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ID Date Author Type Category Subject
12401   Thu Aug 11 11:56:40 2016 gautamUpdateSUSETMY re-suspended
 Quote: How much pitch bias do you need in order to correct this pitch misalignment? That may give you the idea how bad this misalignment is.

I needed to move the pitch slider on the IFO align screen to -2.10 (V?) from 0 to get the HeNe spot to the center of the iris. The slider runs from -10V to 10V, so this is something like 10% of its range. I am not sure if it means anything, but the last saved backup value of this pitch slider was -3.70. Of course, application of the bias will affect all the coils, and when the optic is pitch balanced, the lower magnets are a little too far out and the upper magnets are a little too far in (see Attachment #1), as we expect for a downward pitch misalignment to be corrected. I suppose we can iteratively play with the coil positions and the bias such that the coils are centered and we are well balanced (maybe this explains the old value of -3.70).

I also checked that the side magnet can completely occlude its PD. With the damping on, by pushing the coil all the way in, the output of the side PD went down to 0.

12407   Sat Aug 13 18:25:22 2016 gautamUpdateCOCRC folding mirrors - Numerical review

This elog is meant to summarize my numerical simulations for looking into the effects of curvature on the RC mirrors. I've tried to go through my reasoning (which may or may not be correct) and once this gets a bit more refined, I will put all of this into a technical note.

Motivation:

• Both the G&H (PR2, SR2) and Laseroptik (PR3 SR3) are convex on the HR side with RoCs of approximately -600m and -700m (though as stated in the linked elog, I'm not actually sure if there are measurements of this number) EDIT AUG15: There are measurements for the Laseroptik mirrors here
GV April 8 2017: This elog by Jenne suggests that the installed PR2 has an RoC of approximately -700m. Koji has uploaded the phase map data for the RC TT mirrors to
/users/public_html/40m_phasemap/40m_TT and
/users/public_html/40m_phasemap/40m_TT2. The G&H mirror data seems to be in the former folder, and it looks like there are two mirrors, one with RoC of ~ -700m and the other with RoC of ~ -500m. Does this mean PR2 has RoC -700m and SR2 has RoC -500m?
• As a result, both the PRC and SRC were close to instability
• By flipping the folding mirrors, the instability has been mitigated, but at the expense of the non-ideal situation where the AR coated side and the substrate are now inside the recycling cavity
• We would like to order some new folding mirrors. In order to avoid receiving convex mirrors from the vendor, we want to specify a concave curvature for the HR side
• The aim of this investigation is to look at how concave we should make these mirrors, because although the cavity stability improves with concavity of the HR side, possible disadvantages of having too convex mirrors are:
• ​Mode-mismatch between the recycling cavities and the arms
• Astigmatism

The study:

• I've built a Finesse model for the 40m, which has been used for all the numerical studies quoted here
• In constructing this Finesse model, I've used the following sources to specify various paramaters:
• ​RoCs, R, T and physical dimensions of 4 test-masses, PRM, SRM and BS: Core optics wiki page
• Losses - arm losses from Yutaro's measurements in elog11857 and elog11818 (distributed equally between ITM and ETM). For other optics, a generic value of 25ppm was used
• "Ideal" lengths for our current modulation frequency were used for the various cavities (37.795m for the arms, 6.753m for PRC, 5.399 for SRC)
• The folding mirrors (PR2, PR3, SR2, SR3) are initialized as flat in the model
• I performed some low-level checks (e.g. arm linewidth, PRC FSR etc) to check that the model was sensible
• I then proceeded to investigate the effects of curvature on the folding mirrors. Specifically, I investigated the following:
• What is the mode mismatch between the recycling cavity mode and the arm as a function of the RoC of the folding mirror?
• What is the effect of the RoC of the folding mirrors on the round-trip gouy phase accumulated (and hence the transverse mode spacing) in the recycling cavities?
• For now, the parameter space explored is from 300m concave to 1000m concave. An RoC of 1km for a 2" optic corresponds to a sag of ~0.3 microns. I will explore the 1km-10km concave space and update the results shortly

Results:

• Attachments #1 and #2 show the mode mismatch between the recycling cavity and the arm for various curvatures. The colorbars have been normalized to span the same range in all the plots
• For both the PRC and the SRC, if we have folding mirrors with an RoC of 1000m concave, we will have a mode mismatch of 2-3%. The number gets worse the more convex the mirror
• Attachments #3 and #4 show the one-way accumulated Gouy phase. Here, I have varied the curvature of the folding mirrors along a specific axis at a time (i.e. I've assumed that the folding mirrors are identical). I've also added the transverse mode spacing as a second y-axis. I have yet to check how these numbers compare with the linewidth of the 00-mode for the various fields, but for 1km concave folding mirrors, the TMS is in the region of 2MHz

To do:

• I will extend the range of RoCs explored to 10km concave and post results - but I will have to check with EricG to make sure that it is feasible for us to specify curvatures in this range
• I was trying to use the RT gouy phase as calcluated by my Finesse simulations to plug into some analytical expressions to try and generate plots like this for various RoCs of the folding mirrors, but if the TMS calculations suffice, I will abandon these efforts
• What are the other specifications we need to worry about before placing an order? Some thoughts from Rana's earlier elog:
• The coatings need to be dichroic to allow extraction of the green beam (but only PR3/SR3 is currently dichroic?)
• Wedge angle on the AR side?
• Are there any other obvious sanity checks I should carry out?

12411   Mon Aug 15 18:28:15 2016 gautamUpdateSUSAir-bake preparation

I assume that we are prepared to live with the pitch bias situation of ETMY (i.e. we can achieve a configuration in which there is some pitch bias to the coils, and the OSEMs are inserted such that the PD outputs are half their maximum value). Or at least that we don't want to go through the whole standoff-regluing procedure for ETMY as well.

So today I took the optic out, and began to make some preparations for the air bake.

• Both optics are now sitting in their respective metal donuts.
• How do we want to bake the optics? Bob has said he has prepared the oven for this bake, and that he has configured the temperature controller to a setpoint of 34C, and a ramp time of 2 hours to reach that temperature from lab temperature (we should check this before putting the optics in there with our independent temperature sensor - also, he is away for the week now so we can't get his input on any of these). But what about the actual logistics of how the optics are going to be housed? Specifically:
• Do we want the donut to sit on some sort of tray? Presumably it is not ideal to have the HR surface in close proximity to the oven floor?
• Does the oven need any special cleaning?
• Do we cover the donut+optic setup with a glass jar? If we do, any particles we eject off the optic can't escape the confines of the bowl, and if we don't, detritus from elsewhere may settle on the optic?
• How long do we want this bake to last? 24hours? 48 hours? Bob didn't have an answer when I asked him earlier in the afternoon...
• I also removed the suspension block from the top of the towers of both ETMX and ETMY, so that Steve could work on sanding them before we acetone-wipe and bake the towers themselves.
• It was very apparent that the weights of the two pieces were largely different (ETMY suspension block ~350g, ETMX suspension block ~960g), even though they have the same physical dimensions.
• Investigation into why this was yielded nothing conclusive. But Steve and I think that the ETMY suspension block is made out of Aluminum rather than SS, which would explain why the wire grooves seem deeper in the ETMY piece than the ETMX piece. It is worth noting that the specification calls for SS and not aluminum. But the top piece of the ETMY suspension (and indeed the old ETMX suspension) looks different from the specification, in that they don't have tapped holes for the secondary wire clamps (see Attachment #1).
• I'm not sure if this is important, but it is worth noting. Steve and I also checked the remaining suspension towers. We think that ITMY, BS, SRM and PRM have the correct (to specification) suspension block. We couldn't get a look at ITMX and didn't want to take the door off. So ETMY (and possibly ITMX) will be the only suspension(s?) with a different suspension block.
• Steve's sanding efforts did not go ideally.
• He was successful in removing the wire grooves.
• But the sharp edge which is supposed to clamp the wire seems to have been rounded a little bit (see Attachment #1).
• Overall, the section that we was sanded looks lower (i.e. its like we've dug a small channel into the plane of the suspension block)
• Given that we suspect the ETMY suspension block is Aluminum, it is likely that attempting to sand it will yield an even deeper channel.
• Do we want to bake the suspension towers in the large baking oven? Presumably we don't want to bake the optics with anything else. But does the large oven need any special cleaning before we stick the towers in there?
• ETMY has some acetone marks on it. I will try and have this removed by drag wiping with more acetone and isopropanol prior to the bake tomorrow. Anyways we will first-contact clean the HR (and AR) sides after the bake before installing the optic.

In summary, the questions that remain (to me) are:

1. Are we okay using an Al suspension block?
2. How perfectly do we want wire grooves from prior suspensions removed? It looks like sanding doesn't work well, do we want to consider sending this into the shop?
3. Baking logistics, as described above.

I think we can start the baking of the optics tomorrow. The timeline for the suspension towers is unclear, depends on how we want to deal with the sanding dilemma.

12413   Tue Aug 16 11:51:43 2016 gautamUpdateCOCRC folding mirrors - Numerical review

Summary of roundtable meeting yesterday between EricG, EricQ, Koji and Gautam:

We identified two possible courses of action.

1. Flip the G&H mirror (PR2/SR2) back such that the (convex) HR face is the right way round. We want to investigate what are the requirements on a new PR3/SR3 optic that will guarantee cavity stability and also give good mode matching.
2. Order two new sets of mirrors (i.e. replace all 4 folding mirrors). In this case, we want to spec a flat (how flat is reasonable to specify? EricG will update us) PR3/SR3, and design a PR2/SR2 with some concavity that will guarantee cavity stability in the event PR3/SR3 deviates from flatness (but still within what we spec). The choice to make PR3 as close to flat as possible is because the angle of incidence in our arrangement means that any curvature on PR3 dominates astigmatism.

I have done some calculations to evaluate the first alternative.

• Based on yesterday's preliminary discussion, we felt it is not reasonable to spec mirrors with RoC > 4km (sag of ~80nm). So I restrict my analyses to the range 300m-4km
• Koji has a measurement of the phase maps for the G&H mirrors. The measured curvature is ~-500m. In my simulations, I've tried to allow for error in this measurement, so I look at the range -450m to -700m for the G&H mirror.
• The Gouy phase analysis suggests we should look for an RoC of +500m (concave) for the new PR3/SR3 to have a TMS of ~1.5 MHz. Anything flatter (but still concave) means the TMS gets smaller.
• The mode-matching in this region also looks pretty good, between 98% and 99%
• I will post results of the analysis for the second alternative here for comparison

Something else that came up in yesterdays meeting was if we should go in for 1" optics rather than 2", seeing as the beam spot is only ~3mm on these. It is not clear what (if any) advantages this will offer us (indeed, for the same RoC, the sag is smaller for a 1" optic than a 2").

Attachments:

Attachment #1: Mode-matching maps between PRX and Xarm cavities, PRY and Yarm cavities with some contours overlaid.

Attachment #2: Mode-matching maps between SRX and Xarm cavities, SRY and Yarm cavities with some contours overlaid.

Attachment #3: Gouy phase calculations for the PRC

Attachment #3: Gouy phase calculations for the SRC

12414   Tue Aug 16 16:38:00 2016 gautamUpdateCOCRC folding mirrors - Numerical review

Here are the results for case 2: (flat PR3/SR3, for purpose of simulation, I've used a concave mirror with RoC in the range 5-15km, and concave PR2/SR2 - I've looked at the RoC range 300m-4km).

• This is where we order two new sets of mirrors, one for use as PR2/SR2, and the other for use as PR3/SR3.
• RoC of flat PR3/SR3 in simulation explored in the range 5km-15km (concave)
• RoC of concave PR2/SR2 in simulation explored in the range 300m-4km (concave)

Attachment #1: Mode matching between PRC cavities and arm cavities with some contour plots

Attachment #2: Mode matching between SRC cavities and arm cavities with some contour plots

Attachment #3: Gouy phase and TMS for the PRC. I've plotted two sets of curves, one for a PR3 with RoC 5km, and the other for a PR3 with RoC 15km

Attachment #4: Gouy phase and TMS for the SRC. Two sets of curves plotted, as above.

Hopefully EricG will have some information with regards to what is practical to spec at tomorrow's meeting.

EDIT: Added 9pm, 16 Aug 2016

A useful number to have is the designed one-way Gouy phase and TMS for the various cavities. To calculate these, I assume flat folding mirrors, and that the PRM has an RoC of 115.5m, SRM has an RoC of 148m (numbers taken from the wiki). The results may be summarized as:

Cavity One-way Gouy phase [rad]           TMS [MHz]
PRX 0.244 1.730
PRY 0.243 1.716
SRX 0.197 1.743
SRY 0.194 1.717

So, there are regions in parameter space for both options (i.e. keep current G&H mirrors, or order two new sets of folding mirrors) that get us close to the design numbers...

12415   Tue Aug 16 21:54:27 2016 gautamUpdateSUSAir-bake - IN PROGRESS

I put in both ETMX and ETMY into the air-bake oven at approximately 8.45pm tonight. They can be removed at 8.45am tomorrow morning.

