). The sensitivity in a la mode is parametrized by the amount of power remaining in the TEM00 mode while displacing one or more components. It turns out that this figure of merit is only ~1% smaller for the 2nd least sensitive solution compared to the first. So I've chosen to use that solution. Code used to calculate the mode matching is Attachment #2.
• I've also plotted in Attachment #1 what the beam profile would have looked like before our modificatons last night, using the numbers from Zach's elog - as I have already mentioned in the previous elog, it suggests that the waist size would have been 39um, at a location 1.0821m in my coordinate system (desired position according to considerations in the previous 2 bullets is 1.0713). This seems to have been a sub-optimal configuration, but is also subject to errors I made in measuring the positions of the mirrors/lenses (I don't think I had 1cm resolution).

       2. Implementing the new solution:

• I've switched out the 125mm efl lens for a 150mm efl lens from the same Thorlabs lens kit. I've also moved both the lenses to their new appropriate positions.
• Unfortunately, I had put in some irides in the beampath before calculating this new (more appropriate solution). As a result, both the lenses are off from their optimal positions by a few mm because the irides get in the way. I guess we just have to live with this for now, and can adjust the positions of the lenses once we actually get some green light and are happy with all the other alignments...
• As noted in the previous elog, I suspect that we saw no green light yesterday because we were missing the doubling crystal altogether (given that we have only a 1mm x 1mm area to aim for - the Faraday serves as a coarse constraint, though its aperture has ~25times this area!). I tried playing around with the two steering mirrors immediately after the NPRO to see if I could get some green light out, but have not been successful yet. I may make some further trials later in the evening/tomorrow...

As I check the manual of the Innolight (pg17) and the datasheet of the Lightwave, I wonder if the Quarter Wave Plate that was placed immediately after the Innolight laser head is even necessary now - I assume the purpose of the combination of QWP+HWP was to turn the elliptically polarized light from the Innolight into linearly polarized light before the Faraday. But the Lightwave already produces linearly polarized light. I will check out what is the configuration on the Y-end table...

After the discussion at the meeting, I decided to go ahead and open the top of the oven so that I could get a visual on where the crystal was located - this helped in the alignment, and I was able to get some green light out of the oven. I had to tweak the position of the Doubling oven a little (with the top open) in order to align the crystal to the beam axis. However - I was only able to get ~140uW of green light going into the Faraday. I had measured the power at various points along the beam path recently with the old setup. We used to have ~860uW of green going into the Faraday there. To see if I could improve the situation a little, I checked that the beam was reasonably centered on both apertures of the IR Faraday, and then removed the irides upstream of the doubling oven. These were preventing me from placing the lenses exactly as per the a la mode solution. Once the irides were removed, I moved the lenses to their optimal positions as best as I could with a tape measure to mark out distances. I then further tweaked the position of the doubling oven using the 4 axis stage, monitoring the green power while doing so. The best I could get was ~200uW. Perhaps the positions of the lenses need to be optimized further. I also checked the IR power before and after the IR Faraday - these numbers are ~260mW and ~230mW respectively (I maximized the transmitted power through the Faraday by rotating the HWP, the QWP that was in the beam path has now been removed as the Lightwave outputs linearly polarized light), and compare favourably to the numbers in the old setup. Doing a naive scaling accounting for the fact that we have less power going into the doubling crystal, I would expect ~700uW of green light coming out, so it looks like the mode matching into the doubling crystal is indeed sub-optimal. However, now that things are roughly aligned, I hope the optimization will go faster...

I tried aligning the green beam, elliptical as it is, to the arm by using the various steering mirrors after the doubling oven. The following was done:

1. Eric and I aligned the beam through the green Faraday - we levelled the beam using an iris to check the beam height immediately after the Faraday and a little further along the beam propagation direction.
2. We checked that the beam is reasonably centered on all the lenses. We changed the lens holder for one of the lenses from a Thorlabs model to a Newport model, so as to get the lens to the correct height such that the green beam was roughly centered on it. 
3. I then tweaked the alignment of the steering mirrors until the reflected beam from the ETM roughly coincided with the input beam. The return beam is getting clipped slightly on the way back through the green Faraday, so some more alignment needs to be done. However, given the ITMX situation, I can't align the arm to IR, so I'm holding off on further alignment for now...

