Last night, I plugged the ETMX suspension coils back into the satellite box. Tonight, we turned on the damping loops for ETMX. Rana centered the Oplev so we can use that as an additional diagnostic to see if the optic gets kicked around overnight. We will re-assess the situation tomorrow.

Sometime earlier today, Lydia noticed that the +/- 5V Sorensens at the X end were not displaying their nominal voltage/current values (as per the stickers on them). She corrected this.

Summary pages show no kicking in the ETMX watchdogs from midnight to 6 AM (0800 - 1400 UTC):

https://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:30889/detcharsummary/day/20170118/sus/watchdogs/

After the repair of the faulty LEMO cable, I left MC1 with it's watchdog off overnight. Unfortunately, it looks like the problem still persists. The first attachment shows a second trend plot for the past 15 hours. Towards the left end of the plot, you can see where I re-connected the LEMO cable for the LR/UR channels.

A couple of months ago, I added a BLRMS block for the IMC optics that calculates BLRMS for the shadow sensor output as well as the coil output. Looking at this trend overnight, I noticed that the glitches appear in the coil outputs as well, as shown in the plot below, which is for a 1 hour stretch last night (I used the full data from a 16Hz coil output channel and not the BLRMS, I am not sure if there is a DQ'ed version of the coil outputs?).

Zooming in further to one of these glitches, we can see that the glitches in the coil and shadow sensor signals are in fact coincident.

But given that the watchdog was turned off all this time, the only voltage going to the coils should be the DC bias voltages. So does this not support the hypothesis that the problem lies in the part of the signal chain that supplies the bias voltage to the coils?

Never mind, the "coil output" channel isn't a true readback of the voltage to the coil, but is the calculated damping output (which is not sent to the coils when the watchdog is shutdown...

As part of the ongoing debugging, I've switched the MC1 and MC3 satellite boxes. Both MC1 and MC3 have their watchdogs shudown for the moment.

In the last 3.5 hours, there has been nothing conclusive - no evidence of any glitching in either MC1 or MC3 sensor channels. I am going to hold off on doing the LEMO cable swap test for a few more hours, to see if we can rule out the satellite box.

Going through the last ~20 hours of data, the MC1 sensor channels look glitch free the entire period. However, there is a ~10min period around 1PM UTC today when there were a couple of glitches ~80 counts in size in all the MC3 sensor channels. The attached shows the full 2k data from all 10 channels (MC1 and MC3 sensors) around this time.

Is this sufficient evidence to conclude that the Satellite boxes are to blame? It's hard to explain why the glitches come and go in this fashion, and also the apparent difference in the length of time for which the glitches persist. Here, in almost 24 hours, there is one incidence of glitching, but in yesterday's trend plot, the glitching remains present over several hours... The amplitude of the glitches, and their coincidence in all 5 channels, seems consistent with what we have been seeing though...

Both suspensions have been relatively well behaved for the best part of the last two days, since I effected the Satellite Box swap. Today morning, I set about re-enabling the damping and locking the MC. Judging by the wall StripTool, it stayed locked for about 30 mins or so, after which the glitching returned.

Attached is a screenshot of the sensor signals from MC1 and MC3 (second trend), and also the highest band (>30Hz) BLRMS output for the same 10 channels (full data sampled at 16Hz). Note that MC1 and MC3 satellite boxes remain swapped. So the glitches now have migrated to the MC3 channels.

I need to think about whether this is just coincidence, or if me re-enabling the damping has something to do with the re-occurrence of the glitching...

Addendum 4.30pm: I've also re-aligned the Y arm. Its alignment has been stable over the last few hours, despite several mode cleaner lock losses in between, it recovers good IR transmission. The X arm has been re-aligned to green, but I can't get it locked to the IR - everytime I turn the LSC to ETMX on, there seems to be some large misalignment applied to it. c1iscaux was dead, I restarted it by keying the crate. I haven't had time to investigate the X arm locking in detail, I will continue to debug this.

