There doesn't seem to be any coherence among the different directions of ground motion (as expected from seismic theory), so I am suspicious of such a low MICH noise.

I found the bug in my calibration code, and I fixed it.

And I put the white Gaussian noise on the BS actuator, and calibrated to the differential length with my new code. We already know the efficiency of the actuator(elog#8242), so I could estimate how much I put the disturbance and compare the two values. The result is in attachment 1.  x_exc means the value of the disturbance. 

You can see the PSD of the differential motion decrease factor of 3 by decreasing the disturbance by factor of 3 (except for the region from 1 Hz to 5 Hz), and the value at lower frequency than resonant frequency of the suspension is comparable to the value estimated with the actuator efficiency. Also there is no dip when I put the larger disturbance than free running noise.

Between 1 Hz and 5 Hz there seems to be a resonance of something (seismic stack?). And also on resonance of the suspension there seems to be some other noise source. One possibility is the active damping of each suspension.

Actually still there seems to be a dip between 0.1 Hz and 1 Hz. But if you consider about those effect, I think this result doesn't seems to be so strange. But according to the documentation of LIGO document-T000058, which I found the seismic motion in 40 m Lab is written in, the seismic motion at 0.1 Hz is 10^-7. I'm not sure about this factor of 10 difference. One possibility is the geophone doesn't have good sensitivity at low frequency. I'm still not sure this result is really collect.

I update the LSC calibration screen. This screen is for real time calibration of each DOF with using error signal and control signal. The formula of the calibration is

x_dis = V_err/H + A V_fb

,where x_dis is the disturbance without surpression, V_err and V_fb are error signal and control signal, H is the transfer function from the displacement to output and A is the efficiency of the actuator.

I will put the filter of 1/H into the CINV filter bank and actuator efficiency into the A filter bank.

Masayuki pointed out that dataviewer wasn't connecting to the fb this morning.

When I started dataviewer from the terminal I obtained the following error:

controls@pianosa:~ 0$ dataviewer
Can't find hostname `fb:8088'
Can't find hostname `fb:8088'; gethostbyname(); error=1
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Error in obtaining chan info.
Can't find hostname `fb:8088'
Can't find hostname `fb:8088'; gethostbyname(); error=1

I checked the CDS FE status screen and it looks normal. I could ping the fb and ssh to it as well.

I restarted fb to see if it made any difference. telnet fb 8088

It hasn't helped. Anything else that can be done??

I've fixed the problem.  This was due to a change I made in the NDSSERVER environment variable so that it would work with cdsutils.  I didn't realize there was an incompatibility with how dataviewer parses NDSSERVER.  Joe and I will have to figure it out.

In the mean time I've changed things back so that that dataviewer should now work as expected.  You might have to log out and back in for it to work (or at least open a new terminal).

 The folding beam removed as shown. Two man supporting it while I hammering it out. Pin was dry and it gulled into supporting hinges.

The rotating hinge will be machined and bushing will be added with Zerk fitting or similar. This will allow lubrication in the future.

 see elog #9111

Local m3.8 eq shakes PRM lose.

 In May of 2013 Den wrote a PMC Autolocker because he ignored / didn't want to read anyone else's code. Later that year Yuta also wrote another one from scratch for the same reasons.

I tried to use both today, but neither one runs. Yuta's one doesn't run because he was using a bunch of private yuta library stuff in the yuta directory. That kind of programming style is pretty useless for us since it never works after some time.

So I re-activated and tested the PMCAutolock bash script (it is actually a symbolic link called "PMCAutolock" which points to AutoLock.sh). These scripts are all basically the same:

They turn off the loop (or turn down the gain) and then scan the PZT, look for a resonance, and then activate the loop.

One problem with the logic has been that turning off the loop makes the gain so low that the peak flashes by too fast. But leaving the loop ON and just sweeping with the gain turned down to -10 dB is also not good. That only reduces the UGF from 1 kHz to ~100 Hz. What we want is more like a 10 Hz UGF while scanning the length. SO, I edited the script to turn down the modulation depth on the EOM by that factor. After acquiring lock, it returns all settings to the nominal levels as defined on the PSL_SETTINGS screen.