[ericq, Gautam]

Tonight we embarked on the laser swap. In short, we have gotten ~210mW through the faraday doubler, but no green light is apparent. The laser outputs ~300mW, so it's not exactly a work of art, but I still expected some green. More work remains to be done...

Gautam took numerous photos of the table before anything was touched. One lens was swapped, as per Gautam's plan. The innolight laser and controller are on the work bench by the end table. The lightwave is on the table and on standby, and is not hooked up to the interlock mounted on the table frame, but instead one below the table directly next to the controller. The ETMX oplev laser is turned off. 

Steve pointed me to an old elog by Zach where he had measured the waist of the 1W Innolight NPRO. I ran a la mode with these parameters (and the original optics in their original positions prior to last night's activities), and the result is in reasonably good agreement (see Attachment #1) with my initial target waist of 35 um at the center of the doubling oven (which I presume coincides with the center of the doubling crystal). The small discrepancy could be due to errors in position measurement (which I did by eye with a tape measure) or because I did not consider the Faraday in the a la mode calculation. However, I wonder why this value of 35 um was chosen? In this elog, Kiwamu has determined the optimal waist size to be 50um at the center of the doubling crystal. Nevertheless, as per his calculations, the doubling efficiency should be non-zero (about 1% lower than the optimum conversion efficiency) at 35um or 70um, so we should be able to see some green light as long as we are in this fairly large range. So perhaps the fact that we aren't seeing any green light is down to sub-optimal alignment? I don't think there is a threshold power for SHG as such, its just that with lower input power we expect less green light - in any case, 200mW should be producing some green light... From what I could gather from a bunch of old elogs by Aidan, the Raicol PPKPT crystals have dimension 1mm x 1mm x 30mm (long axis along beam propagation), so there isn't a whole lot of room for error perpendicular to the direction of propagation... I wonder if it is possible, for the initial alignment, to have the top cover of the doubling oven open so that we can be sure we are hitting the crystal?

Today is janitor day. It still does not explain why the 2W Innolight tripped off about an hour ago. All back to normal.

.......................................................I asked Keven later, he admitted hitting the emergency shut off next to the chemical storage cabinet.

 Our janitor turned off the laser accidentally. 

 The PMC wasn't locking very happily after this. I tweaked the pointing onto the PMC REFL diode, to make sure it was centered, and touched the alignment into the PMC. I also reset the FSS Slow output to zero. It took a little while for the laser to settle in, for some reason, but the transmission is up at 0.80 now. 

Tweaked MC2 pointing to get the MC transmission high enough to let WFS kick in, which nicely got the rest of the MC alignment done. After that, I offloaded the WFS into the MC suspensions. 

Lastly, I ran the command that Rana posted in ELOG 10391, to set the FSS input offset (From -0.18 to -0.06)

 Didn't you take this opportunity to replace the cooling fan of the innolight controller?

Reflectivity of AR surface of LaserOptik (SN6)

The first step measurements of R for AR surface. I am not convinced with the data....because the power meter is a lame detector for this measurement.

I'm repeating the measurements again with PDs. But below is the log R plot for AR surface.

R percentage

6000ppm @ 42 deg
3560ppm @ 44 deg
7880ppm @ 46 deg
4690ppm @ 48 deg

We have received the dichroic optics from Laseroptik.  The coatings are:

HR:

• 532nm: T(s+p) > 97%
• 1064nm:  R(p) > 99.9%

AR:

• 532nm: R(s+p) < 1%
• 1064nm: R(p) < 2%

We got two sets with these coatings:

• 6x: 50 x 9.5mm, 2 degree wedge
• 8x: 25 x 6.35mm, 2 degree wedge
• 1x: 25 x 3mm, witness

I put them in the "visible optics" drawer of the newish, metal optics cabinet with the thin drawers down the Y arm.