• Given that we had previously melted a thermocouple in this oven, and there have been no high temperature bakes in it since, we ran the oven at 100C for about 3 hours in the afternoon
• After that, I left the oven door open for an hour for the interior to return to room temperature
• I then re-connected the controller (which doesn't seem very precise, it pulses the AC power to the oven in order to control the temperature), and dialled the oven back down to heating level 4, which is what Bob had it set at. I then waited for a couple of hours for the oven to reach ~34C
• Before putting the optics in, I gave the inside of the oven a quick wipe with a clean wipe, and palced a layer of Al foil on the bottom of the oven
• The optics are sitting on their donuts (see Attachment #1) - the copper wire elevates the optic+donut slightly and provides a path for air flow
• ETMY was drag wiped with acetone+isopropanol prior to baking (to remove acetone stains from soaking to remove epoxy residue
• We will of course be cleaning the optics with first contact prior to re-installation in the vacuum chambers
• I am not sure what the extra cylindrical piece in there is, but Bob advised me to leave it in there so that's what I did
• I've observed the temperature over ~2hours since I first put it in, and the oven/controller isn't going bonkers, so I'm trusting the controller and leaving for the night
12417   Wed Aug 17 14:37:36 2016 gautamUpdateCOCRC folding mirrors - Numerical review
Quote:

Cavity One-way Gouy phase [rad]           TMS [MHz]
PRX 0.244 1.730
PRY 0.243 1.716
SRX 0.197 1.743
SRY 0.194 1.717

So, there are regions in parameter space for both options (i.e. keep current G&H mirrors, or order two new sets of folding mirrors) that get us close to the design numbers...

Keeping these design numbers in mind, here are a few possible scenarios. The "designed" TMS numbers from my previous elog are above for quick reference.

Case 1: Keep existing G&H mirror, flip it back the right way, and order new PR3/SR3.

• Spec PR3 to be concave with RoC 600 +/- 50m
• This means the TMS in the PRC is in the range 1.4 MHz - 1.6 MHz [see this plot]
• The mode matching efficiency for the PRC is > 98.5% [see this plot]
• The TMS in the SRC is in the range 1.6 MHz - 1.8 MHz [see this plot]
• Mode matching efficiency for SRC is > 98.5% [see this plot]
• PRG between 34-38, depending on uncertainty in measurement of RoC of existing G&H mirror [see Attachment #1, added Nov 11 2016]

Case 2: Order two new sets of folding mirrors

• Spec PR3/SR3 to be flat - for purposes of simulation, let's make it concave with RoC 10 +/- 5 km
• Spec PR2/SR2 to be concave with RoC 1500 +/- 500m
• The TMS in the PRC is between 1.7 MHz and 1.85 MHz [see this plot]
• Mode matching efficiency is >98.5% in the PRC [see this plot]
• TMS in the SRC is between 1.7 MHz and 2 MHz
• Mode matching efficiency >99.0% in the SRC

At first glance, it looks like the tolerances are much larger for Case 2, but we also have to keep in mind that for such large RoCs in the km range, it may be impractical to specify as tight tolerances as in the 100s of metres range. So these are a set of numbers to keep in mind, that we can re-iterate once we hear back from vendors as to what they can do.

For consolidation purposes, here are the aLIGO requirements for the coatings on the RC folding mirrors: PR2, PR3, SR2, SR3

12420   Wed Aug 17 23:00:57 2016 gautamUpdateSUSAir-bake of towers

I just put in the following into the air bake oven for a 12 hour, 70C bake:

• ETMX and ETMY cages (with sanded suspension blocks loosely tightened for now, we will tighten them after the bake)
• 13 new wire clamps that were recently made by the shop
• 7 lengths of suspension wire (since the new wire is unlikely to arrive for another 2 weeks). This should be sufficient in case we overtighten the wire clamps a couple of times and the wire snaps.

I put these in at 10.30pm. So the oven will be turned off at 10.30am tomorrow morning. The oven temperature seems stable in the region 70-80 C (there is no temperature control except for the in built oven control, I just adjusted the dial till I found the oven remains at ~70C.

Tomorrow, we will look to put on first contact onto the ETMs, and then get about to re-suspending them.

12422   Thu Aug 18 14:14:20 2016 gautamUpdateSUSAir-bake of towers - finished

I took the two cages, wires and wire clamps out this morning, back into the cleanroom after their 12 hour 70C bake.

I've also applied first contact to the AR face of the optics. Steve is preparing a jig which will allow us to apply first contact on the HR side with the optic horizontal. The idea is to apply a large coating first, to clean the bulk of the HR surface, and peel it off before re-suspending the optic. Then we can paint on a smaller area, suspend the optic (and hope the pitch balancing is alright) before taking the whole assembly into the chamber where it will be peeled off.

Calum recommended that we buy a new ionizing gun + electrometer assembly (apparently our current set up is woefully obsolete) but I don't know if we can have these in time for the first contact peeling...

12424   Fri Aug 19 22:51:12 2016 gautamUpdateSUSETMs first-contacted

I've applied first contact to both the ETMs. They're now ready to be suspended. I've also cut up some lengths of the new wire and put them in the oven for a 12 hour 70C bake.

• For both ETMs, I first applied first contact to the bulk of the HR and AR surfaces (all the way out to the edge for the HR, for the AR as large an area as possible without getting too close to the magnets). Calum recommended pouring first contact onto the horizontal optic, but since I had no practise with this method, I opted not to try it out for the first time on our ETMs
• After allowing this to dry for 24 hours, I peeled this layer off. Visual inspection suggests that the whole film came off cleanly.
• I then applied first contact to a smaller area around the center of the optic for only the HR surface. This will only be peeled off once the suspended optic is back in the vacuum chamber. This way, we keep the HR face protected for as long as possible.
• Even though we applied F.C to both faces of the ITMs, I don't think its so important to keep a film on the AR side of the ETMs till we take it in. So I didnt re-coat the AR side with a smaller area of F.C. This way, if we want, we can do the OSEM assembly in the cleanroom without having to worry about peeling the F.C off with limited access to the rear of the optic.
• I also opted to bake some lengths of the newly arrived steel wire for suspension. Not sure how important/useful this bake will be.

Unless we want the AR surface to also have a small F.C coat until the optic is in the vacuum chamber, I think I will proceed with re-suspending the ETMs..

12426   Sun Aug 21 16:23:05 2016 gautamUpdateSUSETMX suspended
• ETMX has been successfully suspended
• I've used one of the new wire clamps, and also the new suspension wire
• Because the HR face has first contact, pitch balancing cannot be checked at this point. But since the pitch balance was checked after the standoff was glued, there is no reason to believe it would have changed
• Heights of the two scribe lines were checked with the microscope and verified to be at 5.5" above the tabletop. Also checked the position of the scribe line on the bottom of the optic to make sure the optic wasn't somehow rotated
• Checked that wire was in the groove in the standoff on both sides, and that the optic was freely hanging with no EQ stops engaged. I also verified that there are no obvious kinks/other funny features where the wire is in contact with the optic barrel below the standoffs.
• Wire clamps were tightened with the new torque wrench and 5 in. lb. (0.56 N m) of torque. Primary clamp was successfully tightened. However, the wire snapped between the primary and secondary clamps on one side. It is unclear to me how or why this happened. But since the primary wire clamp is the important one, I don't think it is worth re-suspending ETMX all over again
• I've left the cage on the flow bench for now, with EQ stops engaged. OSEM coils have yet to be inserted, but I suppose we want to do this in the vacuum chamber now to do the fine rotation to minimize the bounce mode in the OSEM signals
• I've prepared ETMY and its cage for suspension, will work on it tomorrow
12428   Mon Aug 22 13:06:11 2016 gautamUpdateSUSETMY suspended

Today morning, I suspended ETMY and made the same checks dscribed below. The clamping went smoothly, 5 in. lb. of torque seems sufficient, in the limited observation time, there has been no evidence of wire sag. Today afternoon, we will go about putting the OSEM coils in, setting their equilibrium points etc. This may need to be re-done once the optic is in the chamber and the first contact has come off, but at least we can coarsely place them in the relative convenience of the cleanroom.

GV EDIT 9.15pm 22 Aug: Eric had a look at both towers and pointed out that I had neglected to use washers on the wire stops. After consultation with Steve, I decided that it is not worth it to remove the clamp and re-suspend the optic - it is likely that the current suspension process will have caused new grooves in the suspension block, which will have to be removed, and the sanding process did not work so well last time. In any case, the net effect of this will be that the actual torque with which the clamp is tightened will be slightly different from 5 in. lb., but since there is no evidence that the clamp isn't tight enough / is too tight, I think it is okay to push ahead.

 Quote: ETMX has been successfully suspended I've used one of the new wire clamps, and also the new suspension wire  Because the HR face has first contact, pitch balancing cannot be checked at this point. But since the pitch balance was checked after the standoff was glued, there is no reason to believe it would have changed Heights of the two scribe lines were checked with the microscope and verified to be at 5.5" above the tabletop. Also checked the position of the scribe line on the bottom of the optic to make sure the optic wasn't somehow rotated Checked that wire was in the groove in the standoff on both sides, and that the optic was freely hanging with no EQ stops engaged. I also verified that there are no obvious kinks/other funny features where the wire is in contact with the optic barrel below the standoffs. Wire clamps were tightened with the new torque wrench and 5 in. lb. (0.56 N m) of torque. Primary clamp was successfully tightened. However, the wire snapped between the primary and secondary clamps on one side. It is unclear to me how or why this happened. But since the primary wire clamp is the important one, I don't think it is worth re-suspending ETMX all over again I've left the cage on the flow bench for now, with EQ stops engaged. OSEM coils have yet to be inserted, but I suppose we want to do this in the vacuum chamber now to do the fine rotation to minimize the bounce mode in the OSEM signals I've prepared ETMY and its cage for suspension, will work on it tomorrow

12430   Mon Aug 22 18:04:24 2016 gautamUpdateSUSETMY OSEMs inserted

[Johannes, gautam]

We worked on trying to insert the OSEMs in the optimal positions such that the coupling of the bounce mode into the OSEM sensor signals was minimised.

First, I gave the barrel of the optic a wipe with some optical tissue + acetone in order to remove what looked like some thin fibres of dried first contact. It may be that while I was applying the F.C., the HEPA air flow deposited these on the barrel. In any case, they came off easily enough. There is still a few specks of dust on various parts of the barrel, but it is likely that these can just be removed with the ionized air jet, which we can do after putting the optic in the chamber.

We then did the usual OSEM insertion till the magnets neutral position was such that the sensor output was ~50% of the fully open value (turned the HEPA off for the remainder of this work). I tweaked the bottom OSEM plate a little in order to center the magnets relative to the coil as best as possible. Once this was done, we attempted to look at spectra of the sensor outputs, with 0.05 Hz bandwidth - however, we were unable to identify any peak at 16.4 Hz, which is what a Jan 2015 measured value wiki page claims the bounce mode frequency is (although this was an in vacuum measurement). There were a couple of peaks at ~15.7 Hz and ~16.7 Hz, but I can't think of any reason why the bounce mode resonance should have changed so much - after all, this is ETMY for which no standoff regluing was done. The only difference is that there is some first contact + peek mesh on the HR face now, but I doubt this can modify the bounce resonance frequency so much (this is just my guess, I will have to back this up with a calculation).

Anyways we decided to take this up again tomorrow. Things are progressing fairly well now, I hope to be able to put in ETMY back into the chamber at some point tomorrow and commence re-alignment of the interferometer. I've left the OSEMs in for today, with the EQ stops not engaged but close by. HEPA has been turned back on.

12434   Tue Aug 23 19:35:38 2016 gautamUpdateSUSETMY back in IFO

[johannes, gautam]

Summary: Today we moved the suspended ETMY optic back into the chamber from the cleanroom. Once in the chamber, we positioned the optic using the stops that marked the previous position of the optic. We then shortened the arm length by 19mm (in order to match the X and Y arm lengths. The F.C. coat on the HR face was removed prior to the final placement of the optic. We then adjusted the OSEM positions in their holders to get the sensor outputs to half their maximum value.

We did not get to check where the input beam hits the optic or see if the pitch balance of the optic is such that the reflected beam makes it back to the ITM. The plan for tomorrow is to do this.

Part 1: Cleanroom work

• We worked a little more on trying to adjust the rotational position of the OSEM coils in order to minimize the coupling of the bounce mode into the sensor signals.
• We had limited success in this regard. After about an hour, we concluded that it made more sense to do this in the chamber itself. For one thing, the drive electronics for the Y end are different (in the cleanroom, we are using the X end electronics, satellite box etc.).
• We adjusted the position of the OSEMs till the sensor output readout was half the open value as best as we could. We also made sure that the wire was in the groove on both sides and that the magnets were well centered in the vertical direction relative to the OSEM coils and that there was no danger of knocking any magnets off (see attached pictures).
• We then engaged all the EQ stops, and transferred the suspension cage to a cart (topped with Al foil, wiped clean) for transportation to the Y-end (with OSEMs left in).

Part 2: Transportation of optic

• Nothing special here, just took great care while going over bumps near doors between the cleanroom and the IFO, and along the Y-arm itself.
• Definitely a 2 man job - one person can lift a pair of wheels over any bumps while the other can make sure there is no danger of the cage toppling over.

