Summary:
Using the data I collected yesterday, the POP angular FF filters have been trained. The offline time-domain performance looks (unbelievably) good, online performance will be verified at the next available opportunity(see update).

Details:

The sequence of steps followed is the same as that done for the MCL FF filters. The trace that is missing from Attachment #1 is the measured online subtraction. Some rough notes:

• The "target" channels for the subtraction are the POP QPD PIT/YAW signals, normalized by the QPD sum. For the time that the PRMI was locked yesterday, the QPD readouts suggested that the beam was well centered on the QPD, but the POP QPD (OT-301) doesn't give me access to individual quadrant signals so I couldn't actually verify this.
• I used 64s impulse time on the FIR filter for training. Maybe this is too long, but anyways, the calculation only takes a few seconds even with 64^2 taps.
• I found that the Levinson matrix algorithm sometimes failed for this particular dataset. I didn't bother looking too much into why this is happening, the brute force matrix inversion took ~4 times longer but still was only ~5 seconds to calculate the optimal filter for 20 mins of training data sampled at 64 Hz.
• The actuator TF was measured with >0.9 coherence between 0.3 Hz - 10 Hz and fitted, and the fit was used for subsequent analysis. Fit is shown in Attachment #2.
• FIR to IIR fitting took considerable tweaking, but I think I got good enough fits, see Attachments #3, #4. In fact, there may be some benifit to making the shape smoother outside the subtraction band but I couldn't get IIRrational to cooperate. Need to confirm that this isn't re-injecting noise.

Update Apr 5 1145pm:

• Attachment #1 has now been updated to show the online performance. The comparison between the "test" and "validation" datasets aren't really apple-to-apple because they were collected at different times, but I think there's enough evidence here to say that the feedforward is helping.
• Attachment #5 shows that the POP DC (= PRC intracavity buildup) RMS has been stabilized by more than x2. This signal wasn't part of the training process, and I guess it's good that the intracavity power is more stable with the feedforward on. Median averaging was used for the spectral densities, there were still some abrupt glitches during the time this dataset was collected.
• _{The next step is to do the PRFPMI locking with all of these recently retuned feedforward loops engaged and see if that helps things}.

that's pretty great performance. maybe you can also upload some code so that we can do it later too - or maybe in the 40m GIT

I wonder how much noise is getting injected into PRC length at 10-100 Hz due to this. Any change the PRC ERR?

I don't have a recent measurement of the optical gain of this config so I can't undo the loop, but in-loop performance doesn't suggest any excess in the 10-100 Hz band. Interestingly, there is considerable improvement below 10 Hz. Maybe some of this is reduced A2L noise because of the better angular stability, but there is also improvement at frequencies where the FF isn't doing anything, so could be some bilinear coupling. The two datasets were collected at approximately the same time in the evening, ~5pm, but on two different days.

[Paco, Yuta]

Measured power recycling gain at POP is 10(2), consistent with our expectation.

We measured power at POP with ITMY single bounce and estimated power recycling gain in PRMI.
As POP RFPD (Thorlabs PDA10CF; used for POPDC, POP22, POP110) was saturating, we attenuated the input power by OD2.5 ND filter.
Power recycling gain was estimated to be 10(2), roughly consistent with our expectation of 13.2 (40m/17532).

What we did:
 - Realigned POP path in ITMX table after aligning the IFO. It turned out that when POP power measurements were done in 40m/17532, POP was not well aligned.
 - We measured the power with ITMY single bounce at POP right after the viewport and in front of POP RFPD.
 - We also measured counts in C1:LSC-POPDC_OUT under ITMY single bounce, PRMI carrier locked, and MICH locked with PRM misaligned, with different ND filters.

Results:

 - Estimated power recycling gain is 1600(300) / (9.0(6) / 5.637%) = 10(2) .

Expected values:
 - Expected power using PSL output of 890 mW (measured in elog 40m/17390) under ITMY single bounce at POP is the following, and is consistent with the measurement.
[a] 890 mW * 0.9 (IMC transmission?) * 5.637%(PRM) * (1-2.2%)(PR2) * 50%(BS) * (1-1.384%)(ITMY) * 50%(BS) * 2.2%(PR2) = 0.240 mW

 - Calibration for C1:LSC-POPDC_OUT into power at POP RFPD is
[b] 437 counts / 0.108 mW = 4.0e3 counts/W.

 - Thorlabs PDA10CF has a transimpedance gain of 1e4 V/A and output range of 0-5 V. So, the saturation happens at 5 V / (1e4 V/A * 0.8 A/W) = 0.625 mW. We ended up attenuating POP RFPD with OD2.5 to make it not saturating (0.4 mW on the PD with PRMI carrier lock).

[Anchal, JC]

We first aligned the single arm cavity resonance for both arms to get maximum flashing. As we opened the chamber, I found that the POP beam was mostly hitting the POP_SM4 mirror but was clipping about 2 mm on the top edge.

I used TT2-PR3 to lower the injection beam angle and moved pairs of ITMY-ETMY, and ITMX-ETMX to recover as much flashing as I could in the both arms. Then, I moved PR2 in pitch from 49 to 71 to maximize the arm flashing again. After these steps, the POP beam was clearly within the POP_SM4 mirror but still in the upper half of the optic and there was maybe just a mm of clearance from the top edge. I decided to raise POP_SM4 mirror by 0.14" spacer. Now the beam is still in upper half of the mirror but has a good clearance from the edge.

The POP beam is coming outside in the in-air table at as a rising beam in the nominal path near the center of the window. This beam needs to be directed to the POP camera and RFPD on the far-side of the table.

Next steps:

• In-air table work: Setup POP camera and RFPD.
• In ITMX chamber, rotate ITMX Oplev mirror to clear the oplev beam off POP_SM5. Change oplev beam path outside accordingly.
• Install green transmission from X-arm steering mirrors in BS chamber.
• Install 4 steering mirrors in ITMY chamber at the two outputs of BHD BS to direct the beam outside.
• Figure out POX11 rotation angle and get XARM locking as well.

 Done.  The beam is also going vaguely in the direction of POP110, but I can't see the beam, so it's tricky. 