 I repeated the transmittance measurements of LaserOptik SN6 @1064nm.

Transmittance for s-polarization 

0 deg - 0.524
45 deg - 0.055

Transmittance for p-polarization

0 deg - 0.515
45 deg - 0.1047 0.01047

Raji's measurements are here.

Got confused (even after I talked with Manasa).

The plot shows the number ~0.01 or less at 45deg. But the number is the text does not match with the plot.

Please use the logarithmic scale for the vertical axis.
And more points between 35 to 50 deg please (like ~1deg spacing)

Don't we have the data sheet from the coater? Can we request it?

I corrected the typo in the text...however, I agree the plot was lame...Will get the data sheet made tomorrow! 

I repeated the transmittance measurements of Laseroptik SN6 at 1064nm. The rotation stage could only resolve 2 deg rotation (We should consider buying a better rotation stage).

s-polarization

Percentage transmittance

       0.177% 42 deg
       0.806% 44 deg
       0.57%   46 deg
       54.8%    0 deg

p-polarization

Percentage transmittance

       1.039% 42deg
       1.155% 44 deg
       1.159% 46 deg
        65.6%   0 deg

The mirror T is completely out of spec. We should find or request the data sheet of the mirror.

> We should consider buying a better rotation stage

I'm already on it

  I have two questions:

1) Are we sure that the T measurement is not being compromised by some systematic? i.e. some leakage is making the apparent T appear too high.

2) IF the T is really so high, how should we decide whether or not to use this one rather than the G&H? Is the 532 nm property more important than the high recycling gain?

 Here are the German plots. Unfortunately they are not logarithmic.

 Ed: Proprietary data removed. Use wiki (Koji)

Steve uploaded data to the 40m wiki  / Aux_Optics on 02-07-2013

VEA is now a laser hazard area as usual, several 1064nm lasers in the lab have been turned back on. Apart from this

• the IFR was reset to the nominal modulation settings of +13dBm output at 11.066209 MHz (this has to be done manually following each power failure).
• The temeprature control unit for the EY doubling oven PID control was turned back on.
• The EY Oplev HeNe was turned back on.
• EY green PZT HV Kepco was turned back on.

Over the past week I have been continuing to finalize the daily summary pages, attempting to keep the total run time under half an hour so that they can be run frequently.  I have had many hang ups with the spectrograms and am currently using second trends (with this method, the entire script takes 15 minutes to run).  I also have a backup method that takes 3 minutes of data for every 12 minutes, but could not implement any interpolation correctly.  This might be a future focus, or the summary pages could be configured to run in parallel and full data for the spectrograms can be used.  I configured Steve's tab to include one page of images and one page of plots and fixed the scripts so that it corrects for daylight savings time (at the beginning of the running, the program prints 'DST' or 'Not DST').

Right now, I am focusing on making coherence plots in a spectrogram style (similar to the matlab 'coh_carpet' function) and a spectrogram depicting Gaussianity (similar to the plots made by the RayleighMonitor).  I have also been working on my  final paper and presentation.

On Thursday night (sorry for the late elog) I decided to give the MCL FF one more try. 

I first remeasured the actuator transfer function because previous measurements had poor coherence ~0.5 - 0.7  at 3 Hz. I did a sine swept to measure the TF. 

Raw transfer function:

The data is attached here: TF.zip

Then I made Wiener filters by fitting the transfer function data with coherence > 0.95 (on the left). Fitting all the data (on the right). Here are the filters:

The offline subtractions (high coh fit on left, all data fit on right). Notice the better IIR performance when all the TF data was fitted.

The online results: (these were aquired by taking five DTT measurements with 15 averages each and then taking the mean of these measurements)

And the subtraction performance:

When making the Wiener filter OFF/ON comparisons, we want to use the median PSD estimates, not the mean (which is what pwelch gives you).

cf. Sujan's note and Evan's follow-up

The median will be less sensitive to the transients / gltiches and will show more improvement I think.