Part 3: Chamber work

• PSL shutter was closed for this part of work. Earlier today, I found that C1SUSAUX had failed yet again (why are all the slow computers dying more often nowadays?!). I restarted the slow machine, and locked the mode cleaner. The alignment hadn't drifted so much from when EricQ had last aligned the IMC, and with only minimal tweaking, I was able to lock the IMC and see a beam on the REFL camera.
• First, I transferred the suspension cage onto the edge of the table inside the chamber. Care was taken not to accidentally place the cage onto the trailing OSEM wires.
• There were some specks of dust on the barrel of the optic, and also the cage. These were removed with clean wipes and isopropanol.
• I judged that it would be too precarious to remove the F.C. with the optic in its final desired position. So we decided to take the coat off with the optic at the edge of the table. The central part of the HR face looks pretty clean. Even though the whole HR face was cleaned with F.C., the part that was left uncovered prior to putting the optic back into the chamber has a few specks of dust on it (see attachments). These could not be removed just by blowing ionized air. I was hesitant to drag wipe the optic, so I left things as is. In any case, the optic as a whole is MUCH cleaner (to my eye at least) than prior to the cleaning.
• Conveniently, the stops marking the previous position of the optic were on the far side and back.
• Since we wanted to shorten the Y arm length by 2 cm, we placed a clean steel ruler of width 19mm in front of the rear stop (see attached pictures). I then moved the cage back along the side stop till I hit the ruler.
• I then clamped the optic down, removed the spacing ruler, and re-adjusted the position of the rear stop to mark the new position of ETMY.
• We were concerned that the change of position of the cage on the table affected the leveling. Checking with a clean spirit level, we found evidence of a slight tilt in the direction towards the vertex of the IFO, as expected from the way the ETMY cage was moved. To compensate for this, I moved one of the counterweight masses (see attachments) till the spirit level showed the table to be level (to its resolution) in two perpendicular directions
• We then plugged in the OSEMs into the DB25 connectors on the table. We found that the Y-end electronics were giving different readouts from what we had been seeing in the cleanroom with the X end electronics (not surprising I guess). We resolved to pull out all the OSEMs, check their maximum sensor output values, and re-insert them till the sensor output was half this maximum as best as we could. NOTE TO SELF: UPDATE THE WIKI PAGE!
• We turned on the damping, and found that the exisiting input matrix performs fairly well.
• We took a quick look at the spectra of the sensor outputs - interestingly, with the suspension on the seismic stacks inside the chamber, the 16.4 Hz bounce mode peak showed up clearly (these were totally absent in the cleanroom). I did not attempt any fine rotation of the OSEMs in the holders (it is not even clear to me how good/bad the present configuration is) because I reasoned we first need to apply a pitch bias to get the beam back to the ITMY chamber and then re-adjust the OSEM coils. The bounce mode decoupling will be the last step.
• For tonight, we decided to leave the optic freely swinging (with EQ stops close by) so that tomorrow, we can look at the offline spectra of sensor outputs and if necessary, re-diagonalize the suspension.
• After checking nothing unwanted was left behind in the chamber, we closed it up for tonight.

Plan for tomorrow:

• Pitch balancing check (by looking at reflected beam at ITMY)
• Re-adjust OSEMs on ETMY, minimize bounce mode coupling into sensor outputs
• Make Y arm cavity by re-positioning ITMY

Attachments:

Attachment #1: Wire is in groove in side without OSEM

Attachment #2: Wire is in groove in side with OSEM (picture taken with OSEM coil removed)

Attachment #3: UL magent relative to OSEM coil

Attachment #4: LL magent relative to OSEM coil

Attachment #5: LR magnet relative to OSEM coil

Attachment #6: UR magnet relative to OSEM coil

Attachment #7: Side magnet relative to OSEM coil

Attachment #8: ETMY HR face with F.C. film removed. Non-covered part isn't super clean, but the covered part itself does not have any large specks of dust visible.

Attachment #9: Scheme adopted to shorten Y arm length by 19mm.

Attachment #10: Current situation inside EY chamber. Counterweight that was moved to balance the table is indicated.

12443   Thu Aug 25 20:07:35 2016 gautamUpdateSUSOSEM issues - maybe resolved?

[lydia, johannes, gautam]

While struggling to minimize the bounce mode coupling into the sensor signals, we briefly poked into the ITMY chamber, and think that we understand the origin of the problem, at least for the SRM.

Essentially, we believe that moving the ITM from its nominal position to the edge of the table has shifted the table leveling such that the optic (SRM) is tilted backwards (hence the magnets are completely occluding the LEDs) and that perhaps the optic is in contact with one or more of the bottom EQ stops (hence the signal is stationary, no oscillations visible. The timing of the signals going dark as Eric mentioned supports this hypothesis. The reason why we believe this to be the case is that when I was trying to loosen the screw on the clamp holding the ITMY cage to the table, we saw ~1Hz signals from all 5 SRM OSEM sensors, though they were well away from the nominal equilibrium values. The arrangement of towers in the chamber right now did not permit me to get a good look at the SRM magnets, but I believe they are all still attached to the optic, and that they are NOT stuck to the OSEM coils. If this is indeed the case, putting ITMY back in will solve the issue completely.

It is not clear what has happened to the LR coil on the PRM - could it be that during the venting process, somehow the LR magnet got stuck to the OSEM? If so, can we free it by the usual bias jiggling?

12444   Thu Aug 25 21:11:43 2016 gautamUpdateSUSETMY back in IFO

There was some confusion as to the order in which we should go about trying to recover the Y arm. But here are the steps we decided on in the end.

1. Use the tip tilts to make sure the input beam is hitting roughly the center of ETMY, with ITMY left out.
2. Use the reflected beam from the ETM as viewed in the ITM chamber to set the pitch bias on ETM.
3. Center OSEM coils on ETM, rotate them to minimize bounce mode coupling into the sensor signals.
4. Install the ITM, look for cavity flashes, and use alignment biases to try and lock the Y arm in air.

Yesterday, Eric, Johannes and I tried to do step 1, but after some hours of beam walking, we were unsuccessful. Today morning, Koji suggested that the ITM wedge could be playing a part - essentially, over 40m, the wedge would shift the beam horizontally by ~30cm, which is kind of what we were seeing yesterday. That is, with 0 biases to the tip tilts, we could find the beam in the ETM chamber, towards the end of the table, ~30cm away from where it should be (since the input pointing is adjusted taking this effect into account, but we were doing all of our alignment attempts without the ITM in).

So, we shifted strategy today. The idea was to trust that the green beam was well aligned to the cavity axis (we had maximized the green transmission before the vent), and set the pitch bias voltage to ETMY by making the reflected beam overlap with itself. This was done successfully, and we needed to apply a pitch bias of ~-2.70 (value on the MEDM screen slider), which agrees well with what I was seeing in the cleanroom. We then adjusted the OSEMs to bring the sensor outputs to half their nominal maximum value. Next, we went into the ITMX chamber, and were able to find the green beam, at the right height, and approximately where we expect the center of the ITM to be (this supports the hypothesis that the green input pointing was pretty good). I am however concerned if this is truly the right value of the bias for making a cavity with the ITM, because the pre-vent value of the pitch bias slider for ETMY was at -3.7, which is a 30% difference from the current value (and I can't think of a reason why this should have changed, the standoffs weren't touched for ETMY). If we go ahead and fine tune the OSEMs rotationally assuming this is the right bias to have, we may end up with sub-optimal bounce mode coupling into the sensor signals if we have to apply a significantly larger/smaller offset to realise a cavity? The alternative is to put in the ITM, and set the pitch balance using the IR beam, and then go about rotating OSEMs. The obvious downside is that we have to peel the F.C. off, risking dirtying the ITMs.

For much of the rest of the day, we were trying to play with the rotation of the OSEM coils in order to minimize the bounce mode coupling into the sensor signals. We weren't able to come up with a good scheme to do this measurement, and I couldn't find any elog which details how this was done in the past. The problem is we have no target as to how good is good enough, and it is extremely difficult to gauge whether our rotation has improved the situation or not. For instance, with no rotation of the OSEMs, by observing the bounce mode peak height over a period of 20-30 minutes, we saw the peak height change by a factor of at least 3. This is not really surprising I guess, because the impulses that are exciting the bounce mode are stochastic (or at least they should be), and so it is very hard to make an apples to apples comparison as to whether a rotation has improved the situation on.

After some thought, the best I can come up with is the following. If anyone has better ideas or if my idea is flawed, or if this is a huge waste of time, please correct me!

1. Adopt this spectrum (except the side signal) as a reference for what constitutes "good" rotational orientation of the OSEMs (even though it is for ETMX not ETMY).
2. Start with one coil. The suspension assembly document tells us to expect the orientation with minimal bounce coupling to be located within 20 degrees of "the vertical", the vertical being defined as that orientation in which the line connecting the LED and PD as seen by eye is vertical. So start with the coil oriented vertically, as best as possible by eye.
3. Damp the optic for ~1min, with the curtain covering the chamber entrance. Ideally, we want the door back on, as this lowers the noise floor significantly, but it is too cumbersome to replace even the light door so I suppose we will have to compromise.
4. Take a reference spectrum. In the interest of time, I think a bandwidth of 0.1Hz on the Fourier Transform should be sufficient. (Tangentially related - the BW you specify in the measurement setup in DTT doesn't seem to be the BW with which the spectrum is computed, I wonder why that is?)
5. It is basically impossible to rotate the coil continuously. So divide the range to be explored into steps (so each step will involve rotating the coil by ~2 degrees (I don't know if this number is physically feasible, but some discrete step will be involved). Rotate the coil, center it such that the sensor output is close to half the maximum.
6. Pull the curtain down, damp the optic, and take another spectrum. If the bounce mode peak is higher, abandon this direction of rotation, and rotate the other way. We accept as the optimal position the one from which the bounce mode peak height gets worse by rotating to either side.

Of course, this method assumes that the excitation into the bounce mode is a constant over time. I'm also attaching the spectrum of the OSEM sensor signals right now - the optic is in the chamber, free swinging (no damping) with the door on (so it is fairly quiet). The LR signal seems to be the best (indeed seems to match the levels in this plot), but it is not clear whether the others can be improved or not.

There was also some concern as to whether we will be able to see the beam in the ETMX chamber once the ITM has been re-installed. Assuming we get 100mW out of the IMC, PRM transmission of 5.5%, and ITM transmission of 1.4%, we get ~35uW incident on the ETM, which while isn't a lot, should be sufficient to see using an IR card.

12445   Fri Aug 26 11:35:44 2016 gautamUpdateSUSETMY UL sensor problematic

I've been noticing that the ETMY UL sensor output has been erratic  over the last few days. It seems to be jumping around a lot, even though there is no discernable change in any of the other sensor signals. Damping is OFF, which means the sensor signals should just be a reflection of actual test mass motion. But the fact that only one sensor output is erratic leads me to believe that the problem is in the electronics. I've also double checked that we aren't touching any EQ stops. Also, we had centered all the sensor outputs to half their maximum value pretty carefully. But looking at the Striptool traces, I now find that the UL sensor output has settled at some other value. Simply removing the OSEM connector and plugging it in again leads to the sensor output going back to the carefully centered value. Could it be that the photodiode has gone bad? If so, do we have spare OSEMs to use? I will also re-squish the satellite box cables to see if that fixes the problem.

Attachments:

Attachment #1: Sensor output spectra around the bounce mode peak. Nothing was touched inside the chamber between the time this spectrum was taken and the spectrum I put up last night (in fact the chamber was closed)

Attachment #2: UL sensor output is erratic, while the others show no glitching. This supports the hypothesis that the problem is electronic. The glitch itself happened while the chamber was closed.

Attachment #3: The only difference between this trace and Attachment #2 is that the UL connector was removed and plugged in (OSEM wasn't touched)

12448   Fri Aug 26 17:48:14 2016 gautamUpdateSUSbounce mode coupling reduction

We worked on reducing the bounce mode coupling into the sensor signals today. After some trial and error, essentially following the procedure I had put up in my previous elog, we think we were successful in reducing the coupling. We have now left the optic free swinging, so that we can collect some data and look at a spectrum with finer bandwidth. But as per the methodology we followed, we saw that the peak height corresponding to the bounce mode increased when we rotated the OSEM either side of its current position (except for the side OSEM, which we felt was in a good enough position to warrant not touching it and messing it up - of course only the spectrum will tell us if we are right or not. I also took some pictures with the camera with the IR filter removed, but we couldn't get any real information from these photos. I also checked with Jenne and Jamie who both suggested that they didn't have any metric with which they judged if the rotation of the OSEM was good enough or not. So we will wait to have a look at the spectrum from later tonight, and if it looks reasonable enough, I vote we move on. As Eric suggested, perhaps we can repalce the UL OSEM coil and see if that solves the apparent UL coil problem. Then we should move on to putting the arm cavity together.

Addendum 11pm 26 Aug 2016: I've uploaded the spectra - looks like our tweaking has gained us a factor of ~2 on LL, LR and SD, and no significant improvement on UL and UR compared to yesterdays spectrum.

12449   Sun Aug 28 21:40:11 2016 gautamUpdateSUSETMY UL sensor problematic

I wanted to observe the UL coil for any excursions over the weekend. Looking at the 2 day trend, something is definitely wrong. These glitches/excursions are much more pronounced than what is seen in the pre-vent plots Steve had put up.

In order to try and narrow down whether the problem is with the Satellite box or the LED/PD themselves, I switched the Satellite box at the Y end with the Satellite box for ITMY (at ~930pm tonight). Hopefully over a 12 hour observation period, we see something that will allow us to make some conclusion.