Order of operations:

1. Find POP on the table, place iris so I wouldn't forget.  Find beam by putting big IR card where I think beam should be, look at IR card with IR viewer.

2. Move and re-clamp 2" lens so beam is on center of lens.

3. Move and re-clamp 1st (2") mirror so that beam is on center of mirror. 

4. Remove BS-33% so that all the beam goes to POP55, steer that 1st mirror so beam is on POP55's little mirror.  Align little mirror so beam is centered on POP55 (as seen by looking at PD with viewer, finding "edges" of PD, going back to center).

5. Put BS-33% back in place.  The reflected portion of this beam is not possible to see using card+viewer technique.

6. Remove BS-50% that reflects half of this beam to POP110.  Find beam reflected from BS-33% by waving POP camera around.  Steer BS-33 until beam goes back in the direction that the camera used to be mounted.  Adjust camera mount and BS-33 so that beam is on camera.

7. Put BS-50% back in place.  Steer it around with voltmeter on PD to see if beam ever hits PD.  Unsuccessful. Give up, since we have POP55, and POP camera.

8. Make a youtube video: POP, AS, REFL, ITMXF (all on Quad3) - PRMI coarsely aligned, no IFO parts locked.  MICH was locked earlier, but not during video time.

[Yuta, Tega]

We needed to sort out the POXDC signal so we could work on X-arm alignment. Given that POXDC channel value was approx 6 compared to POYDC value of approx. 180, we decided to open the ITMX chamber to see if we could improve the situation. We worked on the alignment of POX beam but could not improve the DC level which suggests that this was already optimized for.  As an aside, we also noticed some stray IR beam from the BS chamber, just above the POX beam which we cold not identify.

Next we moved on to the POP beam alignment, where we noticed that the beam level on LO1 and POP_SM4 was a bit on the high side. Basically, the beam was completely missing the 1" POP_SM4 mirror and was close to the top edge of LO1. So we changed TT2 pitch value from 0.0143 to -0.2357 in order to move the beam position on POP_SM4 mirror. This changed the input alignment, so we compensated using PR2 (0.0 -> 49.0) and PR3 (-5976.560 -> -5689.800). This did not get back the alignment as anticipated, so we moved ITMY pitch from 0.9297 to 0.9107. All of these alignment changes moved the POP beam down by approx 1/5 of an inch from outside the mirro to the edge of POP_SM4 mirror, where about half of the beam is clipped.

Next Steps:

We need to repeat these aligment procedures with say 1.5 time the change in TT2 pitch to center the beam on POP_SM4 mirror.

[Paco, Yuta]

I swapped the 1 inch BS and lenses along the POP beam to clear the apertures and avoid clipping this beam. The results are illustrated by the attached pictures; this was done right after Yuta had optimized IFO alignment so it's hopefully a good reference from now on. Yuta also tuned the alignment of BHDC path in ITMY table, which mostly improved the alignment to DCPD A (90-ish counts improved to 100-ish counts with ITMY single bounce).

 [Jenne, Jamie]

We fixed up, as best we can, the in-vac POP alignment.  We are entirely limited in yaw by the aperture size of the 2" 45deg mirror launching the beam out of the vacuum.  The main centroid of the beam is well centered, but the inflated weird part of the beam is totally clipped.  There's nothing we can do about it except use a much larger mirror, install a fast lens inside the chamber, or just fix the damn PRC.  I vote for the third option there.

How did we work our magic? 

We put a green laser pointer where the POP DC PD was, and injected it into the vacuum, just like we normally do.  However, this time, we made sure the green laser was centered on all of the out of vacuum mirrors, so that there was no real work to do once we turned off the laser pointer. We locked the cavity, and confirmed that we are well centered on all of the in and out of vacuum mirrors, and discovered our aperture problem with the last in-vac mirror.

Here is a snapshot of the POP camera:

Getting POP:

We put a green laser pointer at ~4 inches on the POX table, and steered it using a mirror on the POX table to hit the center of the last in-vac mirror that POP sees.  I then steered that mirror so we were hitting the center of the other POP in-vac steering mirror, and hitting the same spot as the main IR beam.  It is easy to hold an IR card in front of PR2 and see the IR and green beams simultaneously.  I aligned both of the POP in-vac steering mirrors such that the green beam is co-aligned with the IR beam at PR2, as well as as far as I could reach toward the face of PRM from the ITMX door. 

Note:  The drawings by Koji have the POP "forward" beam (transmission through PR2 of the beam from PRM to PR2) dumped, while the POP "backward" beam (transmission through PR2 of the beam from PR3 to PR2) leaving the vacuum.  I aligned the steering mirrors such that the 'forward' beam would come out, although no dump is in place to dump the other beam.  I can't think of a reason why we care one way or the other, but I feel like Koji has perhaps mentioned something in the past.  I need to figure this out before we put doors on.

Getting POY:

Like yesterday with POX, we used the Watec with the aperture fully open to look at the POY pickoff, while I held the IR card in front of the mirror, to confirm that the beam was ~on the center of the optic. Then we took the lens off the camera, and made sure that the POY beam hit the CCD on the POY table.

To do list for Monday: While we are putting the heavy doors on, someone needs to wave an IR card in front of the IPANG steering mirrors in the ETMY chamber, while someone else takes a photo / still snapshot with the Watec.  Also, Manasa wanted to retake in-vac photos of at least the ITMY chamber, since SR2 was moved a very slight amount.  Also, also, someone tall needs to put the regular EQ stops on the PRM face (we have the old spring ones in there now).

Before pumpdown, we also need to get the IPANG beam centered on the PD.  The beam is cleanly coming out of the vacuum and hitting the first out of vac steering mirror, I just haven't centered it onto the QPD. 

Barring any other thoughts that people have of things that *must* be done before we pump down, I think we're ready to start putting heavy doors on the chambers on Monday.

Other thoughts, for next vent:  We need to re-look at the ITMY table.  POY's pickoff is just too close to the main beam.  Is it possible to move the AS steering mirrors and get POY from the BS table?  VENT CZAR: please put looking at this on the next vent to-do list.

  What was the reasoning / resolution of the POP forward/backward beam? Are we going to have the right beam for DRMI locking?