As per Eric's request, here is the code and TF measurement that was used to calculate the MC2 FF filter that is loaded in FM5. This filter module has the filter with the best subtraction performance that was achieved for MCL.

code_TF.zip

This is being recorded for posterity so we know where to look for the old controls settings.

The last good burt restore that was saved before turning off scipe25 aka c1dcuepics was on September 29, 11:07.

[Manasa, Jenne]

We took the last of the in-vac photos of mirrors today.  I'll post in the morning.

Tomorrow, I'll align the DRMI once more to check, and get IPPOS and IPANG out of the vacuum.  I'll  take a look at POX, POY and POP, but we may just have to cross our fingers and hope for the best on those ones.  They were pretty hard to get out of the vac during their initial alignment, since they're so weak.

Also, tomorrow morning Steve is going to try out our new light access connector!!!!  I'm so excited!

The goal is to put heavy doors on, on Wed, and start pumping Wed afternoon / Thurs evening.

 My hope is that the DRMI flashes will be bright enough to see on the PO beams. IF we get 10 mW through the Faraday, you should get some buildup when the carrier resonates in the DRMI.

If the recycling gain is 10 and the pickoff fraction is 100 ppm you ought to get ~10 uW on PO. How much of the recycling cavity power gets out of POP?

 The photos on the OMC table are particularly tricky, since the camera plus the 'bathroom' mirror add a lot of weight....even if the MC locked, the input beam would be completely different, so all of the beams would be wrong.

During some of the work on the BS table, ITMY was realigned to have its beam retro-reflect, since the weight of the camera plus mirror was shifting all of the suspended optics on the BS table.  ITMY was restored after that, for subsequent photos.

I'm making a separate entry to go along with this thread of photos...

Putting the camera and 'bathroom' mirror on any table pretty significantly changes the leveling of any table.  The mirror especially is very heavy, although the camera is not feather light.  We need to come up with a new plan for taking alignment-confirming photos without adding anything to the tables.  That, or we have to level the table between each camera shot.  Anyone who has ever leveled one of our in-vac tables should shudder in horror at idea #2, so we need to put some thought into idea #1 before our next vent.  Vent Czar - can you put this on the list, in addition to the REFL rearrangement stuff?

As a result of this, PZT2 needed to be reverted to the place it was before work began on Saturday (so that the beam goes through the 45 degree target without any extra stuff on the table).  This means, unfortunately, that all of the photos / still captures of optics after PZT2 are invalid.

[Koji Gautam]

We continued to check the latch logic. Today we found that latch.py didn't catch the change of LSB but did for MSB. We determined that this happens when the slider value is chaged between the polling for LSB and MSB.
SInce these two should always be related to a single gain value, latch.py was modified so.

Now we don't observe any logic error for ~100 gain transisitions (see attached).

[Jenne & Kyung-ha]

We suspended the mirror to one of the main frame with the ECD backplane we finished before. The hard task was to find the right balance for the mirror so that 1) it won't be tilted and 2) it'll be in the right position for the ECD backplanes so that the magnets attached to the mirror holder would be in the very center of each ECD holes. We used optical lever laser (red He/Ne) to check the balance of the mirror. We tried to use the jig for the mirror holder clamps but because of the size difference, we couldn't use it at all. (Since the magnets are very heavy, we thought the wire being not perfectly centered might work better. However, the jig dimension was way too different that the wire ended up in the middle of one of the holes.) Since there was no other clever way to attach the wire in the right position, we just tried to be as center/accurate as possible. After attaching wire to that mirror holder clamps, we hanged it to the frame. Again, we couldn't find any other accurate way to find the center so we held the wire and tried to adjust the mirror height as accurate as possible so that it can be in the right position in respect to ECD backplane and not be tilted at the same time. However, when we hanged the mirror, it was still tilted.. So we adjusted the mirror tilt using the mirror holder clamps. Since the holes on the clamps were ellipse shapes, we could adjust the position of the clamps a little bit. When we adjust the clamps, we started to tighten the screws when the mirror is NOT in the perfect position since the tightening up part changes the mirror angle anyways. Luckily, when we tightened up the last screw, the mirror was in the perfect position! After that, we poked the mirror several times to make sure that it comes back to the same place.