I've tested it a few times and it seems to work OK. You can run it from the yellow shabang button on the PMC screen.

I also changed the .bashrc aliases for the MEDM command so that if you type medm_good at the command line you get MEDM screens with scalable fonts. So you can stretch the screens.

I used a script (~PSL/PMC/testAutoLocker.sh) to unlock the PMC and run autlocker ~100 times to see how robust the new autlocker is.

It failed to grab it 2 out of 137 times. During those times it just went on trying to ramp the PZT even after it had gone to a rail. Once someone resurrects Rob's 'trianglewave'  script we should be OK. Even so, I think this is good enough. Please try this out via the yellow button next time the PMC needs to be locked.

It usually takes 10-30 seconds to lock, depending upon where the fringe is compared to the upper voltage rail. Good enough.

Ottavia, Rossa  and Pianosa are running out of storage  space.

I'm working on it.

Atm1,  The folding arm is back on with 0.1" misalignment at no load in the trolly's way. The other side of the I beam is 0.02" higher than the main beam.. New bushing and pin were greased up  with Krytox before installation.

The axial Zerk 1/8" pipe in the pin upper end can not take any fitting. There is no room. It is taped off.

This gap comes down to ~ 1/16" at fully extended arm with 225 lbs load at the end of it.

The present plan is to grind down the  the misalignment of 0.1"  for a slow-loaded trolly.

Steve Baker of Konacranes will be back to grind down this ridge and load test at 500 lbs on Tuesday,  OCT  1, 2013

 I used our procedure from this entry to set the IMC board offset as well as the FSS board offset.

I found this afternoon that the MC was having trouble locking: the PC path was railing as soon as the boost was engaged. Could be that there's some misalignment on the PSL which has led to some RAM having to be canceled by this new offset. Let's see if its stable for awhile.

 I fixed the filter of the MICH real-time calibration. You can find C1CAL screen from the LSC menu 'calibration' of sitemap.

*Filter explanation

    C1CAL_MICH_CINV : the servo to convert  the error signal to displacement.

Sen_MICH :

the inverse of the transfer function from the distance to the error signal, which has the unit of count/m. In the formula this filter is represented by 1/H.

I assume this H is independent of frequency and time, and I calculated by the amplitude of the fringe of error signal. But it may change every day by drift of laser intensity and so on.  So we should follow the actual H somehow.  The temporary value of H is 3.76*10^7 count/m .

    C1CAL_MICH_A : the servo to convert the feedback signal to displacement. In formula This transfer function is represented by A

 SUS_BS;

the transfer function of the suspension of the BS. This is modeled from the measurement in elog#9127. The resonant frequency is 1.029 Hz and Q is 12.25.

 Res_A :

the response of the actuator on BS_SUS, which has the unit of m/count. The value is 1.99*10^-8 m/count. This value is measured in the measurement in elog#9121.

     C1CAL_MICH_W : the servo to handle the calibrated signal.

  m->um ;

the filter to convert the unit of signal from m to um. When this filter is on, the output is written in unit of um.

*Measurement

 I measured the power spectrum of the calibrated free running noise. The measured port was C!CAL_MICH_W_OUT. The result is in attachment 1. Also in this figure there are the plots of the Verr/H and Vfb*A.

 In low frequency region, where control loop suppresses the disturbance, you can see that the displacement is equal to the displacement of actuation (I'm not sure what happens at the point of 0.03Hz), and in high frequency region, where control loop doesn't work, the displacement is equal to the value of the Verr divided by MICH sensitivity. Also this result is similar to the my calibration result.elog#9131