From Koji's email to me:

"With the backward beam you can see the returning beam even when the PRM is misaligned. That's the only difference. Once the PRM is aligned both beams have the same information."

So, we should be fine.

[Evan, Jenne]

We aligned the PRMI.  We definitely can lock MICH, but we're not really sure if PRCL is really being locked or not.  I don't think it is.

Anyhow, we found 2 different places on the AS camera that we can align the PRMI.  One (middle, right hand side of the camera), we see the same weird fringing that we've been seeing for a week or two.  The other (lower left side of the camera), we see different fringing, almost reminds me more of back in the day a few months ago when the beam looked like it was expanding on each pass.  As I type, Evan is uploading the movies to youtube.  I *still* don't know how to embed youtube videos on the elog!

Also, we found both forward-going and backward-going POP beams coming out onto the POX table.  We placed the 2" lens in the path of the backwards beam, so that we can find it again.  We can't see it on an IR card, but if we put some foil where we think the beam should be, we can use a viewer to see the spot on the foil.  Poking a hole in the foil made an impromptu iris.

Youtube videos:

Lower left on camera

Middle right on camera

How can you lock the PRMI without the REFL beams? c.f. this entry by Kiwamu
Which signals are you using for the locking?

I think the first priority is to find the fringes of the arms and lock them with POX/POY.

As for the POP, make sure the beam is not clipped because the in-vac steering mirrors
have been supposed to be too narrow to accommodate these two beams.

 Koji set the IFO in a PRM-ITMY configuration for me, while I went to put a lens on the POP path.  Before putting the lens, the maximum average output that I saw from the diode (on a 'scope) was 4.40mV.  After putting in the lens and realigning the beam onto the diode, the new max DCvalue that I saw was 21.6mV.  This is a factor of 4.9. 

EDIT:  The dark value was -3.20mV, so actually the ratio is ~3.25 .

I have not yet done anything to fix the situation of the large angle of incidence on the first out-of-vac steering mirror.

I did some re-alignment of the POP beam on the IX in air table. Here are the details:

1. Attachment #1 - optical layout.
2. With the PRC locked with the carrier resonant (no arm cavities), there is ~300uW of DC power incident on the Thorlabs PDA10CF, which serves as POP22, POP110 and POPDC photosensor.
   • See this elog for the signal paths.
   • On a scope, this corresponded to ~1.8 V DC of voltage. This is in good agreement with the expected transimpedance gain of 10 kOhms and responsivity of ~0.65 A/W given on the datasheet.
   • This is also in agreement with the ~6000 ADC counts I see in the CDS system (although there are large fluctuations). 
3. These was significant misalignment of the beam on this photodiode at some point:
   • Previously, I had used the CDS system to walk the beam on thde photodiode to try and maximize the power.
   • Today I took a different approach - triggered the MICH and PRCL loops on REFLDC (instead of the usual POPDC / POP22) so I could freely block the beam.
   • I found that there is a fast (f=35mm) lens to make the beam small enough for the PDA10CF. The beam was somewhat mis-centered on this strongly curved optic, and I suspect it was amplifying small misalignments. Anyway it is much better centered now (see Attachment #2) and I have a much stronger POPDC signal (by a factor of ~2-3, see Attachment #3).
   • The ASS dither alignment now shows much more consistent behavior - minimizing REFLDC maximises POPDC, see Attachment #4.
   • I took this opportunity to take some spectra/time-series of the PD output with the interferometer in this configuration. 

Tangentially related to this work - I took the nuclear option and did a hard reboot of the c1susaux Acromag crate on Sunday to fix the EPICS issue - it seems to be gone for now, see Attachment #5.

[Manasa, Yuta]

We set up POP camera and POPDC PD, and centered REFL PDs.
We also tried to center AS55 PD, but AS55 seems to be broken.

What we did:
 1. POP path alignment:
   Shot green laser pointer from ITMX table at where POPDC PD was sitting and centered green beam at optics in the POP path. Steered POPM1/M2 mirrors in the ITMX chamber to make green laser overlap with the PRM-PR2 beam as far as I can reach from ITMX chamber. We removed some ND filters and a BS for attenuating POP beam because POP power was somehow so low. Currently, POP is pick-off of the beam which goes from PRM to PR2.

 2. POP camera and PD:
   We first used camera to find the beam at where POPDC PD was sitting because it is much easier to find focused beam. Put an iris in front of the camera, and put POP DC behind it. Steered a mirror in front of PD to maximize DC output.

 3. REFL PDs:
   Steered mirrors in the REFL path to center the beam and maximized DC outputs, as usual.

 4. AS55:
   AS55 was not responding very much to the flashlight nor AS beam. C1:LSC-ASDC_OUT looked funny. By swapping the ribbon cables of AS55, REFL55, and REFL165, I confirmed that AS55 PD itself is broken. Not the ribbon cable nor PD circuit at LSC rack. I don't know what happened. AS55 was working on Feb 8 (elog #8030).

Result:
  We aligned PRMI coarsely. POP(right above) looks much better than before. REFL (left below) still looks elliptic, but ellipticity differs with the position on the camera. Some astigmatism is happening somewhere. AS (right below) looks pretty nice with MI aligned.


Next:
  1. Fix AS55? Or replace it with POP55 PD, which is currently unused.
  2. Confirm we are getting the right error signals or not, and lock PRMI.

I undertook the investigation of the AS55 PD. I found the PD is not broken.

I tested the PD on the PD test bench and it works just fine.

I attatched the characterization result as there has been no detailed investigation of this PD as far as I remember.

The transimpedance gain at 55MHz is 420Ohm, and the shotnoise intercept current is 4.3mA.

Hmm......
I thought AS55 is broken because it was not responding to the AS beam nor flashlight in DC. What's the DC gain difference between AS55 and POP55 (or REFL55)?

10010 Ohm for POP55 vs 50 Ohm for AS55 (cf. http://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:8080/40m/4763)

I wonder if you used an LED flash light, which emits no IR.

I didn't use LED flash light. We learned from the past (elog #7355). I checked that POP55 and REFL55/165/33/11 are clearly responding to flash flight, but I didn't expect that much difference in DC gain.
I wonder why we could align AS beam to AS55 in Feb 8 (elog #8030), but not in Feb 15 (elog #8091). I will check during the pump down.