On the control room monitors, I noticed that the IR TEM00 spot was moving around rather a lot in the Y arm. The last time this happened had something to do with the ETMY Oplev, so I took a look at the 30 day trend of the QPD sum, and saw that it was decaying steeply (Steve will update with a long term trend plot shortly). I noticed the RIN also seemed rather high, judging by how much the EPICS channel reading for the QPD sum was jumping around. Attached are the RIN spectra, taken with the OL spot well centered on the QPD and the arms locked to IR. Steve will swap the laser out if it is indeed the cluprit.

Summary:

I got around to doing this measurement today, using a minicircuits bi-directional coupler (ZFBDC20-61-HP-S+), along with some SMA-LEMO cables.

• With the IMC "well aligned" (MC transmission maximized, WFS control signals ~0), the RF power per quadrant into the Demod board is of the order of tens of pW up to a 100pW.
• With MC1 misaligned such that the MC transmission dropped by ~10%, the power per quadrant into the demod board is of the order of hundreds of pW.
• In both cases, the peak at 29.5MHz was well above the analyzer noise floor (>20dB for the smaller RF signals), which was all that was visible in the 1MHz span centered around 29.5 MHz (except for the side-lobes described later).
• There is anomalously large reflection from Quadrant 2 input to the Demod board for both WFS
• The LO levels are ~-12dBm, ~2dBm lower than the 10dBm that I gather is the recommended level from the AD831 datasheet

Details:

I first aligned the mode cleaner, and offloaded the DC offsets from the WFS servos.

The bi-directional coupler has 4 ports: Input, Output, Coupled forward RF and Coupled Reverse RF. I connected the LEMO going to the input of the Demod board to the Input, and connected the output of the coupler to the Demod board (via some SMA-LEMO adaptor cables). The two (20dB) coupled ports were connected to the Agilent spectrum analyzer, which have input impedance 50ohms and hence should be impedance matched to the coupled outputs. I set the analyzer to span 1MHz (29-30MHz), IF BW 30Hz, 0dB input attenuation. It was not necessary to turn on averaging to resolve the peaks at ~29.5MHz since the IF bandwidth was fine enough.

I took two sets of measurements, one with the IMC well aligned (I maximized the MC Trans as best as I could to ~15,000 cts), and one with a macroscopic misalignment to MC1 such that the MC Trans fell to 90% of its usual value (~13,500 cts). The peak function on the analyzer was used to read off the peak height in dBm. I then converted this to RF power, which is summarized in the table below. I did not account for the main line loss of the coupler, but according to the datasheet, the maximum value is 0.25dB so there numbers should be accurate to ~10% (so I'm really quoting more S.Fs than I should be).

For the well aligned measurement, there was ~0.4mW incident on WFS1, and ~0.3mW incident on WFS2 (measured with Ophir power meter, filter out).

I am not sure how to interpret the numbers for quadrants #2 and #6 in the first table, where the reverse coupled RF power was greater than the forward coupled RF power. But this measurement was repeatable, and even in the second table, the reverse coupled power from these quadrants are more than 10x the other quadrants. The peaks were also well above (>10dBm) the analyzer noise floor 

I haven't gone through the full misalginment -> Power coupled to TEM10 mode algebra to see if these numbers make sense, but assuming a photodetector responsivity of 0.8A/W, the product (P₁P₂) of the powers of the beating modes works out to ~tens of pW (for the IMC well aligned case), which seems reasonable as something like P₁~10uW, P₂ ~ 5uW would lead to P₁P₂~50pW. This discussion was based on me wrongly looking at numbers for the aLIGO WFS heads, and Koji pointed out that we have a much older generation here. I will try and find numbers for the version we have and update this discussion.

Misc:

1. For the sake of completeness, the LO levels are ~ -12.1dBm for both WFS demod boards (reflected coupling was negligible)
2. In the input signal coupled spectrum, there were side lobes (about 10dB lower than the central peak) at 29.44875 MHz and 29.52125 MHz (central peak at 29.485MHz) for all of the quadrants. These were not seen for the LO spectra.
3. Attached is a plot of the OSEM sensor signals during the time I misaligned MC1 (in both pitch and yaw approximately by equal amounts). Assuming 2V/mm for the OSEM calibration, the approximate misalignment was by ~10urad in each direction.
4. No IMC suspension glitching the whole time I was working today

This is probably just a confirmation of something we discussed a couple of weeks back, but I wanted to get more familiar with using the multi-coherence (using EricQs nice function from the pynoisesub package) as an indicator of how much feedforward noise cancellation can be achieved. In particular, in light of our newly improved WFS demod/whitening boards, I wanted to see if there was anything to be gained by adding the WFS to our current MCL feedforward topology.