controls@rosalba:/opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/SUS 0$ ./setOLtramps
Old : C1:SUS-ETMX_OLPIT_TRAMP        0
New : C1:SUS-ETMX_OLPIT_TRAMP        2
Old : C1:SUS-ETMX_OLYAW_TRAMP        0
New : C1:SUS-ETMX_OLYAW_TRAMP        2
Old : C1:SUS-ETMY_OLPIT_TRAMP        2
New : C1:SUS-ETMY_OLPIT_TRAMP        2
Old : C1:SUS-ETMY_OLYAW_TRAMP        2
New : C1:SUS-ETMY_OLYAW_TRAMP        2
Old : C1:SUS-ITMX_OLPIT_TRAMP        0
New : C1:SUS-ITMX_OLPIT_TRAMP        2
Old : C1:SUS-ITMX_OLYAW_TRAMP        0
New : C1:SUS-ITMX_OLYAW_TRAMP        2
Old : C1:SUS-ITMY_OLPIT_TRAMP        0
New : C1:SUS-ITMY_OLPIT_TRAMP        2
Old : C1:SUS-ITMY_OLYAW_TRAMP        0
New : C1:SUS-ITMY_OLYAW_TRAMP        2
Old : C1:SUS-BS_OLPIT_TRAMP          0
New : C1:SUS-BS_OLPIT_TRAMP          2
Old : C1:SUS-BS_OLYAW_TRAMP          0
New : C1:SUS-BS_OLYAW_TRAMP          2
Old : C1:SUS-PRM_OLPIT_TRAMP         0
New : C1:SUS-PRM_OLPIT_TRAMP         2
Old : C1:SUS-PRM_OLYAW_TRAMP         0
New : C1:SUS-PRM_OLYAW_TRAMP         2
Old : C1:SUS-SRM_OLPIT_TRAMP         0
New : C1:SUS-SRM_OLPIT_TRAMP         2
Old : C1:SUS-SRM_OLYAW_TRAMP         0
New : C1:SUS-SRM_OLYAW_TRAMP         2
 
Done setting TRAMPs

The ETMX oplev signal looks kind of dead compared to the ETMY. It has no features in the spectra and the SUM is pretty low.

I noticed that the cal fields are still set to 1. To get it close to something reasonable, I calibrated it vs. the SUSPIT and SUSYAW values by giving it a step in angle and using 'tdsavg' plus some arithmetic.

OLPIT =  45 urads/ count

OLYAW = 85 urads / count

These are very rough. I don't even know what the accuracy is on the OSEM based calibration, so this ought to be redone in the way that Jenne and Gabriele did before.

The attached image shows the situation after "calibration" of ETMX. This OL system needs some noise investigation.

Having trouble again, starting around 1 hour ago. No one in the VEA. Adjusted the offset -seems to be OK again.

 After seeing all of these spikes in the BLRMS at high frequency for awhile, I power cycled the Guralp interface box (@ 10:21 PM) to see if it would randomly recenter in a different place and stop glitching.

It did - needs to be better centered (using the paddle). Plot shows how the Z channel gets better after power cycle.

After relocking the PMC at a good voltage, Steve and I re-aligned the beam into the PMC by walking the last two steering mirrors. After maximizing the power, we also aligned the reflected beam by maximizing the PMC_REFL_DC with the unlocked beam.

Transmission is back to 0.84 V. We need Valera mode matching maintenance to get higher I guess. Maybe we can get a little toaster to keep the PMC PZT more in the middle of its range?

 [Masayuki, Manasa]

We locked FPMI and measured the FPMI noise (power spectrum of error signal - MICH_IN1) which will be calibrated.

The arms were locked using POX11 and POY11. The sign of MICH gain was changed to lock FPMI (from -30 to +30). 

I went down to investigate the issue with the extra noise that I found in the ETMY optical lever yesterday. There were several problems with the optical layout down there - I'm not sure if I remember them all now.

1. Beam reflected from OL QPD not dumped.
2. OL QPD set normal to the steering mirror so that the back reflection goes into the vacuum chamber.
3. HeNe laser mount only dogged with 2 dogs. Needs 3. Looks like some said "Aw, that's not goin' nowhere. Let's just leave that there pard!"
4. First lens downstream of the laser had 2 screws and washers, but neither was even finger tight! They were loose by more than 1 full turn.
5. Second lens was clipping. Beam was so far off center that this lens was being used to steer the beam by a few inches on the QPD.
6. Extra reflections from ingoing beam (I don't know which surfaces) randomly landing on green & red optics.
7. Lenses for the HeNe mode matching are coated for 1064 nm. HeNe is 633 nm, so these lenses must be replaced to reduce the reflections.