There are many versions of the POP22 signal path I found on the elog, e.g. this thread. But what I saw at the LSC rack was not quite in agreement with any of those. So here is the latest greatest version.

Since the 2f signals are mainly indicators of power buildups and are used for triggering various PDH loops, I don't know how critical some of these things are, but here are some remarks:

1. There is no Tee + 50 ohm terminator after the minicircuits filters, whose impedance in the stopband are High-Z (I have been told but never personally verified).
2. The RF amplifier used is a Minicircuits ZFL-1000-LN+. This has a gain of 20dB and 1dB compression output power spec of 3dBm. So to be safe, we want to have not more than -20dBm of signal at the input. On a 50-ohm scope (AC coupled), I saw a signal that has ~100mVpp amplitude (there is a mixture of many frequencies so this is not the Vpp of a pure sinusoid). This corresponds to -16dBm. Might be cutting it a bit close even after accounting for cable loss and insertion loss of the bias tee.
3. We use a resistive power splitter to divide the power between the POP22 and POP110 paths, which automatically throws away 50% of the RF power. A better option is the ZAPD-2-252-S+.
4. The Thorlabs PDA10CF photodiode (not this particular one) has been modelled to have a response that can be approximated by a complex pole pair with Q=1 at ~130 MHz. But we are also using this PD for measuring the 110 MHz PD which is a bit close to the band edge?

Motivation:

1. I want to use the QPD at POP, calibrate it into physical units, and quantify the amount of angular jitter in the PRC (which I claim is what limits DRMI stability atm).
2. I want to revive the PRC angular feedforward to try and mitigate this a bit. But is feedforward even the best approach? Can we use feedback using the POP QPD?

POP QPD checkout:

• The POP QPD sits on the ITMX optical table. 
• It is interfaced to the CDS system via an OT301 and then a Pentek whitening stage (z:p = 15:150). 
• The OT301 claims to have a switchable offset nulling capability - but despite my best efforts tonight, I couldn't use the knobs on the front to null the offset (even with the PRC locked on carrier and a strong POP beam on the QPD).
  • We don't have readbacks of the individual quadrants available.
  •  
• So I moved the QPD with the PRC locked, to center the CDS readback of the spot position at (0,0).
• Next step is to calibrate the POP QPD readback into physical units.
  • I'm thinking of using the EricG diode laser for this purpose.
  • I can calibrate counts to mm of displacement on the QPD active area.
  • After which I can use the estimated position to PR2 (from which POP is extracted) to convert this to angular motion.
• I guess I should check for coherence between the POP QPD signal and all angular sensors of PRM/BS/MC1/MC2/MC3 to try and confirm the hypothesis that the folding mirrors are dominating the angular noise of the cavity. Unfortunately we don't have readbacks of the angular positions of TT1 and TT2.
• I moved the POP camera a bit in YAW so that the POP spot is now better centered on the CCD monitor.
• I also wanted to check the centering on the other POP QPD (POP22/POP110/POPDC?) but I think the POPDC signal, used for triggering the PRCL LSC servo, is derived from that PD, so everytime I blocked it, the lock was lost. Need to think of another strategy.
• MC3 has been rather glitchy tonight.
  • So I will wait for a quieter time when I can collect some data to train the WF for angular FF.

We would like the option of feeding back the POP beam position fluctuations to the PRM to help stabilize the PRC since we don't have oplevs for PR2 and PR3.  However, we cannot just use the DC QPD because that beam spot will be dominated by carrier light as we start to get power recycling. 

The solution that we are trying as of today is to look at yaw information of just the RF sidebands.  (Yaw is worse than pitch, although it would be nice to also control pitch).  I have placed a razor blade occluding about half of the POP beam in front of the POP PD (which serves POPDC, POP22 and POP110).  I also changed the ASS model so that I could use this signal to feed back to the PRM.  Loop has been measured, and in-loop spectra shows some improvement versus uncontrolled.

Optical table work:

The POP beam comes out of the vacuum system and is steered around a little bit, then about 50% goes to the DC QPD.  Of the remaining, some goes to the Thorlabs PD (10CF I think) and the rest goes to the POP camera.  For the bit that goes to the Thorlabs PD, there is a lens to get the beam to fit on the tiny diode.

There was very little space between the steering mirror that picks off the light for this PD, and the lens - not enough to put the razor blade in.  The beam after the lens is so small that it's much easier to occlude only half of the beam in the area before the lens.  (Since we don't know what gouy phase we're at, so we don't know where the ideal spot for the razor is, I claim that this is a reasonable place to start.)

I swapped out the old 50mm lens and put in a 35mm lens a little closer to the PD, which gave me just enough room to squeeze in the razor blade.  This change meant that I had to realign the beam onto the PD, and also that the demod phase angles for POP22 and POP110 needed to be checked.  To align the beam, before placing the razor blade, I got the beam close enough that I was seeing flashes in POPDC large enough to use for a PRMI carrier trigger.  The PRMI carrier was a little annoying to lock.  After some effort, I could only get it to hold for several seconds at a time.  Rather than going down a deep hole, I just used that to roughly set the POP22 demod phase (I -phase maximally negative when locked on carrier, Q-phase close to zero).  Then I was able to lock the PRMI sideband by drastically reducing the trigger threshold levels.  With the nice stable sideband-locked PRMI I was able to center the beam on the PD. 

After that, I introduced the razor blade until both POPDC and POP22 power levels decreased by about half. 

Now, the POP22 threshold levels are set to up=10, down=1 for both MICH and PRCL, DoF triggers and FM triggers.

ASS model work:

POP22 I and POP110 I were already going to the ASS model (where ASC lives) for the PRCL ASS dither readbacks.  So, I just had to include them in the ASC block, and increased the size of the ASC input matrix.  Now you can select either POP QPD pit, POP QPD yaw, POP221 or POP110I to go to either PRCL yaw, PRCL pit, CARM yaw or CARM pit. 

Compiled, installed and restarted the ASS model.

Engaging the servo:

I took reference spectra of POP QPD yaw and POP 22, before any control was applied.  The shapes looked quite similar, but the overall level of POP22 was smaller by a factor of ~200.  I also took a reference spectra of the POP QPD in-loop signal using the old ASC loop situation.