Amazingly, we could finish this whole hanging/adjusting process in about 30 mins! :D (Jan said it's because of his amazing moral support. :P Maybe he'll be there to support us everytime we work on the mirrors?)

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

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

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

[Jenne, Rana]

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

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

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

#!/bin/bash   ### this is a comment  PATH=$PATH:/home/user/path    echo "How cool is this?" 

EDIT: it looks like the code highlighting is sort of broken :-(.

the lead spheres that were placed below the granite slab have been flattened by hammering to have lesser degree of wobbling of the slab.

the height of each piece, and the flatness of their surfaces was checked by placing another slab over them and checking by the spirit level.

Jordan, Chub, Paco

Chub and I went into the lab this morning to leak check the new gate valve after pumping over the weekend. This would be done through the RGA and spraying helium around the newly installed flanges. The RGA is set to monitor the partial pressure of helium versus time and we visually watch for any spikes in pressure to indicate an air leak.

So, I mistakenly thought the gate valve was opened and both sides were being pumped on, this was not the case. The vavle was closed so there was a pressure differential whenI turned the handle it tripped the interlocks and closed V4. I closed VM3 to the RGA volume to prevent the filament from being damaged.

Then the medm screen for the vac controls started flashing rapidly, I closed the window and reopened the controls to find all the panels were white, but we could still see the read only vac screen. So Paco restarted c1vac and the controls were restored. V7 closed, but was then reopened.

We now need to restart pumping with the odd pressure differentials between V4 and VM3.

Plan

- TP2 turned off along with the AUX pump

- VM3 opened to vent RGA volume (RGA turned off, filament cooled)

- Open the manual vent screw on TP1 to bring the RGA+TP1 volume back to atmosphere, now no pressure diff. on V4

- Open V4, restart AUX pump to rough out the volume

- Connect RP1/3 line to the pump scroll, turn on RP1/3 RGA+TP1 volume went to mtorr

- Slowly open the manual gate valve

- Connect AUX pump to TP2 and rough out

- Restart TP2, once at speed open V4, close V6 and turn off RP1/3

Now we are pumping on the RGA/TP1 volume with TP2, leak check attempt #2 will happen tomorrow morning

This morning Chub and I leak checked the manual gate valve with the RGA and helium. There was no change in the helium partial pressure while spraying helium around the flanges, all looks good.

I also took a 100 AMU analog scan, after the filament had warmed up overnight and the plot was quite noisy even with the lowest scan speed. I recommend this unit go back to SRS for a filament replacement/recalibration. I am worried yesterday's "vent" of the RGA volume may have burned the filament. See the comparison of yesterday's analog scan to today's below.

SURFS want some locking of IMC for camera adjustment.

So I left the IMC with intermediate gains so that it keeps locking and unlocking.

VCO (overall) iMC gain of -32, FSS common gain 3, and the FAST gain 20. I believe MC2tickle is ON too.

Q. When should we use plano-convex lenses, and when should we use bi-convex?

As I had the same question from Jenne and Dmass in a month,
I just like to introduce a good summary about it.
Lens selection guide (Newport)
http://www.newport.com/Lens-Selection-Guide/140908/1033/catalog.aspx

At a first order, they have the same function.
Abberation (= non-ideal behavior of the lens) is the matter.