The main noise issue, however, appears to be not a layout issue at all. Instead its that the laser intensity noise has gone through the roof. See attached spectra of the quadrants (this is the way to diagnose this issue).

I'll ask Steve to either heal this laser or swap it out tomorrow. After that's resolved we'll need another round of layout fixing. I've done a couple of hours today, but if we want a less useless and noisy servo we'll have to do better.

NOTE: by looking at the OL quadrants, I've found a noisy laser, but this still doesn't explain the excess noise in the ETMX. That was the one that has a noisier error signal, not ETMY. By the coherence in the DTT, you can see that the ETMY OL is correctly subtracting and normalizing out the intensity noise of the laser. Seems like the ETMX electronics might be the culprit down there.

Liyuon will set up a  ~5 mW He/Ne laser for  waist measurement for LIGO oplev telescope.

This  will be between the beam tube and the CES wall. He will do his tests in the morning.

We are out of JDSU-Uniphase 1103P heads. I'm ordering some right now. I'm planning to make some corrections on Rana's list tomorrow morning at ETMY.

Not so fast! We need to plan ahead of time so that we don't have to repeat this ETMY layout another dozen times. Please don't make any changes yet to the OL layout.

Its not enough to change the optics if we don't retune the loop. Please do buy a couple of JDSU (and then we need to measure their intensity noise as you did before) and the 633 nm optics for the mode matching and then we can plan about the layout.

Hidden in Nakano-kun's previous entries was that the phase margin of the X-Arm was only 9 degrees!! This extremely close to instability and makes for huge gain peaking. The feedback loop is increasing noise above 100 Hz rather than suppress. After some tweaks of the LSC filters we got a much more stable loop/.

So we today started to examine the sources of phase lag in the arm cavity sweeps. There were a few unfortunate choices in the XARM LSC filter bank which we tuned to get less delay.

Then I wrote a bunch of detail about how that worked, but the ELOG ate my entry because it couldn't handle converting my error signal noise plot into a thumbnail. Then it crashed and I restarted it. We also have now propagated the changes to the Y arm by copy/paste the filters and the result there is pretty much the same: low phase margin is now 38 deg phase margin. Noise is less bad.

[Rana, Masayuki

 I made the plot of the phase of the digital filters which Rana change and also  of the AA, AI, DAA, DAI filters. Now the biggest phase delay come from the timedelay of the digital system.

The UGF is around 150 Hz at that frequency the time delay has biggest phase  delay. Second one is the FM9 filter (this filter is BOOST filter). Then we have the AA filter, AI filter and so on, but these delay is roughly 5 degree.

As I said in previous entry, the time delay of the XARM control is roughly 300 usec, and we have 120 usec even only in C1SUS. Also between the C!SUS and C1LSC we have another 120 usec time delay. We want to increase the UGF to 300 Hz but because of the time delay of the digital system we cannot increase. So we should fix this problem.

After changing these filters, the FPMI noise is become better at high frequency. Before we have peak around the 100 Hz (because of 8 degree phase margin...), but they are gone. i attached the noise spectrum. This plot is measured by the real time calibration output. But even then, you can see the extra noise around 100 Hz in FPMI conpare to only MICH.

  I added the DAQ channel to all output of calibration servo. The name of channels are C1CAL_(plant name)_W_OUT_DQ.

I recompiled and restarted the model. Also I committed the changes to the svn of the calibration model.

[Masayuki, Manasa]

While trying to lock the arms using ALS we found that the locks were not very stable and the in-loop noise was higher than seen before.

I looked into things and checked the out-of loop noise for ALS and found that the Y arm ALS noise (rms) was higher than the X arm.