Q looked at Foton for me, and said that with the boost on, the UGF needed to be around 9 or 10 Hz, which ended up meaning a servo gain of +2.5 (the old POP QPD yaw gain was -0.063).  We determined that we didn't know why there was a high-Q 50Hz notch in the servo, and why there is not a high frequency rolloff, so right now the servo only uses FM1 (0:2000), FM6 (boost at 1Hz and 3Hz) and FM7 (BLP40). 

The in-loop residual isn't quite as good with POP22 as for the QPD, but it's not bad. 

Here's the loop:

And here's the error spectra.  Pink solid and light blue solid are the reference traces without control.  Pink dashed is the QPD in-loop.  Red and blue solid are the QPD and POP22 when POP22 is used as the error signal.  You can definitely see that the boosts in FM6 have a region of low gain around 1.5Hz.  I'm not so sure why that wasn't a problem with the QPD, but we should consider making it a total 1-3Hz bandpass rather than a series of low-Q bumps.  Also, even though the POP22 UGF was set to 9 Hz, we're not seeing any suppression above about 4Hz, and in fact we're injecting a bit of noise between 4-20Hz, which needs to be fixed still. 

With the re-do of the IFO alignment last week, I think that the beam was no longer about halfway on the POP22 razor blade.  To fix this, I locked the PRMI on sideband, removed the razor blade, and then put it back in such that it occluded about half of the light.  

I'm not entirely sure why, but when I put the razor in, POP22 went from 104(ish) to 45(ish) but POPDC  went from 5200(ish) to 1600(ish).  [The 'ish'es are because the PRC wasn't angularly stabilized, so there was some motion changing the power levels that leaked out to the POP port].  The ETMs were misaligned, so this should not be a carrier vs. sideband effect, since they'll both share the cavity axis defined by the ITMs and the PRM.  It is possible, although I didn't check, that there is some oplev light scattered into the POP photodiode that is now blocked by the razor blade.  This light would only be at DC and not the 2f frequencies.  Since the signal levels for POP22 vs. POPDC didn't change with and without the table top on (and with and without room lights on), I don't think that it is an effect of ambient light getting into the diode.  To check if it is oplev light I should (a) just look, and (b) try to lock the PRMI without the ITMX oplev laser being on to see if there is a difference in the POPDC signal.

Anyhow, under the assumption that the POP22 signal level is correct, I tuned up the PRCL ASC a little bit.  These changes are now in the carm_cm_up script, and the carm_cm_down script resets things.  Before the PRC is locked, I have FM1 and FM7 (the basic servo shape and a 40Hz lowpass) on, the gain set to zero, and the input off.  After lock is acquired, the input is turned on, and the gain ramps from 0 -> 10 in 3 seconds.  Then FM2 and FM6 (boosts at 1 and 3Hz) are engaged.

In the plot below, the dark blue and red curves were taken when there was no angular control on the PRC.  Pink was taken last week with the old QPD yaw ASC on.  Light blue is today's version of the in-loop performance of the POP22 yaw ASC loop.  I didn't save the trace unfortunately, but the DC QPD saw out-of-loop improvement between about 0.8Hz - 4 Hz. 

Also, has anything happened with the LSC rack in the last few weeks that might be causing lots of 60Hz noise? I saw these large lines last week, but I don't think I remember them from the past.

After I got the PRCL ASC working, I tried several iterations of locking.  ETMX is still being annoying, although the last hour or so have been okay.  CARM keeps getting rung up right around the transition to the sqrtInv error signal.  Since CARM and DARM are kind of entangled, it took me a few iterations to figure out that it was CARM that is ringing up, and not DARM.  I'm a little worried about the phase loss from the 1kHz lowpass that we turn on just before the transition to sqrtInv.  I want to keep the lowpass off until after we have transitioned DARM also over to DC transmission.  I tried once, but I lost lock before starting the CARM transition.  Anyhow, the ETM alignment issue is annoying.

Also, Jamie, Q, Diego and I were discussing last Friday, but none of us elogged, that we think there might be something wrong with one of the Martian network switches.  I'll start a separate thread about that right now, but it slows things down when you can't trust EPICS channels to be current, and I (without evidence) am a little worried that this might also affect the fast signals.

[Evan, Jenne, Jamie]

We used the green laser pointer technique to adjust the POP steering mirrors behind PR2 to get the POP backward beam out onto the table (rather, the mirrors were adjusted so that the green laser pointer, mounted on the POX table, was co-aligned with the beam between PR2 and PR3).

We were unable (why? I feel like it wasn't so hard last time) to see the POX beam, with a camera pointed at an IR card.  We ended up just waving a lens-free CCD camera around on the POX table where we expected POX to be, found the beam, and decided that if the beam was getting to the table, that was good enough.

We then waved the camera around on the POY table, and found the POY beam on the table.  We also moved ITMY up and down in pitch, and saw that the POY beam was moving, so we were satisfied that we had the correct beam.  We should go back and do this same check with POX, although I'm pretty sure that we already have the correct beam.  But checking is good.

We confirmed that IPPOS was coming out of the chambers.  I didn't end up touching any in-vac mirrors for IPPOS, since they all looked centered, and the beam on the table was already centered on the steering mirror on the out-of-vac table.

We got IPANG out of the chamber to the ETMY table.  IPANG has, after the pickoff window, an adjustable mirror, and then a fixed mirror on the BS table.  The beam was very close to the edge, in yaw, on that fixed mirror.  Jamie unclamped it and moved it so the beam was centered, then twisted it until I got beam back down at the end, centered on the first steering mirror down there.  Then Evan and I got the beam centered on the other steering mirror on the in-vac ETMY table, and got the mirror to ~the center of the first out-of-vac steering mirror.  Then Evan adjusted the other steering optics so the beam was hitting the QPD.

We then got the real REFL beam out of the chambers.  I still don't know what that ghost/fake beam is.  Anyhow, we moved PRM around, and saw that the real REFL beam moves, while the fake one doesn't.  We adjusted the adjustable REFL steering mirror in-vac such that the real REFL beam came out to the table.  Once on the AP table, we moved the PRM around again, just to be doubly/triply sure that we had the correct beam.  We put a beam splitter (found on the SP table) after the lens in the REFL path on the AP table, and put the camera on the reflected side of that BS.  This is because, like the AS port, the beam is too dim at the normal camera spot (which for REFL is the transmission through a Y1 mirror).