12450   Mon Aug 29 09:37:05 2016 gautamUpdateSUSETMY UL sensor problematic

It looks like the problem is indeed in the Satellite box. Attachment #1 shows the second trend for the last 12 hours (~930pm 28 Aug 2016 - 930am 29 Aug 2016) for the ITMY and ETMY sensor signals. The satellite boxes for the two were switched during this time (the switch is seen at the leftmost edge of the plots). After the switch, ETMY UL has been well behaved, though ITMY UL shows evidence of excursions similar to what we have been seeing. All the ITMY coils are pulled out of the suspension cage currently, and are just sitting on the optical table, so they should just be reading out a constant value. I think this is conclusive evidence that the problem is with the Satellite box and not the OSEM itself. I will pull the Satellite box out and have a look at its innards to see if I can find the origin of the problem...

12451   Mon Aug 29 14:42:06 2016 gautamUpdateSUSETMY Satellite box diagnostics

I opened up the ETMY satellite box to investigate the glitches seen in the UL sensor output.

Attachments #1 & 2: The connection to J4 from the satellite amplifier goes through a "satellite amplifier termination board", whose function, according to the schematic, is to prevent oscillations of the output amplifiers for the PD outputs. This seems to have been attached to the inside cover of the Satellite box by means of some sort of sponge/adhesive arrangement. The box itself gets rather hot however, and the sponge/adhesive was a gooey mess. I believe it is possible that some pins on the termination board were getting shorted - so if the 100 ohm resistor for the Ul channel that is meant to prevent the output amplifier oscillating was getting shorted, this could explain the problem.

For now, I cleaned off the old sponge/adhesive as best as I could, and used 4 pads of thick double sided tape (with measured resistance > 60Mohm) to affix the termination board to the inside of the box lid. In the ~3 hours since I have plugged the satellite box back in, there has been no evidence of any glitching.

Of course, it could be that the problem has nothing to do with the termination board, and perhaps an OpAmp in the UL signal chain is damaged, but I stopped short of replacing these for now. I plan to push on with putting the IFO back together, and will keep an eye on this problem to see if more action is needed.

Also, if the inside of the ETMY satellite box had this problem of the sponge/adhesive giving way, it may be that something similar is going on in the other boxes as well. This remains to be investigated.

12455   Tue Aug 30 20:26:36 2016 gautamUpdateSUSITMY installed

[gautam, johannes, lydia]

Today we installed ITMY into position in the chamber.

• First, we took the F.C coat off both faces
• A stream of ionized nitrogen was used during the peeling process. We took as much care as possible not to blow towards the SRM.
• F.C. films came off smoothly. But when we looked at a picture we took prior to putting the optic in place, it looks like there may be a sliver of F.C. left on the optic. There are also a few specks of dust visible on the HR face, but well away from the clear aperture (see Attachment #1). Do we want to use isopropanol + optical tissue to try and remove these?
• After F.C removal, we moved the optic into place against its stops. Returned OSEM connector tower to approximately its original place as it was moved to facilitate shifting the ITM to the edge of the table.
• I cleaned up the tangled mess of OSEM connector wires. On the ITMY tower, the OSEM cables have been tied using pieces of thin copper wire so as to avoid the wires straying into the beam path. Checked that wires are in grooves on both sides.
• Unfortunately we were not able to start on setting up a cavity today, because when we checked the leveling of the ITM, we found that it was significantly not level. This is probably because the ITM was at the edge of the table. The cage is rather heavy and the location it was put in had a large lever arm. In any case, the table is slowly relaxing back to their usual state, Steve recommended we leave it overnight.
• Other issues:
• the UL sensor on ITMY also seemed to show some evidence of glitchy behaviour. Looking in the Satellite box, I didn't see any obvious probelms like I did for the ETMY box (for which I am not even sure if I did a legitimate fix anyways). I guess we have to keep observing and think about doing something about this if it really is problematic.
• SRM barrel is pretty dusty. So is SR3. Do we want to clean these? If so how? F.C. or isoprop drag wipe?

We did some quick checks with the green beam and the IR beam. With the help of the custom Iris for the suspension towers, we gauged that both beams are pretty close to the center of the test mass. So we are in a not unreasonable place to start trying to align the beam. Of course we didn't check if the beam makes it to the ETM today.

The SRM OSEM sensor problem seems to have been resolved by moving the ITM back to its place as we suspected. The values are converging, but not to their pre-vent values (attachment #2). We can adjust these if necessary I guess... Or perhaps this fixes itself once the table returns to its neutral position. This remains to be monitored.

In the never-ending B-R mode reduction saga - we found what we think is an acceptable configuration now. Spectrum attached (Attachment #3). The top two OSEMs are now nearly 90 degrees rotated, while the bottom two are nearly horizontal. Anyways I guess we just have to trust the spectra. I should also point out that the spectra change rather significantly from measurement to measurement. But I think this is good enough to push ahead, unless anyone thinks otherwise?

12457   Wed Aug 31 22:09:18 2016 gautamUpdateSUSY arm locked to Green

Koji tweaked the alignment sliders till we were able to get the Y arm locked to green in a 00 mode, GTRY ~ 0.5 which is the prevent number I have in my head. The green input pointing looks slightly off in yaw, as the spot on the ITM looks a little misaligned - I will fix this tomorrow. But it is encouraging that we can lock to the green, suggests we are not crazily off in alignment.

[Ed by KA: slider values: ETMY (P, Y) = (-3.5459,  0.7050), ITMY (P, Y) =  (0.3013, -0.2127)]

While we were locked to the green, ITMY UL coil acted up quite a bit - with a large number of clearly visible excursions. Since the damping was on, this translated to somewhat violent jerking of ITMY (though the green impressively remained locked). We need to fix this. In the interest of diagnosis, I have switched in the SRM satellite box for the ITM one, for overnight observation. It would be good to narrow this down to the electronics. Since SRM is EQ-stopped, I did not plug in any satellite box for SRM. The problem is a difficult one to diagnose, as we can't be sure if the problem is with the LED current driver stage or the PD amplifier stage (or for that matter, the LED/PD themselves), and because the glitches are so intermittent. I will see if any further information can be gleaned in this regard before embarking on some extreme measure like switching out all the 1125 OpAmps or something...

Does anyone know if we have a spare satellite box handy?

12458   Wed Aug 31 23:01:02 2016 gautamUpdateSUSthe chamber HEPA tents are back

Some more numbers we found while working in/around the chamber today:

 Area 0.3 micron count (per cfm) 0.5 micron count (per cfm) Vacuum chamber (vented) ITMY ~5000 ~600 HEPA enclosure on ITMY door <100 0 Lab ~100,000 ~6000

These numbers were measured using our particle counter, which has a pump rate of 0.1 cfm, so the numbers above are 10x the numbers shown on the instrument after a measurement to account for this.

Essentially, the chamber is pretty dirty. Peeling the F.C with hard to reach optics like the ITM installed in place is not really feasible, and after peeling the F.C, we are looking at a best case of an additional 1-2 weeks in air to align the IFO, during which the optic is apparently exposed to quite a lot of particulates. In fact, with the high intensity flashlight left on, I actually saw some flecks of dust occassionally floating around inside the chamber while I was working on the optic. But this is just something we have to accept I guess.

12466   Fri Sep 2 21:09:08 2016 gautamUpdateSUSY arm locked in air

[johannes, lydia, gautam]

• The Y arm has been locked to IR in air using POY11 as an error signal
• We had been seeing flashes in the arm since yesterday, but were unable to lock
• Today we re-did the alignment procedure much the same way as yesterday
• It is useful to put in the slide-on irides onto the suspension tower for this sort of alignment
• We were a bit more systematic in aligning back-reflections to overlap each other today
• It is useful to stick the IR card just in front of the iris, and align the tip tilts by looking at the scatter on the camera. At least for Yaw, this works pretty well, probably a more reliable reference than contorting oneself inside the vacuum chamber to see if we are well aligned or not.
• Two fixes that made locking possible today:
• The POY error signal had a large DC offset. I zeroed the offset and adjusted the demod phase to make the error signal 0 when the IMC was unlocked
• I replaced the 50-50 beam splitter that was dividing the transmitted light between the QPD and Thorlabs PDs with a 2" Y1 CVI mirror - this meant that the flashes we had with the arm roughly aligned went from < 0.1 to a healthier 0.25, which allowed easier locking
• The POY whitening gain was unchanged from when we locked the Y arm in air just after venting and before taking the doors off
• The mode is barely visible on ITMY face, although I guess this is to be expected given we are at low power
• Lydia then tuned the arm alignment more finely such that the transmission is now ~0.65 (See Attachemnt 2 for slider values)
• From values from normal (pre-vent) IFO operation, I would have expected us to get a transmission of about 1 assuming 100mW going into the IFO from the IMC - and so with the BS switched out for an HR mirror, a transmission of ~2. What we get is about 1/3 of this value. Perhaps the IMC isn't so well aligned, but it is hard to imagine we have only 30mW going into the IFO. Or perhaps the input pointing is sub optimal (I did not run ASS, perhaps I should have)

GV EDIT Sep 5: These numbers do make sense if the ND filter that was on the Transmon QPD had ND = 0.6 (there are two at the end, one labelled ND 0.6 and the other labelled ND10 though the latter label looks like some custom label so I don't really trust that value), even though only one was on, unfortunately I don't remember which. So, for 10% of input power with a factor of 8 increase because the ND filter is removed and also that the 50% BS has been replaced with a HR mirror, we expect a transmission level of ~0.6 (compared to the normalized value under normal IFO operation) which is close to what we see...

• The UL coil problems continue to plague us but we were able to lock the arm regardless

In any case, I think we can work on putting in the X arm now and work on recovering that.

To do for the Y-arm (now that the F.C. is off, we should try and do this in as few chamber openings as possible):

• Fix problematic ITMY UL coil
• Rotation of all 5 ITMY OSEM coils for B-R peak reduction in sensor outputs
• Adjustment of axial position of all OSEM coils on ITMY and ETMY to better center the PD outputs to half their saturation value, given that the pitch and yaw biases to the optics have changed since this was last done
• Insertion of new baffles - try and center the IR and green beams as best as possible on these so that they serve as an alignment reference in the future

Then we need to do all of this for the X arm as well. The PRM LR coil is still giving no output - I will try moving the bias sliders around to see if this is a stuck magnet situation, but perhaps it is not. Since Eric's 3-satellite-box-monte did not yield any positive results, we have to consider the possibility that the LED or PD themselves are damaged. If so, I don't see any workaround without opening up the BS-PRM chamber, but if we can avoid this, we should. Perhaps when ITMX is open we can use the camera with the IR filter removed to see if all the OSEM LEDs are functional through the beam tube.

We are also piping POY11 error to the DAFI model and can hear it in the control room.

Rana suggested reviving the MC autolocker - I've made some changes to the low power MC autolocker scripts and they've been working the few times I tried today evening, but let's see how it does over the weekend. I've also changed the Y axis of the StripTool on the wall to better reflect the low-power range..

12467   Fri Sep 2 21:15:53 2016 gautamUpdateSUSITMX and ETMX preemptive table leveling

The ITMX table had relaxed overnight into a slightly misaligned state overnight - since the ITMX table holds PR2 and hence can affect the input pointing, we decided to fix this before commencing alignment work today. The misalignment was not as bad as what Johannes observed prior to his first re-leveling attempt, but was ~1 division on the spirit level. So I decided to move one set of weights to level the table again. It is entirely possible that over the next couple of days, the table will shift slightly again, but the hope is that we are closer to the 'ideal' orientation of the table now... Pictures to follow...

12471   Tue Sep 6 00:14:14 2016 gautamUpdateElectronicsSatellite Amplifier

 If we have some data with one of the optics clamped and the open light hitting the PD, or with the OSEMs removed and sitting on the table, that would be useful for evaluating the end-to-end noise of the OSEM circuit. It seems like we probably have that due to the vent work, so please post the times here if you have them.

The ETMX OSEMs have been attached to its Satellite box and plugged in for the last 10 days or so, with the PD exposed to the unobstructed LED. I pulled the spectrum of one of the sensors (mean detrended, I assume this takes care of removing the DC value?). The DQed channels claim to record um (the raw ADC counts are multiplied by a conversion factor of 0.36). For comparison, re-converted the y-axis for the measured curve to counts, and multiplied the total noise curve from the LISO simulation by a factor of 3267.8cts/V (2^16cts/20V) so the Y axis is noise in units of counts/rtHz. At 1Hz, there is more than an order of magnitude difference between the simulation and the measurement which makes me suspect my y-axis conversion, but I think I've done this correctly. Can such a large discrepancy be solely due to thick film resistors?