To troubleshoot, I measured the OLTF of the phase tracking loop. While X arm was healthy, things weren't looking good for the Y arm. Sadly, the Y phase tracking loop gain was set too high with a phase margin of -2 degrees. We brought down the gain from 300 to 150 and set the phase margin close to ~55 degrees.

X arm Phase tracker loop:
UGF = 1.8 K Hz
Phase margin = 50 degrees

Y arm Phase tracker loop:
UGF = 1.6 KHz
Phase margin = 55 degrees

[Masayuki, Manasa]

I. ALS servo loops
After fixing things with the phase tracking loop, we checked if things were good with the ALS servo loops.
We measured the OLTF of the X and Y arm ALS servo loops. In both cases the phase margin was ~20 degrees. There was no room to set enough phase margin. So we looked at the servo filters. We tried to modify the filters so that we could bring enough phase margin, but could not get at it. So we put back the old filters as they were.

 attachment1: OLTF of the ALS XARM and YARM control loops

attachment2: Current phase budget. FM4 and FM10 are the boost filters.

II. ALS in-loop noise
Also, I found that the overall noise of the ALS servo has gone up by about two orders of magnitude (in Hz/rtHz) over the whole range of frequencies for both the arms from the last time the measurements were made. I suspect this could be from some change in the calibration factor. Did anybody touch things around that could have caused this? Or can somebody recollect any changes that I made in the past which might have affected the calibration? Anyways, I will do the calibration again.

 I fixed the XARM and YARM real time calibration servo.

I also change the C1CAL_MICH_A servo. Now the actuator response and the suspension TF are combined together and that filter name is BS_act. C1CAL_XARM_A and C1CAL_YARM_A have same kind of filters, ETMX_act and ETMY_act.

There are AI filter in each A servo and inv_AA, inv_DAA filters in CINV servo, but it's doesn't work correctly yet.

 Konecranes rescheduled the completion of the Vertex crane to Wednesday, Oct. 2

 These aren't servos. What he means is that he's changed some filters in the real time calibration screens so as to make the actuation and sensing parts more accurate, but the inversion of the AA filters is not accurate yet.

[Manasa, Masayuki]

The MC lost lock around 8+hrs ago. The transmission from PMC was 0.77 this morning, so we aligned the PSL to the PMC using the two steering mirrors before the PMC. We brought the PMC transmission to 0.841. We also aligned the MC, and the MC transmission reflection now is 0.59.

[Masayuki, Manasa]

Problem
We wanted to lock both the arms using ALS and get IR to resonate while arms are held using ALS. The X arm was locked using ALS and offsetter2 was used to scan the arm and find IR resonance. The Y arm was locked using ALS. But as the Y arm was brought closer to IR resonance, the X arm ALS loses lock. (attachment 1)

Discussion
We believe that this comes from the X and Y transmission not being well separated at the PSL table. The PBS is not sufficient to decouple them (A strong beatnote ~35dB between the X and the Y arm green lasers can be seen on the spectrum analyzer).

Solution
Decouple the X and Y arm transmitted beams at the PSL table. I am trying to find a wedged mirror/window that can separate the 2 beams at the PSL table before the beat PD (sadly the laseroptik HR532nm optics have no wedge)

[Masayuki, Manasa] 

Flowchart for ALS autolocker. The error signal thresholds will be decided by trial and error.

  I think we can use the IMC autolocker to start with getting this started. Once Jamie fixes the NDSSERVER environment variable bug, we should be able to use his more slick automation code to make it auto lock.

How can we improve the cleanliness of the 40m IFO room 104 ? May be Mario Batali crocs if you chief chef of the lab likes it. We can do more effective things.

Atm 1 is showing the lab air quality dependence on outside air  measured at the top of the IOO chamber. This made me to measure the   differential  pressure between lab and out side.

Properly sized air conditioner is over pressurizing it's room by 0.05 [" Water] like clean assembly room.

The 40m at Vertex location is barely getting pressurized to 0.01 " W

The control room is OK with 0.04 " W but it's air quality is very bad! It is 10x worse at 0.5 micron than IFO room.

Every entry from well pressurized control room into barely pressurized  IFO  pumps dirty air to our "clean room."