I used a 1 hour data segment - the channels I looked at were the vertex seismometer (X,Y,Z) and the pitch and yaw signals of the two WFS, and the coherence of the uncorrelated part of these multiple witnesses with MCL. I tried a few combinations to see what is the theoretical best achievable subtraction:

1. Vertex seismometer X and Y channels - in the plot, this is "Seis only"
2. Seis + WFS 1 P & Y
3. Seis + WFS 2 P & Y
4. Seis + WFS 1 & 2 P
5. Seis + WFS 1 & 2 Y

The attached plot suggests that there is negligible benefit from adding the WFS in any combination to the MCL feedforward, at least from the point of view of theoretical achievable subtraction. 

I also wanted to put up a plot of the current FF filter performance, for which I collected 1 hour of data tonight with the FF on. While the feedforward does improve the MCL spectrum, I expected better performance judging by previous entries in the elog, which suggest that the FIR implementation almost saturates the achievable lower bound. The performance seems to have degraded particularly around 3Hz, despite the multi-coherence being near unity at these frequencies. Perhaps it is time to retrain the Weiner filter? I will also look into installation of the accelerometers on the MC2 chamber, which we have been wanting to do for a while now...

[gautam, lydia]

We rebooted c1psl, c1iscaux and c1aux which were all showing the typical symptom of responding to ping but not to telnet (and also blanked out epics fields on the MEDM screens). Keyed all these crates.

Restored burt snapshots for c1psl, PMC locked fine, and IMC is also locked now.

Johannes forgot to elog this yesterday, but he rebooted c1susaux following the usual procedure to avoid getting ITMX stuck. 

It was raised at the Wednesday meeting that I did not check the RF pickup levels while measuring the RF error signal levels into the Demod board. So I closed the PSL shutter, and re-did the measurement with the same measurement scheme. The detailed power levels (with no light incident on the WFS, so all RF pickup) is reported in the table below.

These numbers can be subtracted from the corresponding columns in the previous elog to get a more accurate estimate of the true RF error signal levels. Note that the abnormal behaviour of Quadrant #2 on both WFS demod boards persists.

I'm not sure if this is related, but since today morning, I've noticed that the data concentrator errors have returned. Looking at daqd.log, there is a 1 second timing mismatch error that is being generated. Usually, manually running ntpdate on the front ends fixes this problem, but it did not work today.

The coil and PD BLRMS are useful tools in identifying when glitches occur in the PD  readout, I thought it would be good to install them for ITMY, ETMX and SRM (since I plan to switch the MC3 satellite box, which we suspect to be problematic, with the SRM one). For this purpose, I had to install some IPC SHMEM blocks in C1SUS and recompile. 24 IPC channels were added to pipe the coil, PD and Oplev signals from C1SUS to C1PEM - the recompilation went smoothly, and it doesn't look like the model computation time has increased significantly or that the model is any closer to timing out.

However, I was unable to install the BLRMS blocks in C1PEM, as when I tried to compile the model with BLRMS for these extra 24 channels, I got a compilation error saying that I have exceeded the maximum allowed 499 testpoints per channel. Is there any workaround to this? It would be possible to create a custom BLRMS block that doesn't have all those testpoints, maybe this is the way to go? Especially if we want to install these channels for all our SOS optics, and also replace the current Seismic BLRMS with this scheme for consistency?

GV edit: I have implemented this scheme - after backing up the original BLRMS_2k part, I made a new one with no testpoints and only EPICS readouts. Doing so allowed me to recompile c1pem without any issues, the CPU time seems to have gone up by 3us from ~55us to 58us. So the BLRMS data record is only available at 16Hz, since there are no DQ channels in the BRLMS block - do we want these in any case? Let's see how this does over the weekend...

Some more details of our investigation:

1. Here is a spectrum of the signal to the power combiner on the PSL table, measured on the output of the RF AM Stabilization box.
   