12474   Tue Sep 6 20:45:14 2016 gautamUpdateSUSX arm test masses back in chamber

[Teng, Johannes, Lydia, gautam]

• The goal was to peel F.C. off both the X arm test masses and start work on aligning the arm
• However the F.C. peeling wasn't successful - Johannes spotted spme residual junk close to the center of the optic on ITMX and I saw a whole bunch of specks in and around the center of the ETM (see Attachment #1)
• Moreover, the PRM LR OSEM issue meant that we decided to re-paint the X arm optics and only take it off after debugging this OSEM PD issue
• Attachment #2 and #3 show the AR and HR face of the ITM respectively after F.C painting
• Attachment #4 shows the ETM HR face after HR painting
• Both towers have been moved, so any pre-emptive levelling has probably gone out the window, just something to be aware of when we put the towers back in place....
• There looks to be some filaments of F.C towards the edge of both the ITM and the ETM. These have been successfully removed with isopropanol + optical tissue, we should take care to do so before peeling the F.C....
12475   Tue Sep 6 20:52:42 2016 gautamUpdateSUSOSEM issues
 The modes look like they're at the right frequencies, so pointing more and more towards a LED or satellite box issue.

We peeked into the BS-PRM chamber via the ITMX chamber to see if we could shed any light on this situation. It's hard to get a picture that is in focus, but it looks quite clear that the LR LED (in the lower left when viewed from the HR side) isn't anywhere near as bright as the rest (see Attachment #1). Various hypothesis include failed LED / piece of Al foil blocking the LED / teflon aperture slipped over the LED. But looks like we can't solve this without opening up the BS-PRM chamber. The plan tomorrow is to open up the chamber, pull out the problematic coil. Once we have a better idea of what is going wrong, we can decide what the appropriate course of action is - replace the OSEM or something else.

As part of the diagnosis, I switched the PRM and SRM satellite boxes earlier today evening around 6pm. They remain in this switched state for now.

Steve, we plan to take the BS-PRM heavy door off tomorrow morning.

12476   Wed Sep 7 17:23:26 2016 gautamUpdateSUSPRM LR fixed for now

[johannes, gautam]

• We took the heavy door off in the morning with Steve's help
• The problem was quickly identified as the Al foil on the back of the PRM OSEMs (placed to mitigate scattered light making it into the OSEM that was making locking difficult) shorting out the pins on the rear of the OSEM
• We decided against using a black glass beam stop behind the PRM - rather, we decided to go for Al foil hats that were
1. More "domed" - so the back plane of the OSEM isn't in direct contact with the Al foil, though the hats themselves are secure and shouldn't simply fly off during pump down etc
2. Have a piece of kapton (courtesy Koji from the OMC lab) in the dome so that even if the foil hats move around slightly, there should be no danger of accidentally shorting out any pins
• Without removing the PRM OSEMs, we were only able to image UR and UL unambiguously showing that they have no filters. Not a single of the 5 spare 'short' OSEMs have filters. We have to open the ITMY chamber to reposition the OSEMs in the near future, which is when we will inspect SRM for filters.
• Attachment #1 shows a picture of these foil hats - the ones actually put on are shaped slightly differently, but the idea is the same
• Attachment #2 shows the PRM with its new OSEM hats (we also used a piece of clean copper wire to tie the OSEM cables to the tower on the bottom left of the cage as viewed from the BS-PRM chamber door)
• After closing up the BS-PRM chamber, I locked the IMC to see if the input pointing had gone way off because of our work on the table and the reputation of the tip-tilts hysteresis - I can see weak flashes in the Y arm but not enough to lock - so I will tweak the alignment a little
• Once I can recover the Y arm alignment, we can move on to peeling first contact and putting the X arm optics in.

Edit 7.30pm: I have managed to recover Y-arm in air locking, and the transmission is up at ~0.6 again which is what we were seeing prior to touching anything on the BS-PRM table, so it looks like the tip-tilt has not gone badly astray... I have also restored the Satellite boxes so that both PRM and SRM have their designated boxes

12478   Thu Sep 8 22:12:36 2016 gautamUpdateSUSX arm in place, locked to green, IR flashes visible

Detailed elog to follow but summary of todays activities:

• ITMX and ETMX are back in their respective positions
• F.C was peeled, OSEMs were inserted after releasing EQ stops
• X arm was aligned to green
• IMC was locked, BS was used to adjust IR input pointing till beam was cleanly passing through irides (slid on to the tower)
• After best efforts for today - we see flashes as judged from TRX signal and also POX11_I. Unfortunately these are really weak and we can't lock, let alone see anything on the screens. Tomorrow we can try some more fine alignment
12480   Fri Sep 9 17:50:02 2016 gautamUpdateSUSHeavy doors on BS-PRM, ETMY chambers

[steve, teng, johannes, lydia, gautam]

• we set about doing some final checks on the Y arm while Johannes and Lydia worked on the X arm alignment
• locked IMC, turned on Oplev HeNes for ITMY, SRM, PRM, BS and ETMY
• I first went into the BS-PRM chamber. Traced Oplev paths for PRM and BS, checked that the beam is approximately centered on all the steering mirrors, and traced the beam with a clean beam card to make sure there was no clipping. The beams make it out of the vacuum onto the PDs, but are not centered
• I also checked the Y arm green - the beam isn't quite centered on the periscope mirrors but I guess this has always been the case and I didn't venture to make any changes
• Checked new PRM foil hats were secure
• Checked the main IR beam out of the IMC, and also the IPANG beam - Steve suggested we keep track of the way this moves during pumpdown. However, I didn't quite think this through and we put the heavy door on the BS-PRM chamber before checking where the IPANG beam was on ETMY table (we later found that the beam was a tad too high. Anyways, this isn't critical, wouldve been nice to have this reference though
• Checked that there were no tools lying around inside the chamber, and proceeded to put the heavy door on
• Moved to ETMY table, and did much of the same as above - Oplev beam makes it successfully out off the ETM, OSEM cables aren't a risk to clipping the green input beam
• Proceeded to put the heavy door on ETMY chamber
• I would have liked to put the heavy door on the ITMY chamber today evening too, but while freeing the SRM from its EQ stops, I noticed that the LL and LR OSEM PD readouts are approximately 60 and 75 % of their saturation values. I think this warrants fixing (I also checked against the frame files from our last DRFPMI lock in march and the PD signals are significantly different) so we should do this before putting the heavy door on. It would also be a good idea to check the table leveling
• The Oplev beams for ITMY and SRM make it cleanly out of the chamber so all looks good on that front
• IR and green beams are well clear of any OSEM cables

Depending on how the X arm situation is, we will finish putting back all the heavy doors on Monday and start the pumpdown

GV Edit 11.30pm:

• We succeeded in locking the X arm as well, although the transmission peaked at 0.1 (but this is the high gain PD and not the QPD, and also, unlike the Y arm, the 50-50 BS splitting the transmitted light between the QPD and the high gain PD is still in place, so can't really compare with the Y arm value of 0.6)
• To get the lock going, we had to change a bunch of things like the POX DC offset, demod phase, sign of the gain etc. It is unclear whether we are locking on the TEM00 mode, but we judged it is sufficient to close doors and pump down
• Johannes and I centered the ETMX and ITMX OL spots on their respective QPDs. Earlier today, Johannes and Lydia had checked ITMX and ETMX OL paths, everything looks decent
• JE piggyback edit : We also tied the upper ITMX OSEM cables to the suspension cage side using copper wire since particularly UR looked like it could slip and possibly fall down into the beam path
• JE piggyback edit: While leveling the ITMX table, Gautam and I found that some of the screws that secure the weights were not vented. None of these were put in during this vent. We replaced them all with vented screws.
• Rana also checked PRM and SRM alignment, all looks okay on that front - the OSEM problem I had alluded to earlier isn't really a problem, once the SRM is aligned, all the OSEMs are reasonably close to 50% of their saturation value.

Looks like on Monday, we will look to put the heavy doors on ITMY, ITMX and ETMX chambers, and begin the pumpdown

12526   Fri Sep 30 19:53:07 2016 gautamUpdateendtable upgradeX end IR pickoff fiber coupled

[johannes, gautam]

Today we re-installed the fiber coupler on the X-endtable to couple some of the PSL light into a fiber that runs to the PSL table, where it is combined with a similar PSL pickoff to make an IR beat between the EX AUX laser and the PSL. The main motivation behind this was to make the process of finding the green beatnote easier. We used JAMMT (just another mode matching tool) to calculate a two lens solution to couple the light into the collimator - we use a +200mm and -200mm lens, I will upload a more detailed mode matching calculation + plot + picture soon. We wanted to have a beam waist of 350um at the collimator, a number calculated using the following formula from the Thorlabs website:

$d =4\lambda (\frac{f}{\pi*MFD})$

where d is the diameter of the output beam from the collimator, f is the collimating lens focal length and MFD is 6.6um for the fiber we use.

There is ~26mW of IR light coming through the BS after the EX AUX - after playing around with the 6 axis stage that the coupler is mounted on, Johannes got the IR transmission to the PSL table up to ~11.7mW. The mode matching efficiency of 45% is certainly not stellar, but we were more curious to find a beat and possibly measure the X arm loss so we decided to accept this for now - we could probably improve this by moving the lenses around. We then attenuated the input beam to the fiber by means of an ND filter such that the light incident on the coupler is now ~1.3mW, and the light arriving at the PSL table from the EX laser is ~550uW. Along with the PSL light, after the various couplers, we have ~500uW of light going to the IR beat PD - well below its 2mW threshold.

The IR beat was easily found with the frequency counter setup. However, there was no evidence of a green beat. So we went to the PSL table and did the near-field-far-field alignment onto the beat PD. After doing this, we were able to see a beat - but the amplitude was puny (~-60dBm, we are more used to seeing ~-20dBm on the network analyzer in the control room). Perhaps this can be improved by tweaking the alignment onto the PD while monitoring the RF output with an oscilloscope.

Moreover, the green PDH problems with the X end persist - even though the arm readily locks to a TEM00 mode, it frequently spontaneously drops lock. I twiddled around with the gain on the uPDH box while looking at the error signal while locked on a oscilloscope, but was unable to mitigate the situation. Perhaps the loop shape needs to be measured and that should tell us if the gain is too low or high. But ALS is getting closer to the nominal state...

Johannes is running his loss measurement script on the X arm - but this should be done by ~10pm tonight.

12532   Wed Oct 5 16:28:10 2016 gautamUpdateendtable upgradeEX laser power monitor PD installed

I installed a 10% BS to pick off some of the light going to the IR fiber, and have added a Thorlabs PDA55 PD to the EX table setup. The idea is to be able to monitor the power output of the EX NPRO over long time scales, and also to serve as an additional diagnostic tool for when ALS gets glitchy etc. There is about 0.4mW of IR power incident on the PD (as measured with the Ophir power meter), which translates to ~2500 ADC counts (~1.67V as measured with an Oscilloscope set to high impedance directly at the PD output). The output of the PD is presently going to Ch5 of the same board that receives the OL QPD voltages (which corresponds to ADC channel 28). Previously, I had borrowed the power and signal cables from the High-Gain Transmon PD to monitor this channel, but today I have laid out independent cabling and also restored the Transmon PD to its nominal state.

On the CDS side of things, I edited C1SCX to route the signal from ADC Ch28 to the ALS block. I also edited the ALS_END library part to have an additional input for the power monitor, to keep the naming conventions consistent. I have added a gain in the filter module to calibrate the readout into mW using these numbers. The channel is called C1:ALS-X_POWER_OUT, and is DQed for long-term trending purposes.

The main ALS screen is a bit cluttered so I have added this channel to the ALS overview MEDM screen for now..

12533   Wed Oct 5 19:10:04 2016 gautamUpdateGeneralArm loss measurement review

[ericq,gautam]

There are multiple methods by which the arm loss can be measured, including, but not limited to:

1. Cavity ringdown measurement
2. Monitoring IR arm transmission using ALS to scan the arm through multiple FSRs
3. Monitoring the reflected light from the ITM with and without a cavity (Johannes has posted the algebra here)

We found that the second method is extremely sensitive to errors in the ITM transmissivity. The first method was not an option for a while because the AOM (which serves as a fast shutter to cut the light to the cavity and thereby allow measurement of the cavity ringdown) was not installed. Johannes and Shubham have re-installed this so we may want to consider this method.

Most of the recent efforts have relied on the 3rd method, which itself is susceptible to many problems. As Yutaro found, there is something weird going on with ASDC which makes it perhaps not so reliable a sensor for this measurement (unfortunately, no one remembered to follow up on this during the vent, something we may come to regret...). He performed some checks and found that for the Y arm, POY is a suitable alternative sensor. However, the whitening gain was at 0dB for the measurements that Johannes recently performed (Yutaro does not mention what whitening gain he used, but presumably it was not 0). As a result, the standard deviation during the 10s averaging was such that the locked and misaligned readings had their 'fuzz' overlapping significantly. The situation is worse for POX DC - today, Eric checked that the POX DC and POY DC channels are indeed reporting what they claim, but we found little to no change in the POX DC level while misaligning the ITM - even after cranking the whitening gain up to 40!

Eric then suggested deriving ASDC from the AS110 photodiode, where there is more light. This increased the SNR significantly - in a 10s averaging window, the fuzz is now about 10 ADC counts out of ~1500 (~<1%) as opposed to ~2counts out of 30 previously. We also set the gains of POX DC, POY DC and ASDC to 1 (they were 0.001,0.001 and 0.5 respectively, for reasons unknown).

I ran a quick measurement of the X arm loss with the new ASDC configuration, and got a number of 80 +/- 10 ppm (7 datapoints), which is wildly different from the ~250ppm number I got from last night's measurement with 70 datapoints. I was simultaneously recording the POX DC value, which yielded 40 +/- 10 ppm.