This door should be closed.

The drill- room entry is ideal because it is using the same air conditioner as the  main lab, therefore it has cleaner air.

Things to do: seal holes of CES walls, seal paint wall at south end so it will shed less, replace gas kits on doors.

I have plugged the cable tray space entering the control room above Rosalba.

 Probably more important is to establish quantitatively how particle counts affects the lock acquisition or noise in the interferometer.

We don't want to adopt a "Sky is Falling" mentality as was done previously in LIGO when people were trying to outlaw burritos and perfume.

Dust monitor counts and human noses do not correlate well with the interferometer's nose.

When the vacuum system is closed, we might check to see if particle counts correlate with losses in the PMC or excess scatter on the ISC tables. If not, we should move on to other concerns.

 [Manasa, Masayuki]

[revised at 10/1 pm 5:00]

As we mentioned in previous entry (elog#9171), the phase margin of ALS control was at most 20 degree. We modified the filter of C1ALS_XARM and C1ALS_YARM. The OLTF is in attachment1. Now the phase margins of both arms are more than 35 degree. I modified the FM5 filters of both servo.

FM5 filter is the filter for the phase compensation. It had the one pole at 1000 Hz and one zero at 1Hz. As you can see in attachment2, it start to lose the phase at 50 Hz. But the UGF of our ALS control loop is higher than 100 Hz, so I changed the pole from 1 kHz to 3 kHz in order to get more phase margin at UGF. The new servo have 10dB larger gain than previous filter at higer than 1kHz, but the control loop do nothing in that region, so it's no problem.

We have phase lag between 2 arms. I used same filters for both arms, so I'm wondering where these phase lag came from.

The smoke alarms were turned off and surrounding areas were covered with plastic.

The folding I-beam was ground down to be in level with the main beam.

Load bearing cable moved into correct position. New folding spring installed.

Crane calibration was done at 500 lbs at the end of the fully extended jib.

Than we realized that the rotating wheel limit switch stopped working.

This means that the crane is still out of order.

Message on 'pianosa':

Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/drgraefy/nds2-client/ubuntu/dists/lucid/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz  404  Not Found

As another proof that sometime is ill with ETMX Optical Lever:

We scanned the ETMX bias in PIT using ezcastep and saw that the OL response is very screwy. In the attached, you can see that the ETMX SUSPIT signal shows that the actual motion is good and linear. In fact, our sus diagonalization is extermely good and there's almost no signal in SUSYAW.

The PMC transmission was around 0.78 all day, rather than the usual 0.83ish.  Rana went out to the PSL table and fixed up the PMC alignment.  This should not need to be done very often, so things to check before touching the alignment are FSS / PMC settings (digital stuff).  Make sure that the PC RMS (on the FSS screen) is low (at least below 2, preferably below 1), and that the FSS Fast monitor is near 5ish (not near 0 or 10).  

This is a capture of PMC REFL's camera after Rana was finished. If it doesn't look this good when you finish then you are not done. Never do PMC alignment without looking at the PMC REFL camera.

The attached trend shows 80 days of PMC REFL and TRANS. The bad alignment stuff started on Sep 21-24 time period. You know who you are.

First up for me this evening was getting the PRMI locked.

I used the IFO configure screen to lock the X and Y arms, then aligned them using the ASS scripts.  Then used the IFO config screen to restore the Michelson, and did some fine tune tweaking of the BS alignment by looking at the AS camera.  Then, I restored the PRMI from the IFO config screen, tweaked the PRM a little bit in yaw, and was able to get a lock using REFL 165 I&Q for ~25 minutes before I got bored and unlocked things.  I used the ASS for the PRM to align the PRM, then turned off the ASS.  POP110 and POP22 both drifted down, but by a small amount, and at the end (when I turned the ASS back on for PRM), they picked back up to about their original levels.

(Note to self: to get it to print both plots, chose custom paper size, make it 14.5 by 11.  Don't ask why, just do it, because it works.  Also, in PNG device properties, increase the compression to 9.)

After I played with the PRMI, I started looking at the ALS system. 