   Perhaps these sidebands were the ones I observed while looking at the input to the WFS demod board.
2. The signal looked like a clean sinusoid when viewed on an oscilloscope with input impedance set to 50ohms. There were no sharp features or glitches in the time we observed, except when the 29.5 MHz MEDM slider was increased beyond 5, as noted by Lydia.
3. We couldn't find a schematic for this RF AM Stabilization servo, so we are not sure what RF output power to the EOM we should expect. Schematic has since been found.
4. I measured the power level at the input side (i.e. from the crystal) and found that it is ~12dBm, which seems reasonable (the front panel of the box housing the 29.5 MHz oscillator is labelled 13dBm). The schematic for the RF AM stabilization box says we should expect +10dBm at the input side, so all this points to a problem in the RF AM stabilization circuit...
5. There is an attenuator dial on the front panel of the said RF AM stabilization servo that allows one to tune the power to the LO input of the WFS. Right now, it is set to approximately 7dB of attentuation, which corresponds to -12dBm at the WFS demod board input. I did a quick check to see if turning the dial changed the signal level at the LO input of the WFS board. The dial moves in clicks of 1dB, and the RF power at the LO input of the demod board increased/decreased by ~1dBm for each click the dial was rotated (I only explored the region 3dB-11dB of atttentuation). So it should be possible to increase the LO level to the WFS demod boards, is there any reason we shouldn't increase this to -8bBm (~0.25Vpp into 50ohms, which is around the level Koji verified the mixer to be working well at)?
6. There were a couple of short ribbon cables which were just lying around on top of the cards in the eurocrate, Koji tells me that these were used as tester cables for checking the whitening filters and that they don't serve any purpose now. These have been removed.
7. Added a button to IMC MEDM screen to allow easy access to the MEDM screen with slider to control the 29.5MHz modulation depth - though as mentioned in Lydia's elog, at the moment, this slider has no effect on the 29.5MHz power level to the EOM...
   

[johannes, gautam]

We pulled out the RF AM stabilization box from the 1X2 rack. PSL shutter was closed, marconi output, RF distribution box and RF AM stabilization box were turned off in that order. We had to remove the 4 rack nut screws on the RF distribution box because of the stiff cables which prevented the RF AM stabilization box extraction. I've left the marconi output and the RF distribution boxes off, and have terminated all open SMA connections with 50 ohm terminators just in case. Rack nuts for RF distribution box have been removed, it is currently sitting on a metal plate that is itself screwed onto the rack. I deemed this a stable enough ledge for the box to sit on in the short run, while we debug the RF AM stabilization box. We will work on the debugging and re-install the box as soon as we are done...

> What is the probe situation? Ought to use a high impedance FET probe to measure this or else the scope would load the circuit.

We did indeed use the active probe, with the 100:1 attenuator in place. The values Lydia has quoted have 40dB added to account for this.

> What kind of HELA are the HELA amplifiers? Please a link to the data sheet if you can find it. I wonder what the gain and NF are at 30 MHz. I think the HELA-10D should be a good variant

The HELA is marked as HELA-10. It doesn't have the '+' suffix but according to the datasheet, it seems like it is just not RoHS compliant. It isn't indicated which of the varieties (A-D) is used either on the schematic or the IC, only B and D are 50ohms. For all of them, the typical gain is 11-12dB, and NF of 3.5dB.

I've been suggesting that there may be something wonky with the Seismic Rainbow Striptool on the wall for the last couple of weeks. Here are a few things that were verified today.

1. If you want to restore the StripTools in the control room, just run /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/general/startStrip.sh. I have verified as of today that this works, and in future, any changes to channels/limits/colors of traces etc should be reflected in this script.
2. Though some of the BLRMS bands have looked anomalous over the last few weeks, in particular the 0.3-1Hz band. The attached 120 day trend plot suggests that there hasn't been any dramatic change recently. In fact, looking on the summary pages, Rana noticed that today was an unusually low 0.3-1Hz activity day..

I've added the schematic of the RF AM stabilization board to the 40m PSL document tree, after having created a new DCC document for our 40m edits. Pictures of the board before and after modification will also be uploaded here...