We also discovered another possible problem today - the spot on the AS camera has been looking rather square (clearly not round) since, I presume, closing up and realigning everything. By looking at the beam near the viewport on the AS table for various configurations of the ITM, we were able to confirm that whatever is causing this distortion is in the vacuum. By misaligning the ITM, we are able to recover a nice round spot on the AS camera. But after running the dither align script, we revert to this weirdly distorted state. While closing up, no checks were done to see how well centered we are on the OMs, and moreover, the DRMI has been locked since the vent I believe. It is not clear how much of an impact this will have on locking the IFO (we will know more after tonight). There is also the possibility of using the PZT mounted OMs to mitigate this problem, which would be ideal.

Long story short -

1. Some more thought needs to be put into the arm loss measurement. If we are successful in locking the IFO, the PRG would be a good indicator of the average arm loss.
2. There is some clipping, in vacuum, of the AS beam. It may be that we can fix this without venting, to be investigated.

GV Edit 8 Oct 2016: Going through some old elogs, I came across this useful reference for loss measurement. It doesn't talk about the reflection method (Method 3 in the list at the top of this elog), but suggests that cavity ringdown with the Trans PD yields the most precise numbers, and also allows for measuring TITM

12534   Wed Oct 5 19:43:13 2016 gautamSummaryGeneralVent review

This elog is meant to review some of the important changes made during the vent this summer - please add to this if I've forgotten something important. I will be adding this to the wiki page for a more permanent record shortly.

Vent objectives:

1. Clean ITMX, ITMY, ETMX, ETMY
2. Replace ETMX suspension cage, replace Al wire standoffs with Ruby (sapphire?) standoffs.
3. Shorten Y arm length by 20mm
4. Replace 40mm aperture baffles in ETM chambers with 50mm black glass baffles

Optics, OSEM and suspension status:

ITMX & ITMY

• ITMX and ITMY did not have any magnets broken off during the vent - all five OSEM coils for both were removed and the optic EQ stopped for F.C. cleaning.
• Both HR and AR faces were F.Ced, ~20mm dia area cleaned.
• The coils were re-inserted in an orientation as close to the original (as judged from photos), and the shadow sensor outputs were made as close to half their open values as possible, although in the process of aligning the arms, this may have changed
• OSEM filter existense was checked (to be updated)
• Shadow sensor open values were recorded (to be updated)
• Checked that tables were level before closing up
• The UL OSEM on ITMY was swapped for a short OSEM while investigating glitchy shadow sensor outputs. This made no difference. However, the original OSEM wasn't replaced. Short OSEM was used as we only had spare short OSEMs. Serial number (S/N 228) and open voltage value have been recorded, wiki page will be updated. Does this have something to do with the input matrix diagonalization weirdness we have been seeing recently?
• ITMX seems to be prone to getting stuck recently, reason unknown although I did notice the LL OSEM was kind of close to the magnet while inserting (but this magnet is not the one getting stuck, as we can see this clearly on the camera - the prime suspect is UL I believe)
• OL beam centering on in vacuum steering optics checked before closing up

ETMY

• UL, UR and LR magents broke off at various points, and so have been reglued
• No standoff replacement was done
• Re-suspension was done using newly arrived SOS wire
• Original OSEMs were inserted, orientations have changed somewhat from their previous configuration as we did considerable experimentation with the B-R peak minimization for this optic
• OSEM filter status, shadow sensor open voltage values to be updated.
• New wire suspension clamp made at machine shop is used, 5 in lb of torque used to tighten the clamp
• HR face cleaned with F.C.
• Optic + suspension towers air baked (separately) at 34C for curing of EP30
• Checked that tables were level before closing up
• 40mm O.D. black glass baffle replaced with 50mm O.D. baffle.
• Suspension cage was moved towards ITMY by 19mm (measured using a metal spacer) by sliding along stop marking the position of the tower.

ETMX

• Al wire standoffs <--> Ruby wire standoffs (this has changed the pitch frequency)
• All magnets were knocked off at some point, but were successfully reglued
• New SOS tower, new SOS wire, new wire clamp used
• OSEM filter status, shadow sensor open voltage values to be updated.
• OSEM orientation is close to horizontal for all 5 OSEMs
• Table leveling was checked before closing up.
• 40mm O.D. black glass baffle replaced with 50mm O.D. baffle.\

PRM

• Some issues with the OSEMs were noticed, and were traced down to the Al foil caps covering the back of the (short) OSEMs, which are there to minimize the scattererd 1064nm light interfering with the shadow sensor, shorting one of the OSEMs
• To mitigate this, all Al foil caps now have a thin piece of Kapton between foil and electrical contacts on rear of OSEM
• No OSEMs were removed from the suspension cage during this process, we tried to be as gentle as possible and don't believe the shadow sensor values changed during this work, suggesting we didn't disturb the coils (PRM wasn't EQ stopped either)

SRM

• The optic itself wasn't directly touched during the vent - but was EQ stopped as work was being done on ITMY
• It initially was NOT EQ stopped, and the shift in table level caused by moving ITMY cage to the edge of the table for F.C. cleaning caused the optic to naturally drift onto the EQ stops, leading to some confusion as to what happened to the shadow sensor outputs
• The problem was diagnosed and restoring ITMY to its original position made the OSEM signals come back to normal.

SR3

• Was cleaned by drag wiping both front and back faces

SR2/PR2/PR3/BS/OMs

• These optics were NOT intentionally touched during this vent
• The alignment on the OMs was not checked before close-up

Other checks/changes

• OL beams were checked on in-vacuum input and output steering mirrors to make sure none were close to clipping
• Insides of viewport windows were checked for general cleanliness, given that we have found the outside of some of these to be rather dirty. Insides of viewports checked were deemed clean enough.
• Steve has installed a new vacuum guage to provide a more realiable pressure readout.
• We forgot to investigate the weird behaviour of the AS beam that Yutaro and Koji identified in November. In any case, looks like the clipping of the AS beam is worse now. We will have to try and fix this using the PZT mounted OMs, and if not, we may have to consider venting again

Summary of characterization tasks to be done:

1. Mode matching into the Y arm cavity given the arm length change
2. HOM content in transmitted IR light from Y arm given the arm length change (Finesse models suggest that the 2f second order HOM resonance may have moved closer to the 00 resonance)
3. Arm loss measurement
4. Suspension diagonalization
5. Check the Qs of the optics eigenmodes - should indicate if any of our magnets, reglued or otherwise, are a little loose
12542   Mon Oct 10 11:48:05 2016 gautamUpdateCDSPower-cycled c1susaux, realigned PMC, spots centered on WFS1 and WFS2

[Koji, Gautam]

We did the following today morning:

1. I re-aligned the PMC - transmission level on the scope on the PSL table is now ~0.72V which is around what I remember it being
2. The spot had fallen off WFS 2 - so we froze the output of the MC WFS servo, and turned the servo off. Then we went to the table to re-center the spot on the WFS. The alignment had drifted quite a bit on WFS2, and so we had to change the scale on the grid on the MEDM screen to +/-10 (from +/- 1) to find the spot and re-center it using the steering mirror immediately before the WFS. It would appear that the dark offsets are different on WFS1 and WFS2, so the "SUM" reads ~2.5 on WFS1 and ~0.3 on WFS2 when the spots are well centered
3. Coming back to the control room, we ran the WFSoffsets script and turned on the WFS servo again. Trying to run the relief servo, we were confronted by an error message that c1susaux needed to be power cycled (again). This is of course the slow machine that the ITMX suspension is controlled by, and in the past, power cycling c1susaux has resulted in the optic getting stuck. An approach that seems to work (without getting ITMX stuck)  is to do the following:
• Save the alignment of the optic, turn off Oplev servo
• Move the bias sliders on IFO align to (0,0) slowly
• Turn the watchdog for ITMX off
• Unplug the cables running from the satellite box to the vacuum feedthrough
• Power cycle the slow machine. Be aware that when the machine comes back on, the offset sliders are reset to the value in the saved file! So before plugging the cables back in, it would be advisable to set these to (0,0) again, to avoid kicking the optic while plugging the cables back in
• Plug in the cables, restore alignment and Oplev servos, check that the optic isn't stuck
4. Y green beat touch up - I tweaked the alignment of the first mirror steering the PSL green (after the beam splitter to divide PSL green for X and Y beats) to maximize the beat amplitude on a fast scope. Doing so increased the beat amplitude on the scope from about 20mVpp to ~35mVpp. A detailed power budget for the green beats is yet to be done

It is unfortunate we have to do this dance each time c1susaux has to be restarted, but I guess it is preferable to repeated unsticking of the optic, which presumably applies considerable shear force on the magnets...

After Wednesday's locking effort, Eric had set the IFO to the PRMI configuration, so that we could collect some training data for the PRC angular feedforward filters and see if the filter has changed since it was last updated. We should have plenty of usable data, so I have restored the arms now.

12545   Mon Oct 10 18:34:52 2016 gautamUpdateGeneralPZT OM Mirrors

I did a quick survey of the drive electronics for the PZT OM mirrors today. The hope is that we can correct for the clipping observed in the AS beam by using OM4 (in the BS/PRM chamber) and OM5 (in the OMC chamber).

Here is a summary of my findings.

• Schematic for (what I assume is) the driver unit (located in the short electronics rack by the OMC chamber/AS table) can be found here
• This is not hooked up to any HV power supply. There is a (short) cable on the back that is labelled '150V' but it isn't connected to anything. There are a bunch of 150V KEPCO power supplies in 1X1, looks like we will have to lay out some cable to power the unit
• The driver is also not connected to any fast front end machine or slow machine - according to the schematic, we can use J4, which is a Dsub 9 connector on the front panel, to supply drive signals to the two PZTs X and Y axes. Presumably, we can use this + some function generator/DC power supply to drive the PZTs. I have fashioned a cable using a Dsub9 connector and some BNC connectors for this purpose.

I hope these have the correct in-vacuum connections. We also have to hope that the clipping is downstream of OM4 for us to be able to do anything about it using the PZT mirrors.

12551   Tue Oct 11 13:30:49 2016 gautamUpdateSUSPRM LR problematic again

Perhaps the problem is electrical? The attached plot shows a downward trend for the LR sensor output over the past 20 days that is not visible in any of the other 4 sensor signals. The Al foil was shorting the electrical contacts for nearly 2 months, so perhaps some part of the driver circuit needs to be replaced? If so a Satellite Box swap should tell us more, I will switch the PRM and SRM satellite boxes. It could also be a dying LED on the OSEM itself I suppose. If we are accessing the chamber, we should come up with a more robust insulating cap solution for the OSEMs rather than this hacky Al foil + kapton arrangement.

The PRM and SRM Satellite boxes have been switched for the time being. I had to adjust some of the damping loop gains for both PRM and SRM and also the PRM input matrix to achieve stable damping as the PRM Satellite box has a Side sensor which reads out 0-10V as opposed to the 0-2V that is usually the case. Furthermore, the output of the LR sensor going into the input matrix has been turned off.

12552   Wed Oct 12 13:34:28 2016 gautamUpdateSUSPRM LR problematic again

Looks like what were PRM problems are now seen in the SRM channels, while PRM itself seems well behaved. This supports the hypothesis that the satellite box is problematic, rather than any in-vacuum shenanigans.

Eric noted in this elog that when this problem was first noticed, switching Satellite boxes didn't seem to fix the problem. I think that the original problem was that the Al foil shorted the contacts on the back of the OSEM. Presumably, running the current driver with (close to) 0 load over 2 months damaged that part of the Satellite box circuitry, which lead to the subsequent observations of glitchy behaviour after the pumpdown. Which begs the question - what is the quick fix? Do we try swapping out the LM6321 in the LR LED current driver stage?

GV Edit Nov 2 2016: According to Rana, the load of the high speed current buffer LM6321 is 20 ohms (13 from the coil, and 7 from the wires between the Sat. Box and the coil). So, while the Al foil was shorting the coil, the buffer would still have seen at least 7 ohms of load resistance, not quite a short circuit. Moreover, the schematic suggests that that the kind of overvoltage protection scheme suggested in page 6 on the LM6321 datasheet has been employed. So it is becoming harder to believe that the problem lies with the output buffer. In any case, we have procured 20 of these discontinued ICs for debugging should we need them, and Steve is looking to buy some more. Ben Abbot will come by later in the afternoon to try and help us debug.

12560   Thu Oct 13 19:28:14 2016 gautamUpdateGeneralin-air alignment

I did the following today to prepare for taking the doors off tomorrow.

• Locked MC at low power
• low power autolocker used during the last vent isn't working so well now
• so I manually locked the IMC - locks are holding for ~30 mins and MC transmission was maximized by tweaking MC1 and MC2 alignments. The transmission is now ~1150 which is what I remember it being from the last vent
• I had to restart c1aux to run LSCoffsets
• Aligned arms to green using bias sliders on IFO align
• X green transmission is ~0.4 and Y green transmission is ~0.5 which is what I remember it being before this vent
• Removed ND filters from end Transmon QPDs since there is so little light now
• Locked Y arm, ran the dither
• Some tip tilt beam walking was required before any flashes were seen
• I had to tweak the LSC gain for this to work
• TRY is ~0.3 - in the previous vent, in air low power locking yielded TRY of ~0.6 but the 50-50 BS that splits the light between the high gain PD and the QPD was removed back then so these numbers are consistent
• Tried locking X arm
• For some reason, I can't get the triggering to work well - the trigger in monitor channel (LSC-XARM_TRIG_IN) and LSC-TRX_OUT_DQ are not the same, should they not be?
• Tried using both QPD and high gain PD to lock, no luck. I also checked the error signal for DC offsets and that the demod phase was okay
• In any case, there are TRX flashes of ~0.3 as well, this plus the reasonable green transmission makes me think the X arm alignment is alright
• All the oplev spots are on their QPDs in the +/- 100 range. I didn't bother centering them for now

I am leaving all shutters closed overnight.