Since the f numbers of the lenses in the proposed design with biconvex lenses are a little less than 5 and the conjugate ratio(that is the ratio of object to image distance) is greater than 5, I explored the use of plano convex lenses, but with the same focal lengths, the accessible u-v range is restricted with the planoconvex rather than biconvex lenses.
On Friday, I had a discussion with Gautam and Steve about the hardware that is the cylindrical enclosures for the camera and the telescope and we examined two such aluminum cylindrical enclosures. One of them was the one being currently employed for the cameras. The dimensions were measured and the length was found to be 8’’ and an outer diameter of 26 cm within an error of 0.5 cm.
The other enclosure was longer with a length of 52 cm(±0.5 cm), outer diameter of 10”(±0.1”) and an inner diameter of 23.7cm(±0.1cm). Pictures of these enclosures are attached.
Both of these enclosures have internal optical rail to mount the camera and the telescope system. Depending on the weight of the telescope system(that includes the weight of the slotted lens tubes, the lenses), it might be more efficient to clamp the telescope system itself on the rails with the low weight camera mounted on the lens tube.
I also went around to get an idea of distance of the GigE from the test masses. This was just a step to verify if the object distances were really in the ranges being taken into consideration, that is between 1500 and 2500 mm. I also tried to cross check the measurements with the CAD drawing of the 40m. However, as I have been informed, the distances in the CAD version are not updated.

The distances from the optic to the CCD detector would range from around 75.1 cm for MC2, 94.01 cm for ITMX, 97.21 cm for ETMX, 117.19 cm for ITMY and 88.463 cm for ETMY. The illuminator for the ETMY was disconnected, so Gautam helped me access the manual lamp control to enable me to take measurements.
The values for ETMX, MC2 and ITMY are subject to an error of ±1’’. Due to a lot of obstructions, the values for ETMY and ITMX may be subject to a lot more error. Even so, these distances are clearly less than 2 meters, prompting me to run the simulations again and verify that the chosen combination is still useful.

As for the slotted lens tubes to mount the 2” lenses, the following options are available on the Thorlabs catalog. CVI and Edmunds do not seem to offer much of the stackable lens tubes.

SM2L30C is a lens tube onto which the optic can be mounted without the need of a spanner wrench. It also has a length of 3”. However, it has a rotatable slip shield which can be rotated open as and when the access to optic is required. However, there might be a slight compromise with rigidity here.

SM2L30 is a lens tube with internal thread depth of 3”, the optic can be mounted using spanner wrench and a retainer ring. The optic cannot be accessed from both ends of the tube here.
SM2M30 is a lens tube with no external threads, therefore lens tube couplers would be required to stack the tubes. The optic is accessible from both ends here though.

Considering the merits and demerits of all these available options, the use of SM2L30 might be considered as it provides a quick and efficient way of stacking multiple lens tubes. As for accessing the optic from both sides, using multiple tubes helps overcome the problem and still ensures that we are able to access a number of separation distances as per requirement.
Thorlabs also offers an internal C to external SM2 adapter so that the lens tube could be fixed onto the C mount of the camera. 

I would be examining the use of 1" diameter lenses for the eyepiece as suggested by Rana, as that might give us more flexibility. 

Les Guthman interviews  gradstudent Graig.

Main laser emergency shut off was acuated by accident during this fiming. The laser is turned on.

[Koji,Joe]

PART 1:

Koji was unable to build his c1lst model first thing this morning.  Turns out there was  a bug with RCG parser that was introduced on Friday when we did the RCG updates.  We talked Alex who did a quick comment fix.  The diff is as follows:

Index: Parser3.pm
==============================

This was some code to remove TAGs from the .mdl file for some reason which I do not understand at this time.  I will ask tommorrow in person so I can understand the full story.

PART 2:

Koji then rebuilt and started the c1lst process.  This is his new test version of the LSC code.  We descovered (again) that when you activate too many DAQ channels (simply uncommenting them, not even recording them with activate=1 in the .ini file) that the frame builder crashes.  In addition, the c1lsc machine, which the code was running on, also hard crashed.

When a channel gets added to the .ini file (or uncommented) it is sent to the framebuilder, irregardless of whether its recorded or not by the frame builder.  There is only about 2 megabytes per second bandwidth per computer.  In this case we were trying to do something like 200 channels * 16384 Hz * 4 bytes = 13 megabytes per second.

The maximium number of 16384 channels is roughly 30, with little to no room for anything else.  In addition, test points use the same allocated memory structure, so that if you use up all the capacity with channels, you won't be able to use testpoints to that computer (or thats what Alex has led me to believe).