I had noticed something wonky with the microphone, but neglected to elog it. I had tested it after installation by playing a sine wave from my laptop and looking at the signal on the PSL table, it worked fine. But you can see in the attached minute trend plot that the signal characteristics changed abruptly ~half a day after installation, and never quite recovered.\

Rana motivated me to take a step back and reframe the objectives and approach for this project, so I am collecting some thoughts here on my understanding of it. As I write this, some things still remain unclear to me, so I am leaving these as questions here for me to think about...

Objectives: 

1. The PSL is locked to the IMC cavity - but at frequencies near 1 Hz, the laser frequency is forced to follow the IMC cavity length fluctuations, even though the free-running PSL frequency noise at those frequencies is lower. This excess is also imprinted on the arms when locked to the IR. We would like to improve the situation by feeding back a portion of the MC PDH error signal to the cavity length actuator to stabilize the MC cavity length at low frequencies. Moreover, we would like this loop to not imprint additional control noise in the arm control signals, which is a problem we have observed with the existing MCL loop. 
    
2. The borader goal here is to use this project as a case study for designing the optimal loop and adaptive feedback. Can we come up with an algorithm, which takes
   • A model of our system (made with measured data where possible)
   • A list of our requirements (e.g. in this case, frequency noise requirements in various frequency bands, smooth crossovers between the various loops that enable locking the PSL to the IMC cavity and avoid injecting excess control noise into the plant)

and come up with the best loop that meets all our rquirements? What constitutes the "best" loop? How do we weight the relative importance of our various requirements? 

Proposed approach:

For the specific problem of making the MCL feedback loop better, the approach I have in mind right now is the following:

1. Build a model of the 40m IMC loop. Ultimately the performance of the loop we implement will depend on the transfer function from various additive noise sources and disturbances in the feedback loop (e.g. electronics noise) to the output (i.e. laser frequency). Building an accurate model will allow us to quantify the performance of the proposed control loop, and hence, optimize it with some algorithm. I did some work on a simplistic, purely analytical model of the two MC loops (MCF and MCL), but Rana pointed out that it is better to have something more realistic for this purpose. I have inherited his Simulink models, which I will now adapt to reflect the 40m topology. 
2. Come up with a list of requirements for the MCL controller. Some things that come to mind:
   • Reduce the arm control signal spectral amplitude below 20 Hz
   • Not increase the arm control signal spectral amplitude above 20 Hz
   • Crossover smoothly with the FSS slow temperature control loop and the MCF loop. 
   • What factor of suppression are we looking for? What is achievable? Once I build the model, it should shed some light on these..
   • Is the PMC a more stable frequency reference than the NPRO crystal at low frequencies? This measurement by Koji seems to suggest that it isn't (assuming the 1e4 product for the NPRO free-running frequency noise)..
3. Once we have a model and a satisfactory list of requirements, design a control loop that meets these using traditional techniques, i.e. desired tracking error in the control band of 0.1-20 Hz (is this possible? The model will tell us...), gain and phase margin requirements etc. But this need not necessarily be the optimal controller that meets all of our requirements
4. Optimize the controller - how? Can we define an objective function that, for example, rewards arm control signal suppression and penalizes injection of control noise, and just fminsearch in the [z,p,k] parameter space of the controller? Is there a smarter way to do this?
5. Can this algorithm be adaptive, and optimize the controller to adapt to prevailing seismic conditions for example? Is this the same as saying we have a model that is accurate enough for us to predict the response of the plant to environmental disturbances? 

My immediate goal is to have the Simulink model updated.

Thoughts/comments on the above will be appreciated...

Had to reboot c1psl, c1susaux, c1auxex, c1auxey and c1iscaux today. PMC has been relocked. ITMX didn't get stuck. According to this thread, there have been two instances in the last 10 days in which c1psl and c1susaux have failed. Since we seem to be doing this often lately, I've made a little script that uses the netcat utility to check which slow machines respond to telnet, it is located at /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/cds/testSlowMachines.bash.

The script can be executed by ./testSlowMachines.bash.

I've edited Rana's Simulink model to reflect the current IMC servo topology (to the best of my understanding). I've tried to use Transfer Function blocks wherever possible so that we can just put in the appropriate zpk model in the script that will linearize the whole loop. I've also omitted the FSS SLOW loop for now.