So I think we are ready to take the doors off at 8am tomorrow morning, unless anyone thinks there are any further checks to be done first.

Vent objectives:

1. Fix AS beam clipping issues (elog1, elog2)
2. Look into the green scatter situation (elog)

Should we look to do anything else now? One thing that comes to mind is should we install ITM baffles? Or would this be more invasive than necessary for this vent?

Steve reported to me that he was unable to ssh into the control room machines from the laptops at the Xend and near the vacuum rack. The problem was with pianosa being frozen up. I did a manual reboot of pianosa and was able to ssh into it from both laptops just now.

12561   Fri Oct 14 10:31:53 2016 gautamUpdateGeneraldoors are off ITMY and BS/PRM chambers

[steve,ericq,gautam]

We re-checked IMC locking, arm alignments (we were able to lock and dither align both arms today, and also made the michelson spot look reasonable on the camera) and made sure that the AS and REFL spots were in the camera ballpark. We then proceeded to remove the heavy doors off ITMY and BS/PRM chambers. We also quickly made sure that it is possible to remove the side door of the OMC chamber with the current crane configuration, but have left it on for now.

The hunt for clipping now begins.

12563   Fri Oct 14 18:33:55 2016 gautamUpdateGeneralAS clipping investigations

[steve,ericq,gautam]

In the afternoon, we took the heavy door off the OMC chamber as well, such that we could trace the AS beam all the way out to the AP table.

In summary, we determined the following today:

1. Beam is centered on SRM, as judged by placing the SOS iris on the tower

2. Beam is a little off on OM1 in yaw, but still >2 beam diameters away from the edge of the steering optic, pitch is pretty good
3. Beam is okay on OM2
4. Beam is okay on OM3 - but beam from OM3 to OM4 is perilously close to clipping on the green steering mirror between these two steering optics (see CAD drawing). We think this is where whatever effect of the SR2 hysteresis shows up first.
5. Beam is a little low and a little to the left on OM4 (the first PZTJena mirror)
6. Beam is well clear of other optics in the BS PRM chamber on the way from OM4 to OM5 in the OMC chamber
7. Beam is a little low and a little to the left of OM5 in the OMC chamber. This is the second PZTJena mirror. We are approximately 1 beam diameter away from clipping on this 1" optic
8. Beam is off center on OMPO-OMMTSM partially transmissive optic, but because this is a 2" optic, the room for error is much more
9. Beam is well clear of optics on OMC table on the way from OMPO-OMMTSM to OM6, the final steering mirror bringing the AS beam out onto the table
10. Beam is low and to the left on OM6. It is pretty bad here, we are < 1 beam diameter away from clipping on this optic, this along with the near miss on the BS/PRM chamber are the two most precarious positions we noticed today, consistent with the hypothesis in this elog that there could be multiple in vacuum clipping points
11. Beam clears the mirror just before the window pretty confortably (see photo, CAD drawing). But this mirror is not being used for anything useful at the moment. More importantly, there is some reflection off the window back onto this mirror frame which is then scattering and creating some ghost beams, so this could explain the anomalous ASDC behaviour Koji and Yutaro saw. In any case, I would favour removing this mirror since it is serving no purpose at the moment.

Attachment #5 is extracted from the 40m CAD drawing which was last updated in 2012. It shows the beam path for the output beam from the BS all the way to the table (you may need to zoom in to see some labels. The drawing may not be accurate for the OMC chamber but it does show all the relevant optics approximately in their current positions.

EQ will put up photos from the ITMY and BS/PRM chambers.

Plan for Monday: Reconfirm all the findings from today immediately after running the dither alignment so that we can be sure that the ITMs are well-aligned. Then start at OM1 and steer the beam out of the chambers, centering the beam as best as possible given other constraints on all the optics sequentially. All shutters are closed for the weekend, though I left the SOS iris in the chamber...

Here is the link to the Picasa album with a bunch of photos from the OMC chamber prior to us making any changes inside it - there are also some photos in there of the AS beam path inside the OMC chamber...

12566   Mon Oct 17 22:45:16 2016 gautamUpdateGeneralAS beam centered on all OMs

[ericq, lydia, gautam]

IMC realignment, Arm dither alignment

• We started today by re-locking the PMC (required a c1psl restart), re-locking the IMC and then locking the arms
• While trying to dither align the arms, I could only get the Y arm transmission to a maximum of ~0.09, while we are more used to something like 0.3 when the arm is well aligned this vent
• As it turns out, Y arm was probably locked to an HOM, as a result of some minor drift in the ITMY optical table leveling due to the SOS tower aperture being left in over the weekend

ITMY chamber

• We then resolved to start at the ITMY chamber, and re-confirm that the beam is indeed centered on the SRM by means of the above-mentioned aperture
• Initially, there was considerable yaw misalignment on the aperture, probably due to the table level drifting because of the additional weight of the aperture
• As soon as I removed the aperture, eric was able to re-dither-align the arms and their transmission went back up to the usual level of ~0.3 we are used to this vent
• We quickly re-inserted the aperture and confirmed that the beam was indeed centered on the SRM
• Then we removed the aperture from the chamber and set about inspecting the beam position on OM1
• While the beam position wasn't terribly bad, we reasoned that we may as well do as good a job as we can now - so OM1 was moved ~0.5 in such that the beam through the SRM is now well centered on OM1 (see Attachment #1 for a CAD drawing of the ITMY table layout and the direction in which OM1 was moved)
• Naturally this affected the beam position on OM2 - I re-centered the beam on OM2 by first coarsely rotating OM1 about the post it is mounted on, and then with the knobs on the mount. The beam is now well centered on OM2
• We then went about checking the table leveling and found that the leveling had drifted substantially - I re-levelled the table by moving some of the weights around, but this has to be re-checked before closing up...

BS/PRM chamber

• The beam from OM2 was easily located in the BS/PRM chamber - it required minor yaw adjustment on OM2 to center the beam on OM3
• Once the beam was centered on OM3, minor pitch and yaw adjustments on the OM3 mount were required to center the beam on OM4
• The beam path from OM3 to OM4, and OM4 to the edge of the BS/PRM chamber towards the OMC chamber was checked. There is now good clearance (>2 beam diameters) between the beam from OM4 to the OMC chamber, and the green steering mirror in the path, which was one of the prime clipping candidates identified on Friday

OMC chamber

• First, the beam was centered on OM5 by minor tweaking of the pitch and yaw knobs on OM4 (see Attachment #2)
• Next, we set about removing the unused mirror just prior to the window on the AP table (see Attachment #3). PSL shutter was closed for this stage of work, in order to minimize the chance of staring directly into the input beam!
• Unfortunately, we neglected checking the table leveling prior to removing the optic. A check after removing the optic suggested that the table wasn't level - this isn't so easy to check as the table is really crowded, and we can only really check near the edges of the table (see Attachment #3). But placing the level near the edge introduces an unknown amount of additional tilt due to its weight. We tried to minimize these effects by using the small spirit level, which confirmed that the table was indeed misaligned
• To mitigate this, we placed a rectangular weight (clean) around the region where the removed mirror used to sit (see Attachment #3)Approximately half the block extends over the edge of the table, but it is bolted down. The leveling still isn't perfect - but we don't want to be too invasive on this table (see next bullet point). Since there are no suspended optics on this table, I think the leveling isn't as critical as on the other tables. We will take another pass at this tomorrow but I think we are in a good enough state right now.
• All this must have bumped the table quite a bit, because when we attempted re-locking the IMC, we noticed substantial misalignment. We should of course have anticipated this because the mirror launching the input beam into the IMC, and also MMT2 launching the beam into the arms, sits on this table! After exploring the alignment space of the IMC for a while, eric was able to re-lock the IMC and recover nominal transmission levels of ~1200 counts.
• We then re-locked the arms (needed some tip-tilt tweaking) and ran the dither again, setting us up for the final alignment onto OM6
• OM5 pitch and yaw knobs were used to center the beam on OM6 - the resulting beam spot on OMPO-OMMTSM and OM6 are shown in Attachment #4 and Attachment #5 respectively. The centering on OMPO-OMMTSM isn't spectacular, but I wanted to avoid moving this optic if possible. Moreover, we don't really need the beam to follow this path (see last bullet in this section)
• Beam path in the OMC chamber (OM5 --> OMPO-OMMTSM --> OM6 --> window was checked and no significant danger of clipping was found
• Beam makes it cleanly through the window onto the AP table. We tweaked the pitch and yaw knobs on OM6 to center the beam on the first in-air pick off mirror steering the AS beam on the AP table. The beam is now visible on the camera, and looks clean, no hint of clipping
• As a check, I wondered where the beam into the OMC is actually going. Turns out that as things stand, it is hitting the copper housing (see Attachment #6, it's had to get a good shot because of the crowded table...). While this isn't critical, perhaps we can avoid this extra scatter by dumping this beam?
• Alternatively, we could just bypass OMPO-OMMTSM altogether - so rotate OM5 in-situ such that we steer the beam directly onto OM6. This way, we avoid throwing away half (?) the light in the AS beam. If this is the direction we want to take, it should be easy enough to make the change tomorrow

In summary...

• AS beam has been centered on all steering optics (OM1 through OM6)
• Table leveling has been checked on ITMY and OMC chambers - this will be re-checked prior to closing up
• Green-scatter issue has to be investigated, should be fairly quick..
• In the interest of neatness, we may want to install a couple of beam dumps - one to catch the back-reflection off the window in the OMC chamber, and the other for the beam going to the OMC (unless we decide to swivel OM5 and bypass the OMC section altogether, in which case the latter is superfluous)

C1SUSAUX re-booting

• Not really related to this work, but we couldn't run the MC relief script due to c1susaux being unresponsive
• I re-started c1susaux (taking care to follow the instructions in this elog to avoid getting ITMX stuck)
• Afterwards, I was able to re-lock the IMC, recover nominal transmission of ~1200 counts. I then ran the MC relief servo
• All shutters have been closed for the night
12568   Tue Oct 18 18:56:57 2016 gautamUpdateGeneralOM5 rotated to bypass OMC, green scatter is from window to PSL table

[ericq, lydia, gautam]

• We started today by checking leveling of ITMY table, all was okay on that front after the adjustment done yesterday. Before closing up, we will have detailed pictures of the current in vacuum layout
• We then checked centering on OMs 1 and 2 (after having dither aligned the arms), nothing had drifted significantly from yesterday and we are still well centered on both these OMs
• We then moved to the BS/PRM chamber and checked the leveling, even though nothing was touched on this table. Like in the OMC chamber, it is difficult to check the leveling here because of layout constraints, but I verified that the table was pretty close to being level using the small (clean) spirit level in two perpendicular directions
• Beam centering was checked on OMs 3 and 4 and verified to be okay. Clearance of beam from OM4 towards the OMC chamber was checked at two potential clipping points - near the green steering mirror and near tip-tilt 2. Clearance at both locations was deemed satisfactory so we moved onto the OMC chamber
• We decided to go ahead and rotate OM5 to send the beam directly to OM6 and bypass the partially transmissive mirror meant to send part of the AS beam to the OMC
• In order to accommodate the new path, I had to remove a razor beam dump on the OMC setup, and translate OM5 back a little (see Attachment #1), but we have tried to maintain ~45 degree AOI on both OMs 5 and 6
• Beam was centered on OM6 by adjusting the position of OM5. We initially fiddled around with the pitch and yaw knobs of OM4 to try and center the beam on OM5, but it was decided that it was better just to move OM5 rather than mess around on the BS/PRM chamber and introduce potential additional scatter/clipping
• OMC table leveling was checked and verified to not have been significantly affected by todays work
• It was necessary to loosen the fork and rotate OM6 to extract the AS beam from the vacuum chambers onto the AP table
• AS beam is now on the camera, and looks nice and round, no evidence of any clipping. Some centering on in air lenses and mirrors on the AP table remains to be done. We are now pretty well centered on all 6 OMs and should have more power at the AS port given that we are now getting light previously routed to the OMC out as well. A quantitative measure of how much more light we have now will have to be done after pumping down and turning the PSL power back up
• I didn't see any evidence of back-scattered light from the window even though there were hints of this previously (sadly the same can't be said about the green). I will check once again tomorrow, but this doesn't look like a major problem at the moment

Lydia and I investigated the extra green beam situation. Here are our findings.