I had both arms locked on IR using the regular LSC system (so POX and POY for the error signals).  Then I opened up the green shutters, and got both arms locked on green (so the green lasers were just following the arms...no digital ALS business).  I went out to the PSL table and tweaked up the alignment of the green beams (didn't need much at all, just an itsy bitsy bit in yaw, mostly).  I saw a very strong peak for the Yarm vs. PSL (around -19dBm), and there was a harmonic of that beat.  Opening and closing the Xarm green shutter had no effect on these peaks, so there wasn't any kind of X-Y cross beat sneaking around that I could see.  That's really as far as I got - I think (but haven't checked) that Manasa may have removed the power splitter / combiner, so that the RF analyzer is only looking at the Y beat PD (she mentioned earlier today that she was going to give that a try to narrow things down). 

After that, Rana and I went back to the PRMI for some noise stuff, and worked on the PMC.  See those separate elogs for info on those activites.

Sorry, that was an experiment to see if I could set up a general-use repository for the NDS packages.  I've removed it, and did an update/upgrade.

 As I was trying to solve the 2 arm ALS problem, I found the Y arm ALS not so stable AGAIN :( . I measured the in-loop noise of the X arm as ~400Hz/rtHz (60 picometers).

I went ahead and checked the out of loop noise of the ALS and found there is some high frequency noise creeping in above 20Hz for the Y arm ALS (blue curve). I checked the UGFs and phase margins of the phase tracker loops and found they were good (UGF above 1.4KHz and phase margins between 40 and 60 degrees).

So the suspect now is the PDH servo loop of both the arms which has to be checked.

Attached is the out-of loop noise plots of X and Y arm ALS.

 ETMY oplev laser clearly showing a tail when it was projected up the sealing.

PS (10-4-2013): I checked the beam quality again as it was removed from the table: it had a good image at 3 meters

 [Manasa, Masayuki]

We made a new flowchart of ALS autolocker. We added the additional step to find the beat note frequency. We have to find a way to read the PSL temperature. By reading the PSL temperature we can decide the sweep range for the end green laser temperature with the curve which measured in previous measurement (in this entry)

We have three thresholds of error signal. One is the threshold for checking the arms are stabilized or not. It should be some hundreds count. Another threshold is to check that the suspensions are not kicked. This should be some thousands counts (in flow chart, it is 2K counts). The other is to check the optimal servo gain. If the servo gain is too high, the UGF is also too high and we will not have enough gain margin. The error signal start to oscillate at the UGF. We will check this oscillation and find the optimal gain. In flow chart this threshold is 1K counts.

We found the PDH servo gain for Y arm green was set at 2 (too low). The gain was set to 8.6 (based on earlier OLTF measurement elog 8817).

The ALS out-of loop noise was remeasured. We also measured the out-of loop noise of each arm while the other arm had no green (shutter closed). There doesn't seem to be any difference in the noise (between green and orange for Y arm and red and pink for the X arm) except that the noise in the X arm was slightly low for the same conditions (blue and red)  when measurement was repeated.

TRANSLATION by Jenne:  We first locked both X and Y for IR using the LSC, and X and Y for green using the analog PDH servos.  We measured the _PHASE_OUT_Hz calibrated error signals for both X and Y in this configuration - this gives us the out of loop noise for the ALS system, the Green and Blue traces in the plot.  We then closed the X end shutter, and measured the Y arm's error signal (to check to see if there is any noise contribution from the suspected X-Y cross beatnote).  Then, we closed the Y end shutter, relocked the Xarm on green's 00 mode, and measured the X arm's error signal.  We weren't sure why the Pink curve was smaller than the Blue curve below a few Hz, so we repeated the original measurement with both arms dichroic.  We then got the Red curve.  So, we should ignore the blue curve (although I still wonder why the noise changed in such a short time period - I don't think we did anything other than unlock and relock the cavity), and just see that the Green and Gold curves look similar to one another, and the Red and Pink curves look similar to one another.  This tells us that at least the out of loop noise is not affected by any X-Y cross beatnote.