Jamie has centered IPPOS and IPPANG QPDs, so we should look at the weekend trend come Monday, to see what things look like, and how they drift, if at all.

On Monday, we should:

* Check the alignment, and the centering of beams on all mirrors one last time

* Remove all apertures from suspended optics (I think BS and PRM may be the only two that have them at this time)

* Check oplev paths for all mirrors

* Check all pickoffs / beams that need to come out of the vacuum

* Start putting on doors

  That's good, but I request two things:

1) Check that the REFL beam is coming from the HR surface and not the AR surface. The real REFL beam should have as much power as the Faraday output. And where does the AR surface reflection go?

2) Use frame grabber to get as many images of the spot positions on the mirrors as is reasonable. Don't endanger bumping the tables again, but take what images can be gotten by remote camera views.

I have re-implemented POP110.  The cable coming from the AS110 diode is disconnected, labeled, and sitting in the cable tray next to the LSC rack. 

Now the POP diode path is:

Thorlabs 10CF ----many meters of heliax cable-----> Bias Tee ------> RF amplifier ------> Splitter ------> Bandpass 21.7MHz --------> POP22 demod board

                                                                                                                   |                                                                                    |

                                                                                                                   |                                                                                    |

                                                                                                                   V                                                                                  V

                                                                                                            POP DC                                                                        High pass 100MHz

                                                                                                                                                                                                        |

                                                                                                                                                                                                        |

                                                                                                                                                                                                       V

                                                                                                                                                                                              Lowpass 150MHz

                                                                                                                                                                                                       |

                                                                                                                                                                                                       |

                                                                                                                                                                                                      V

                                                                                                                                                                                        POP110 demod board

We've seen this before, but we need to figure out why POP22 decreases with decreased CARM offset.  If it's just a demod phase issue, we can perhaps track this by changing the demod phase as we go, but if we are actually losing control of the PRMI, that is something that we need to look into.

In other news, nice work Q!

I had a look at the POP110 signal, with the PRMI flashing.

1) The LSCoffset script does not zero any more POP22_I_ERR offset. I did it by hand

2) The gain of POP22 is changed a lot, as well as the sign: now sidebands are resonant when POP22_I is negative

3) POP110 seems to deliver good signals. The plot attached shows that when we cross the sideband resonance, there is a clear splitting of the peak. If we rely on the simulations I posted in entry 8401, the full width at half height of the POP_22 peak is of the order of 5 nm. Using this as a calibration, we find a splitting of the order of 7 nm, which is not far from the simulated one (5 nm)

Somehow the POP22 and POP110 demod phases weren't correct anymore.  I guess Den saw this after he changed the setup for the REFL165 PD at the LSC rack, but didn't elog it. 

I went out to the LSC rack, and found that the power supply that is supplying the amplifiers for both POP22/110 and REFL165 was set to ~16V each channel.  I put it back to 15V for each channel.  I don't know what Den intended for the 165 amplifier (more volts is more gain), but the POP22/110 amplifier usually runs with 15V. 

I also reset the POP22 and POP110 demod phases.  Since I'm not able to lock PRMI on sideband this morning (why?!?!), I locked on the carrier, and moved the phases around until POP22 and POP110 were both maximally negative.  The phases are/were:

This is a ~60 degree change for both PDs. 

I am not sure if Den ever checked the demod phase of REFL165 after he put in the new SMA cable (there's no mention of it in the elog!), so I'm going to check that to see if it helps get PRMI locking back.  I know that Den had also been using REFL11 for PRMI locking, but the parameters he used for that aren't in the log either.

On Friday we modified the POP22 set up: now the PD output goes to a bias tee. The DC output goes to the ADC board, while the RF output goes to an amplifier (Mini-circuits ZFL-1000LN+), to a band pass filter at 21.4 MHz and then to the ADC

The POP beam coming out of the vacuum chamber is split by a 50/50 BS and half is diverted to the POP22/POP110/POPDC photodiode (Thorlabs PDA10CF) and the other half goes to the POP QPD. This optical layout is still pretty accurate. I looked at the data of the POPDC and POP QPD SUM channels while the dither alignment was running, to see if I could figure out what's up with the weird correlated dip in REFLDC and POPDC. While the POPDC channel shows some degradation as the REFLDC level goes down (=alignment gets better), the QPD sum channel shows the expected light level increase. So it could yet be some weird clipping somewhere in the beampath - perhaps at the 50/50 BS? I will lock the PRMI (no arms) and check...

[Steve / Kiwamu]

Yesterday I and Kiwamu connected two amplifiers (mini-circuit, ZFL-1000LNB+) for POP22/110. Dataviewer can see some signals. I'll test the signal levels and freq components before the rack just in case. [Kiwamu, Keiko]

Adding two amplifiers on POP22/110, I checked the signals going to the dmod board of 22 and 110.

The signal flows: Photodetector of POP --> Amp1 --> Amp2 --> RF splotter --> bandpass filter for 22MHz / 110MHz --> 22MHz / 110MHz demod board.

 Here is the picture of RF spectrum just after the bandpass filter of 22MHz going to the 22MHz demod board. The signal peak at 22MHz is about -40dBm. There is a structure slightly lower than 22MHz.

The below is the RF spectrum for 110MHz branch. The peak at 110MHz is about -15dBm. The peak on the left of 110MHz is 66MHz peak.

The full characterization of POP55 is found in the PDF.