I've been looking through some old elogs and it looks like there have been several modifications to both the MC servo board (D040180) and the TT FSS Box (D040105). I think it is easiest just to measure these TFs since the IMC is still down, so I will set about doing that today. There is also a Pomona Box between the broadband EOM and the output of the TT FSS box, which is meant to sum in the modulation for PMC locking, about which I have not yet found anything on the elog.

So the next steps are:

1. Measure/estimate all the unknown TFs and gains in this schematic
2. Linearize the model, get the OLG, see if the model matches previously measured OLGs (with the MCL part disabled)
3. Once the model is verified to be correct, look at couplings of various noise sources in the MCL part of the loop, and come up with a suitable controller.

If anyone sees something wrong with this topology, please let me know so that I can make the required changes.

A few minutes back, I glanced up at the control room StripTool and noticed that the MCREFL PD DC level had gone up from ~0 to ~0.7, even though the PSL shutter was closed. This seemed bizzare to me. Strangely, simply cycling the shutter returned the value to the expected value of 0. I wonder if this is just a CDS problem to do with c1iool0 or c1psl? (both seem to be responding to telnet though...)

Since things look to be back to normal, I am going to start with my characterization of the various TFs in the IMC FSS loop...

Quick summary elog, details to follow. I did the following:

• Updated the Simulink model based on Koji's feedback. 
• Today morning, I measured the (electronic) open-loop TFs of
  • MC Servo Board
  • FSS Fast path (PZT)
  • FSS PC Drive path
• The summing amplifiers in the latter two paths are assumed to be broadband for the purposes of this model.

The measurements I have look reasonable. But I had a hard time trying to look at the schematic and determine what is the appropriate number and locations of poles/zeros with which to fit the measured transfer function. Koji and I spent some time trying to go through the MC Servo board schematic, but looks like the version uploaded on the 40m DCC tree doesn't have changes made to it reflected (we compared to pictures on the 40m google photos page and saw a number of component values were different). Since the deviation between fit and measurement only occurs above 1MHz (while using poles/zeros inferred from the schematic), we decided against pulling out the servo board and investigating further - but this should be done at the next opportunity. I've marked the changes we caught on a schematic and will upload it to the 40m DCC page, and we can update this when we get the chance.

So it remains to fit the other two measured TFs, and add them to the Simulink model. Then the only unknown will be the PDH discriminant, which we anyway want to characterize given that we will soon have much more modulation.  

Data + plots + fits + updated schematics to follow...

I'd like to fix a few things at 1X1 when we plug in the new amplifier for the 29.5MHz modulation signal. 

1. Split off separate +24 and ground wires to the green BBPD RF amplifiers and the AOM driver (they are sharing a single fuse at the moment)
2. Tap a new +24 GND -24V set for the FSS Fast summing box - this is currently running with a bench power supply underneath the PSL table set to +/-18V, but I checked the 7815/7915 datasheets and they accept up to 35V input for a 15V output, so it should be fine to use 24V
3. Hook up the ZHL-2A for the IMC modulation.

Steve has ordered rolls of pre-twisted wire to run from 1X1 to the PSL table, so that part can be handled later.

But at 1X1, we need to tap new paths from +/- 24V to the DIN connectors. I think it's probably fine to turn off the two Sorensens, do the wiring, and then turn them back on, but is there any procedure for how this should be done? 

Here are the details as promised.

Attachment #1: Updated simulink model. Since I haven't actually run this model, all the TF blocks are annotated "???", but I will post an updated version once I have run the model (and fix some of the questionable aesthetic choices)

Attachment #2: Measured and fitted transfer functions from the "IN1" input (where the demodulated MC REFL goes) to the "SERVO" output of the MC servo board (to FSS box). As mentioned in my previous elog, I had to put in a pole (fitted to be at ~2MHz, called pole 9 in the plot) in order to get good agreement between fit an measurement up to 10MHz. I didn't bother fitting all the high frequency features. Both gain sliders on the MEDM screen ("IN1 Gain" and "VCO gain") were set to 0dB for this measurement, while the super boosts were all OFF.