The daqd process then core dumped and was causing all sorts of martian network slowdowns.  At the same time, the c1lsc computer crashed hard, and all of the front end processes except for the IOP on c1sus crashed.

We rebooted c1lsc, and restarted the c1sus processes using the startc1SYS scripts.  However, the c1susfe.ko apparently got stuck in a wierd state.  We were completely unable to damp the optics and were in general ringing them up severely.  We tried debugging, including several burt restores and single path checks.

Eventually we decided to reboot the c1sus machine after a bit of debugging.  After doing a burt restore after the reboot, everything started to damp and work happily.  My best guess is the kernel module crashed in a bad way and remained in memory when we simply did the restart scripts.

Lessons learned on the beam spot centering (so far)

Well-known fact:

The spot position on MC2 can be adjusted by the alignment of the mirror while maintaining the best overlapping between the beam and the cavity axes.

In general, there are two methods:

1) Use the cavity as a reference:
Move the MC mirrors such that the cavity eigenmode hits the centers of the mirrors.
-> Then adjust the incident beam to obtain the best overlapping to the cavity.

2) Use the beam as a reference:
Move the incident beam such that the aligned cavity has the spots at the centers of the mirrors.
-> Then adjust the incident beam to obtain the best spot position while the cavity mirrors keep tracking
the incident beam.

Found the method 1) is not practical.

This is because we can move the eigenmode of the cavity only by very tiny amount if we try to keep the cavity locked.
How much we can move by mirror alignment is smaller than the waist radius or the divergence angle.
For the MC, the waist radius is ~2mm, the divergence angle is 0.2mrad. This means the axis
translation of ~1mm is OK, but the axis rotation of ~4mrad is impractical.

Also it turned out that adjustinig steering mirror to the 10-m class cavity is quite difficult.
A single (minimum) touch of the steering mirror knob is 0.1mrad. This already change the beam position ~0.1mm.
This is not an enough resolution.

Method 2) is also not so easy: Steering mirrors have singular matrix

Indeed! (Remember the discussion for the IMMT)

What we need is the pure angle change of 4mrad at the waist which is ~2m distant from the steering mirror.
This means that the spot at the steering mirror must be moved by 8mm (= 4mrad x 2m). This is the result of the
nearly-singular matrix of the steering mirrors.

We try to avoid this problem by moving the in-vac mirror (IM1), which has somewhat independent move.
The refl beam path also has the big beam shift.
But once the vacuum manifold is evacuated we can adjust very little angle.

This can also be a good news: once the angle is set, we hardly can change it at the PSL side.

You guys must work harder.

All simulink diagrams being used at the 40m are now under version control. I have compiled, installed, and restarted all current models to make sure that the files are all in a working state, which they seem to be. I have checked the latest version of the userapps svn repository to /opt/rtcds/userapps2.9, to compare the files therein with our current state. 

Surprisingly, only two files in the userapps svn have been changed since they were checked out here, and only one of these is a real change of any kind. 

LSC_TRIGGER.mdl was edited at some point simply to align some drawn lines; no functionality was changed. 

SCHMITTTRIGGER.mdl was edited to change the "INVERT" epics channel from an arbitrary EPICS input, to binary (true/false) input. This does not change the connectivity diagram, and in fact, I don't think we use this option in any of our scripts, nor is it exposed on our medm screens. 

Thus, I think that the only place for block changes can bite us is changes in the fundamental blocks in CDS_PARTS that are used in our custom 40m library parts. 

For posterity, these are the files used in compiling all of our running models. (Path base: /opt/rtcds/userapps/release)

Electrical Shop came in today to replace the lightbulbs around 40m. I supervised the entire visit, inside and outside the lab area. I was sure to use the ladders which were already inside the lab area. Although, while I was crawling under the MC beam tube, I came up too quickly and bumped it. This may have caused MC to become misaligned. Anyways, Yehonathan and I are realigning now.