1. There appears to be 3 ghost beams in addition to the main beam. These ghosts appeared when we locked the X green and Y green individually, which lead us to conclude that whatever is causing this behaviour is located downstream of the periscope on the BS/PRM chamber
2. I then went into the BS/PRM chamber and investigated the spot on the lower periscope mirror. It isn't perfectly centered, but it isn't close to clipping on any edge, and the beam leaving the upper mirror on the periscope looks clean as well (only the X-arm green was used for this, and subsequent checks). The periscope mirror looks a bit dusty and scatters rather a lot which isn't ideal...
3. There are two steering mirrors on the IMC table which we do not have access to this vent. But I looked at the beam coming into the OMC chamber and it looks fine, no ghosts are visible when letting the main beam pass through a hole in one of our large clean IR viewing cards - and the angular separation of these ghosts seen on the PSL table suggests that we would see these ghosts if they exist prior to the OMC chamber on the card...
4. The beam hits the final steering mirror which sends it out onto the PSL table on the OMC chamber cleanly - the spot leaving the mirror looks clean. However, there are two reflections from the two surfaces of the window that come back into the OMC chamber. Space constraints did not permit me to check what surfaces these scatter off and make it back out to the PSL table as ghosts, but this can be checked again tomorrow.

I can't think of an easy fix for this - the layout on the OMC chamber is pretty crowded, and potential places to install a beam dump are close to the AS and IMC REFL beam paths (see Attachment #1). Perhaps Steve can suggest the best, least invasive way to do this. I will also try and nail down more accurately the origin of these spots tomorrow.

Light doors are back on for the night. I re-ran the dithers, and centered the oplevs for all the test-masses + BS. I am leaving the PSL shutter closed for the night

12571   Wed Oct 19 16:41:55 2016 gautamUpdateGeneralHeavy doors back on

[ericq, lydia, steve, gautam]

• We aligned the arms, and centered the in-air AS beam onto the PDs and camera
• Misaligned the ITMs in a controlled ramp, observed ASDC level, didn't see any strange features
• We can misalign the ITMs by +/- 100urad in yaw and not see any change in the ASDC level (i.e. no clipping). We think this is reasonable and it is unlikely that we will have to deal with such large misalignments. We also scanned a much larger range of ITM misalignments (approximately +/-1mrad), and saw no strange features in the ASDC levels as was noted in this elog - we used both the signal from the AS110 PD which had better SNR and also the AS55 PD. We take this to be a good sign, and will conduct further diagnostics once we are back at high power.
• Opened up all light doors, checked centering on all 6 OM mirrors again, these were deemed to be satisfactory
• To solve the green scattering issue, we installed a 1in wide glass piece (~7inches tall) mounted on the edge of the OMC table to catch the reflection off the window (see Attachment #1) - this catches most of the ghost beams on the PSL table, there is one that remains directly above the beam which originates at the periscope in the BS/PRM chamber (see Attachment #2) but we decided to deal with this ghost on the PSL table rather than fiddle around in the vacuum and possibly make something else worse
• Re-aligned arms, ran the dither, and then aligned the PRM and SRM - we saw nice round DRMI flashes on the cameras
• Took lots of pictures in the chamber, put heavy doors back on. Test mass Oplev spots looked reasonably well centered, I re-centerd PRM and SRM spots in their aligned states, and then misaligned both
• The window from the OMC chamber to the AS table looked clean enough to not warrant a cleaning..
• PSL shutter is closed for now. I will check beam alignment, center Oplevs, and realign the green in the evening. Plan is to pump down first thing tomorrow morning

AS beam on OM1

AS beam on OM2

AS beam on OM3

AS beam on OM4

AS beam on OM6

I didn't manage to get a picture of the beam on OM5 because it is difficult to hold a card in front of it and simultaneously take a photo, but I did verify the centering...

It remains to update the CAD diagram to reflect the new AS beam path - there are also a number of optics/other in-vacuum pieces I noticed in the BS/PRM and OMC chambers which are not in the drawings, but I should have enough photos handy to fix this.

Here is the link to the Picasa album with a bunch of photos from the OMC, BS/PRM and ITMY chambers prior to putting the heavy doors back on...

SRM satellite box has been removed for diagnostics by Rana. I centered the SRM Oplev prior to removing this, and I also turned off the watchdog and set the OSEM bias voltages to 0 before pulling the box out (the PIT and YAW bias values in the save files were accurate). Other Oplevs were centered after dither-aligning the arms (see Attachment #8, ignore SRM). Green was aligned to the arms in order to maximize green transmission (GTRX ~0.45, GTRY ~0.5, but transmission isn't centered on cameras).

I don't think I have missed out on any further checks, so unless anyone thinks otherwise, I think we are ready for Steve to start the pumpdown tomorrow morning.

12576   Fri Oct 21 02:06:20 2016 gautamUpdateGeneralIFO recovery

The pressure on the newly installed gauge on the X arm was 6E-5 torr when I came in today evening, so I decided to start the recovery process.

1. I first tried working at low power. I was able to lock the IMC as well as the arms. But the dither alignment didn't work so well. So I decided to go to nominal PSL power.
2. I first changed the 2" HR mirror that is used to send all the MC REFL light to the MC REFL PD in low power operation with a 10% BS. I then roughly aligned the beam onto the PD using the tiny steering mirror. At this point, I also re-installed the ND filters on the end Transmon QPDs and also the CCD at the Y end.
3. I then rotated the waveplate (the second one from the PSL aperture) until I maximized the power as measured just before the PSL shutter with a power meter. I then re-aligned the PMC to maximize transmission. After both these steps, we currently have 1.09W of IR light going into the IMC
4. I then re-aligned MC REFL onto the PD (~90mW of light comes through to the PD) and maximized the DC output using an oscilloscope. I then reverted the Autolocker to the nominal version from the low power variant that has been running on megatron during the vent (although we never really used it). The autolocker worked well and I was able to lock the IMC without much trouble. I tweaked the alignment sliders for the IMC optics, but wasn't able to improve the transmission much. It is ~14600 cts right now, which is normal I think
5. I then centered the beams onto the WFS QPDs, ran the WFSoffsets script after turning the inputs to the WFS servos off, and ran the relief script as well - I didn't try anything further with the IMC
6. I then tried to lock the arms - I first used the green to align the test-masses. Once I was able to lock to a green 00-mode, I saw strong IR flashes and so I was able to lock the Y arm. I then ran the dither. Next, I did the same for the X arm. Even though I ran LSCoffsets before beginning work tonight, the Y arm transmission after maximization is ~5, and that for the X arm is ~2.5. I refrained from running the normalization scripts in case I am missing something here, but the mode itself is clearly visible on the cameras and is a 00-mode.
GV edit 21Oct2016: For the Y-arm, the discrepancy was down to TRY being derived from the high gain PD as opposed to the QPD. Switching these and running the dither, TRY now maxes out at around 1.0. For TRX, the problem was that I did not install one of the ND filters - so the total ND was 1.2 rather than 1.6, which is what we were operating at and which is the ND on TRY. Both arms now have transmission ~1 after maximizing with the dither alignment...
7. The AS spot looks nice and round on the camera, although the real check would be to do the sort of scan Yutaro and Koji did, and monitor the ASDC levels. I am leaving this task for tomorrow, along with checking the recycling cavities.
8. Lastly, I centered the Oplevs for all the TMs

12578   Mon Oct 24 11:39:13 2016 gautamUpdateGeneralALS recovered

I worked on recovering ALS today. Alignments had drifted sufficiently that I had to to the alignment on the PSL table onto the green beat PDs for both arms. As things stand, both green (and IR) beats have been acquired, and the noise performance looks satisfactory (see Attachment #1), except that the X beat noise above 100Hz looks slightly high. I measured the OLTF of the X end green PDH loop (after having maximized the arm transmission, dither alignment etc, measurement done at error point with an excitation amplitude of 25mV), and adjusted the gain such that the UGF is ~10kHz (see Attachment #2).

12579   Tue Oct 25 15:56:11 2016 gautamUpdateGeneralPRFPMI locked, arms loss improved

[ericq,gautam]

Given that most of the post vent recovery tasks were done, and that the ALS noise performance looked good enough to try locking, we decided to try PRFPMI locking again last night. Here are the details:

PRM alignment, PRMI locking

• We started by trying to find the REFL beam on the camera, the alignment biases for the 'correct' PRM alignment has changed after the vent
• After aligning, the Oplev was way off center so that was fixed. We also had to re-center the ITMX oplev after a few failed locking attempts
• The REFL beam was centered on all the RFPDs on the ASDC table

Post the most recent vent, where we bypass the OMC altogether, we have a lot more light now at the AS port. It has not yet been quantified how much more, but from the changes that had to be made to the loop gain for a stable loop, we estimate we have 2-3 times more power at the AS port now.

PRFPMI locking

• We spent a while unsuccessfully trying to get the PRMI locked and reduce the carm offset on ALS control to bring the arms into the 'buzzing' state - the reason was that we forgot that it was established a couple of weeks ago that REFL165 had better MICH SNR. Once this change was made, we were readily able to reduce the carm offset to 0
• Then we spent a few attempts trying to do blend in RF control - as mentioned in the above referenced elog, the point of failure always was trying to turn on the integrator in the CARM B path. We felt that the appearance of the CARM B IN1 signal on dataviewer was not what we are used to seeing but were unable to figure out why (as it turns out, we were locking CARM on POY11 and not REFL11 , more on this later)
• Eric found that switching the sign of the CARM B gain was the solution - we spent some time puzzling over why this should have changed, and hypothesized that perhaps we are now overcoupled, but it is more likely that this was because of the error signal mix up mentioned above...
• We also found the DC coupling of the ITM Oplev loops to be not so reliable - perhaps this has to do with the wonky ITMY UL OSEM, more on this later. We usually turn the DC coupling on after dither aligning the arms, and in the past, it has been helpful. But we had more success last night with the DC coupling turned off rather than on.
• Once the sign flip was figured out, we were repeatedly able to achieve locks with CARM partially on RF - we got through about 3 or 4, each was stable for just tens of seconds though. Also, we only progressed to RF on CARM on 1 attempt, the lock lasted for just a few seconds
• Unfortunately, the mode cleaner decided to act up just about after we figured all this out, and it was pushing 4am so we decided to give up for the night.
• The arm transmissions hit 300! We had run the transmission normalization scripts just before starting the lock so this number should be reliable (compare to ~130 in October last year). The corresponding PRG is about 16.2, which according to my Finesse models suggest we are still undercoupled, but are close to critical coupling (this needs a bit more investigation, supporting plots to follow). => Average arm loss is ~150ppm! So looks like we did some good with the vent, although of course an independent arm loss measurement has to be done...
• Lockloss plot for one of the locks is Attachment #1

Other remarks:

• Attachment #2 shows that the ITMY UL coil is glitchy (while the others are not). At some point last night, we turned off this sensor input to the damping servos, but for the actual locks, we turned it back on. I will do a Satellite box swap to see if this is a Sat. Box problem (which I suspect it is, the bad Sat. Boxes are piling up...)
• Just now, eric was showing me the CM board setup in the LSC rack, because for the next lock attempts, we want to measure the CARM loop - but we found that the input to the CM board was POY and not REFL! This probably explains the sign flip mentioned above. The mix-up has been rectified
• The MICH dither align doesn't seem to be working too well - possibly due to the fact that we have a lot more ASDC light now, this has to be investigated. But last night, we manually tweaked the BS alignment to make the dark port dark, and it seemed to work okay, although each time we aligned the PRMI on carrier, then went back to put the arms on ALS, and came back to PRMI, we would see some yaw misalignment in the AS beam...
• I believe the SRM sat. box is still being looked at by Ben so it has not been reinstalled...
• Eric has put together a configure script for the PRFPMI configuration which I have added to the IFO configure MEDM screen for convenience
• For some reason, the appropriate whitening gain for POX11 and the XARM loop gain to get the XARM to lock has changed - the appropriate settings now are +30dB and 0.03 respectively. These have not been updated in some scripts, so for example, when the watch script resets the IFO configuration, it doesn't revert to these values. Just something to keep in mind for now...
12583   Thu Oct 27 12:06:39 2016 gautamUpdateGeneralPRFPMI locked, arms loss improved
 Quote: Great to hear that we have the PRG of ~16 now! Is this 150ppm an avg loss per mirror, or per arm?

I realized that I did not have a Finesse model to reflect the current situation of flipped folding mirrors (I've been looking at 'ideal' RC cavity lengths with folding mirrors oriented with HR side inside the cavity so we didn't have to worry about the substrate/AR surface losses), and it took me a while to put together a model for the current configuration. Of course this calculation does not need a Finesse model but I thought it would be useful nevertheless.

In summary - the model with which the attached plot was generated assumes the following:

• Arm lengths of 37.79m, given our recent modification of the Y arm length
• RC lengths are all taken from here, I have modelled the RC folding mirrors as flipped with the substrate and AR surface losses taken from the spec sheet
• The X axis is the average arm loss - i.e. (LITMX+LITMY+LETMX+LETMY)/2. In the model, I have distributed the loss equally between the ITMs and ETMs.

This calculation agrees well with the analytic results Yutaro computed here - the slight difference is possibly due to assuming different losses in the RC folding mirrors.

The conclusion from this study seems to be that the arm loss is now in the 100-150ppm range (so each mirror has 50-75ppm loss). But these numbers are only so reliable, we need an independent loss measurement to verify. In fact, during last night's locking efforts, the arm transmission sometimes touched 400 (=> PRG ~22), which according to these plots suggest total arm losses of ~50ppm, which would mean each mirror has only 25ppm loss, which seems a bit hard to believe.

ELOG V3.1.3-