Resonance at 54.49MHz
Q of 2.5, transimpedance 241Ohm
shotnoise intercept current = 4.2mA (i.e. current noise of 37pA/rtHz)

Notch at 11.23MHz
Q of 2.4, transimpedance 6.2 Ohm

Notch at 110.80MHz
Q of 53.8, transimpedance 13.03 Ohm

The DC port of the Bias-Tee is routed to (a modified version of) the iLIGO whitening board. This has the well-known problem of the protection diodes of the LT1125 quad-op-amp lowering the (ideally infinite) input impedance of the first gain stage (+24 dB). To be sure as to how much signal we can put into this port (in anticipation of trying some variable finesse PRFPMI locking but also for general book-keeping), I tested the usable input range by driving a triangle wave at ~3 Hz and changing the amplitude of the signal until we observed saturation. We found that we could drive a 10 Vpp signal at which point there was evidence of some clipping (it was asymmetric, the top end of the signal was getting clipped at +14,000 cts while the bottom end still looked like a triangle wave at -16,000 counts). Anyway we probably don't want to exceed +/- 10,000 counts on this channel. This is consistent with Hartmut's statement of having +/- 4V of usable range (although the counts he mentions are twice what I saw yesterday).

Other discussion points between Rana, Koji and Gautam:

1. Conside putting an in-vacuum (Silicon ?) QPD for the PRC angular motion sensing
   • In-vacuum will yield lower acoustic noise coupling
   • Bring the photocurrent out and do the transimpedance amplification in air 
   • Use a large area QPD so as to be more tolerant to alignment drifts without having to introduce picomotors (but how much does the POP spot actually drift and is this feasible?)
2. Is there some better telescope configuration for the existing in-air QPD?
   • What is the correct Gouy-phase for this to be able to best sense the PRC cavity axis motion?

POP_SM4

I tried out this stack today and found some change of plans.

• The attachment in elog 40m/16640 says to use 1/4-20 silver coated non-vented screws for joining BA2V to PLS-T238, however PLS-T238's bottom hole is a blind hole and is not vented. So we actually required <1 in long silver plated vented 1/4-20 cap screw for this purpose. Jordan and I were only able to find the correct length silver plated screw but it is not vented. So we decided to make a venting hole on the post from the side.
• I had to use a 0.14" spacer as washer between PLS-T238 and BA1V. The 1" post shim that Koji got for this purpose had too small a hole in the center to let the 8-32 screw pass (I know, weird). but I think we had 3 spare 0.14" ad we bought 10 when we required 7, so we should be good.
• The attachment in elog 40m/16640 also says to use 8-32 silver coated vented setscrew for joining TR-1.5 to LMR1V mount. I found one vented silver coated set screw nearby in the clean room but it turned out to be too long. Worse, I overtightened the setscrew when trying this connection which damaged the inner threads of one of the LMR1V. So we need to buy one more LMR1V (maybe an additional spare too) for future installation of OMC1R1/OMC2R1.
  • Then Jordan and I searched for a smaller silver coated and vented 8-32 setscrew but didn't find any. Jordan also noted that LMR1V is an aluminium mount and we should not use silver coated setscrew with it. Since the TR-1.5 mount is ok to be sacrificed if a cold weld happens, we'll just use an uncoated SS 8-32 setscrew to join TR-1.5 and LMR1V. We could not such vented setscrews, but we have plenty of non-vented once. So Jordan is going to make a venthole in TR1.5 top end as well. LMR1V already has a vent hole on its side.

tl,dr; Jordan is preparing PLS-T238 and TR-1.5 with venting holes and C&B and they would be ready by tomorrow. I have collected all other parts for assembly, still looking for the mirror but I know other lab members know where it is, so no big issue there.

POP_SM5

The assemly of this mirror is complete. A slight change here as well, we were supposed to use the former POYM1 (Y1-2037-0) mirror for POP_SM5 but I could not find it. It was stored on the right most edge of the table (see 40m/16450), but it is not there anymore. I found another undocumented mirror on the flow bench on the left edge marked (2010 July: Y1-LW1-2037-UV-0-AR) which means this mirror has a wedge of 1 degree and an AR coating as well. We do not need or care about the wedge or AR coating, so we can use this mirror for POP_SM5. Please let me know if someone was saving this mirror for some other purpose.

I'll finish assembly of POP_SM4 tomorrow and install them in ITMX chamber and resurrect POP path.

 I put POX back to it's place with markers. The pd was removed from it's base so it is for sure misaligned.

I removed POX rfpd to see how it is mounted on its base. It is here on the work bench just in case someone wants to use it the IFO over the week end.

Today I aligned the beam to PD3 (POX) since Steve had moved it.

The DC power read 1.3mV when the beam was on the PD.

Summary:

Since we are using the POX and POY photodiodes as out-of-loop sensors for measuring the ALS noise, I decided to double-check their calibrations. I determined the following numbers (for the single arm lock):

POX_I [with 30dB whitening gain]: (8 +/- 1)e-13 m/ct

POY_I [with 18dB whitening gain]: (0.9 +/- 0.1)e-13 m/ct

With this calibration, I measured the in-loop spectra of the XARM and YARM error-points when they are locked - they line up well, see Attachment #1. Note that these numbers are close to what we determined some time ago using the same method (I drove the ITMs then, but yesterday I drove the ETMs, so maybe the more accurate measure of uncertainty is the difference between the two measurements).

Attachment #2 shows the out-of-loop spectra sensed by these photodiodes with this calibration applied, when the arms are under control using ALS beat frequencies as the error signals, and controlled in the CARM/DARM basis. Need to think about why there is such a difference between the two signals.

Methodology:

The procedure used was the same as that outlined here.

• I started by calibrating the AS55_Q output with the free-swinging Michelson.
• Next, I lock the Michelson and calibrate the BS and ITM actuators using the newly calibrated AS55_Q.
• Next, I calibrate the ETM actuator gains by measuring the ratio of response in POX/POY of driving the (unknown) ETMs and the (known) ITMs.
• Finally, I calibrate the POX/POY photodiodes by driving the ETMs by a known amount of meters (at ~310 Hz where the loop gain is negligible because of the sensing matrix measurement notches).

Summary of DC actuator gains:

The quoted values of the DC gain are for counts seen at the output of the LSC filter bank. I've attempted to show that once we account for the different series resistance and some extra gains between the output of the LSC filter bank and the actual coil, things are fairly consistent.