Attachment #3: Measured and fitted transfer function from "TEST 1 IN" to "FAST OUT" of the FSS box. Both gains on the FSS MEDM screen ("Common gain adjust" and "fast gain adjust") were set to 0dB for this measurement. I didn't need any ad-hoc poles and zeros for this fit (i.e. I can map all the fitted poles and zeros to the schematic), but the fit starts to deviate from the measurement just below 1 MHz.. perhaps I need to add a zero above 1MHz, but I can't see why from the schematic...

Attachment #4: Measured TF from "TEST 1 IN" to "PC OUT" on the FSS box. MEDM gains were once again 0dB. I can't get a good fit to this, mainly because I can't decipher the poles and zeros for this path from the schematic (there are actually deviations from the schematic posted on the 40m DCC page in terms of component values, I will try and correct whatever I notice) . I'll work on this...

Attachment #5: Data files + .fil files used to fit the data with LISO

Most of the model has come together, I am not too far from matching the modelled OLG to the measured OLG. So I will now start thinking about designing the controller for the MCL part (there are a couple of TFs that have to be measured for this path).

Lydia finished up installing the new RF amplifier, and will elog the details of the installation.

I wanted to try and measure the IMC OLG to compare against my Simulink model. So I went about performing a few checks. Summary of my findings:

1. The amplifier seems to be working fine. I checked powers at the input, output to EOM and output to distribution box (that serves the various LOs) first with a 30dB attenuator at the input, and subsequently with the design choice of 5dB attenuator at the input. Everything seemed in order.
2. I installed a 30 dB attenuator at the MC REFL PD input to the demod board since my (rough) calculations suggested that our modifications would have resulted in the RF beat power between carrier and sideband increasing in power by ~27dB.
3. I then opened the PSL shutter and tried locking the IMC - with manual tweaking of the various gains, I was able to lock.
4. But getting to this point took me a while so I couldn't get an OLG measurement in.

TBC tomorrow, I'm leaving the PSL shutter closed and the RF source off for tonight...

Rana and I spent some time looking at the IMC demod board earlier today. I will post the details shortly, but there was a label on the front panel which said that the nominal LO level to the input should be -8dBm. The new 29.5MHz routing scheme meant that the LO board was actually being driven at 0dBm (that too when the input to the RF distribution box was attenuated by 5dB).

An elog search revealed this thread, where Koji made some changes to the demod board input attenuators. Rana commented that it isn't a good idea to have the LO input be below 0dBm, so after consulting with Koji, we decided that we will

• Remove the 5dB attenuator to the input of the distribution box such that the LO is driven at ~5dBm
• Remove the input 10dB attenuator, first ERA-5SM amplifier, and the mini circuits power splitter from the demod board (schematic to follow).

After implementing these changes, and testing the board with a Marconi on the workbench, I found that the measured power levels (measured with an active FET probe) behave as expected, up till the ERA-5SM immediately prior to the LO (U4 and U6 on the schematic). However, the power after this amplifier (i.e. the input to the on-circuit LO, Minicircuits JMS-1H, which we want to be +17dBm), is only +16dBm. The input to these ERA-5SMs, which are only ~2years old, is -2dBm, so with the typical gain of +20dB, I should have 18dBm at their output. Moreover, increasing the input power to the board from the Marconi doesn't linearly increase the output from the ERA-5SM. Just in case, I replaced one of the ERA-5SMs, but observed the same behaviour, even though the amplifier shouldn't be near saturation (the power upstream of the ERA-5SM does scale linearly).

This needs to be investigated further, so I am leaving the demod board pulled out for now...

29.5 MHz RF Modulation Source

• The +13dBm from the Wenzel oscillator gets amplified to +27dBm by a ZHL-2-S. There is a 5dB attenuator on the input to the amplifier to avoid compression/saturation.
• The amplified output goes to the EOM (+26dBm measured at the rack, no measurement done at the input to the triple-resonant circuit box yet), while a 10dB coupled part goes to the RF distribution box which splits the input into 16 equal parts. The outputs were measured to spit out +5dBm.
• 2 of these go to the WFS demod boards - it was verified that this level of drive is okay for the comparator chips on the demod board.
• A third output goes to the IMC Demod board. The demod board was modified so that the nominal LO input level is now +5dBm (details below).
• The remaining outputs are all terminated with 50ohms.