Some remarks:

• I do not understand why we need an extra 12dB of whitening gain on the POX channel to get similar PDH fringe height as the POY channel. The light level on these photodiodes is the same, and the RF transimpedances at 11 MHz are also close according to the wiki (3kohm for POX, 2kohm for POY).
• At night-time, the ALS noise did indeed get reduced compared to what I measured earlier in the evening.
• Even assuming 50% error in the calibration factors, it's hard to explain the swing of TRX/TRY when the CARM offset is brought to zero.
• The increase in (admittedly in-loop) CARM noise as the offset is reduced still seems to me to be correlated with the buildup of IR power in the arm cavities.

...maybe the opto-mechanical CARM plant is changing as a function of the CARM offset...

Single arm locking using POX and POY has been restored. After running the dither alignment servos, the TRX/TRY levels are ~0.7. This is consistent with the IMC transmission being ~11000 counts with the AOM 1st order diffracted beam (c.f. 15000 counts with the undiffracted beam).

{Yehonathan, Paco}

BS, ITMX and ETMX were aligned to get flashing in the X arm.

I aligned the POX beam on the ITMX table using a mixture of the old POP and POX optics. The beam was stirred to the POX11 RFPD. We measure the DC power using a scope but we see nothing. We went and saw that the POX11 cable was not connected to RF rack so we connected it along with some other RFPD cables.

We return but there is still no DC. We ndscope C1:LSC-POX11_I_ERR_DQ C1:LSC-POX11_Q_ERR_DQ and maximize the signal (attachment). The readout is very weak though. It should be as strong as POY which we already observed to have good SNR.

We also noticed that the one of the beam dumps for the POX RFPD is not glued and easily falls down.

[Paco, Anchal]

We found that one of the Y1-1037-45P marked mirror that we used was actually curved. So we removed it and used a different Y1-1037-45P mirror, adjusted the position of the lens and got the beam to land on POX11 RFPD successfully.

Then in control room, we maximized the POX11_I_ERR PDH signal amplitude by changing C1:LSC-POX11_PHASE_R to 42.95 from -67.7. We kept the C1:LSC-POX11_PHASE_D same at 90. We were getting +/- 200 PDH signal on POX_I_ERR.

Then in our attempt to lock the XARM, when we ran the "Restore XARM (POX)" script, YARM locked!

We are not sure why the YARM locked, we might have gotten lucky today. So we ran ASS on YARM and got the transmission (TRY_OUT) stable at 1. The lock is very robust and retrievable.

Coming back to XARM, we realized that the transmission photodiode used for XARM was the low-gain QPD instead of the thorlabs high gain photodiode. The high-gain photodiode was outputing large negative counts for some reason. We went to the Xend to investigate and found that the high gain photodiode was disconnected for some reason. Does anyone know/remember why we disconnected this photodiode?

We connected the photodiode back and it seems to work normally. We changed the photodiode selection back to high gain photodiode for TRX and on 40 dB attenuation, we see flashing between 1.4 to 1.6. However, we were unable to lock the XARM. We tried changing the gain of the loop, played a little bit with the trigger levels etc but couldn't get it to lock. Next shift team, please try to lock XARM.

[Anchal, Paco]

We investigated the low power issue with POX11 photodiode.

• We used a power meter to confirm that above 12 uW of power is reaching the ITMX oplev table.
• But the power reaching the photodiode was only 3 uW, because the 2 steering mirrors used were discarding half of the light. These mirrors were taken from former POP setup and are probably BS or meant for different incidence angle/polarization.
• We used flashlight to test that the photodiode gives a response, so it is not dead.
• We also put in a db15 breakout board in line to the PD and confirmed that power input is correct, temperature is nominal, enable is ON, and DC out is responsive to flashlight.
• So we decided to redo the path with Y1-45P 1inch mirrors. I found two such mirrors in the lab.
• When setting up the path again, I realized that the beam shape is not even. I took a photo of the beam on the card (see attachment 1) and indeed the POX beam that is coming to the table is half clipped.
• So tomorrow, we'll open the chamber and find out where this is happening. For now, I've setup a nominal path to the POX11 photodiode, but we'll tune it after we get a clear POX beam on the table.

[Paco, Anchal, Yuta]

We opened the BSC and ITMX chamber in the morning (Friday) to investigate POX11 beam clipping. We immediately found that the POX11 beam was clipping by the recently installed cable posts, so luckily no major realingment had to be done after reinstalling the cable post in a better location.

Because we had the BSC open, we decided to steer the AS1 mirror to align the AS path from ITMY all the way to the vertex chamber.  Relatively small AS1 offsets (of ~ 2000 counts each) were added on PIT / YAW to center the beam on ASL (there is slight clipping along PIT, potentially because of the AS2 aperture. We then opened the vertex chamber and located the AS beam with relative ease. We decided to work on this chamber, since major changes propagate heavily downstream (simply changing the IMC pointing).

Anchal removed old optics from the vertex chamber and we installed the steering pair of mirrors for AS path. This changed the balance of the vertex table by a lot. By using the MC REFL camera beam spot we managed to coarsely balance the counterweights and recover the nominal IMC injection pointing. Simply reenabling the IMC autolocker gave us high transmission (~ 970 counts out of the typical 1200 these days).

The final IMC alignment was done by Anchal with delicate PIT motion on the input injection IMC miror to maximize the transmission (to our satisfaction, Anchal's motion was fine enough to keep the IMC locked). The end result was quite satisfying, as we recovered ~ 1200 counts of MC transmission.

Finally, we looked at the arm cavity transmission to see if we were lucky enough to see flashing. After not seeing it, we adjusted TT1 / TT2 to correct for any MMTT1 pitch adjustment needed after the vertex table rebalancing. Suprisingly, we didn't take too long and recovered the nominal arm cavity pointing after a little adjustment. We stopped here, but now the vertex table layout is final, and AS beam still needs to be aligned to the vertex in-air table.

I measured the RF transimpedance of the POX photodiode by measuring the optical transfer function with the AM laser and by measuring the shot noise with a light bulb. The plots of these measurements are at http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Electronics/POX.

I measured the noise of the photodiode at 11 MHz for different light intensities using an Agilent 4395a. The noise of a 50 ohm resistor as measured by this spectrum analyzer is 10.6 nV/rtHz. I fit this noise data to the shot noise formula to find the RF transimpedance at 11 MHz to be (2.42 ± 0.08) kΩ. The RF transimpedance at 11 MHz as measured by the transfer function is 6.4 kΩ.