IMC Demodulation Board

• The input attenuator, amplifier and power splitter were removed.
• Schematic with changes marked and power levels measured, along with a high-res photograph (taken with our fancy new Macro lens + LED light ring) has been uploaded to a page I made to track changes for this part on the DCC (linked to 40m document tree).
• After making the changes, it was verified that the power levels in the signal chain were appropriate up till the input to the ERA-5SM amplifier directly before the LO. These levels were deemed appropriate, and also scaled in a predictable manner with the input power. As Koji mentions in the previous elog, the dynamically changing input impedance of the mixer makes it difficult to measure the LO level at this point, but I am satisfied that it is within ~1dBm of the nominal +17dBm the mixer wants.
• The board was further checked for gain imbalance and orthogonality of the I and Q outputs. The graphic below show that there is negligible gain imbalance, but the relative phase between the I and Q channels is ~78 degrees (they should be 90 degrees). Of course this doesn't matter for the IMC locking as we only use the I phase signal, but presumably, we want to understand this effect and compensate for it. 
  
  
• The label on the front panel has been updated to reflect the fact that the nominal LO input is now +5dBm
• The demodulation phase had changed since the RF signal change was modified - Rana and I investigated this effect on Monday morning, and found that a new ~1.5m long cable was needed to route the signal from the RF distribution box to the LO input of the demod board, which I made. Subsequent modifications on the demod board meant that an extra ~10cm length was needed, so I just tacked on a short length of cable. All of the demodulated signal is now in the I output of the demod board (whereas we had been using the Q output).
• The graphics below confirms that claim above. Note the cool feature on the digital scopes that the display persistence can be set to "infinity"!
      

I wanted to do a quick check to see if the observed signal levels were in agreement with tests done on the workbench with the Marconi. The mixers used, JMS-1H, have an advertised conversion loss of ~7dB (may be a little higher if we are not driving the LO at +17dBm). The Lissajous ellipse above is consistent with these values. I didn't measure powers with the MC REFL PD plugged into the demod board, but the time series plot above suggest that I should have ~0dBm power in the MC REFL PD signal at 29.5MHz for the strongest flashes (~0.3Vpp IF signal for the strong flashes). 

MC Servo Board

• As mentioned above, we now use the I phase signal for lMC PDH locking.
• This has resulted in an overall sign change of the servo. I have updated the MEDM screen to reflect that "MINUS" is the correct polarity now..
• To set the various gains, I measured the OLTF for various configurations using the usual IN1/IN2 prescription on the MC Servo Board (using the Agilent analyzer). 
• I started at 0dBm "In1 Gain", and the nominal (old) values for "VCO gain", "FSS Common Gain" and "FSS FAST gain"  and found that though I could lock the MC, I couldn't reliably turn on the boosts.
• After some tweaking, I settled on +10dB "In1 Gain". Here, locking was much more reliable, and I was able to smoothly turn on the Super Boosts. The attached OLTF measurement suggests a UGF of ~118kHz and phase margin of a little more than 30 degrees. There is room for optimization here, since we have had UGFs closer to 200kHz in the recent past. 
  
• I didn't get around to measuring the actual PZT/EOM crossover yesterday. But I did measure the OLTF for various values of the FSS gains. At the current value of +20dBm, the PC drive signal is hovering around 1.5V. This bit of optimization needs to be done more systematically. 
• I've edited mcup and mcdown to reflect the new gains. 
  

Some general remarks

• The whole point of this exercise was to increase the modulation depth for the 29.5MHz signal. 
• By my estimate, assuming 8mrad/V modulation index for the EOM and a gain of 0.6 at 29.5 MHz in the triple resonant box, we should have 100mrad of modulation after installing the amplifier (compared to 4mrad before the change). 
• The actual RF power at 29.5 MHz at the input/output of the triple resonant box has not yet been measured. 
• The WFS input error signal levels have to be re-measured (so I've turned off the inputs to the digital WFS filters for now)

I was a little confused why the In1 Gain had to be as high as +10dB - before the changes to the RF chain, we were using +27dB, and we expect the changes made to have increased the modulation depth by a factor of ~25, so I would have expected the new In1 Gain to be more like 0dB.

While walking by the PSL table, I chanced upon the scope monitoring PMC transmission, and I noticed that the RIN was unusually high (see the scope screenshot below). We don't have the projector on the wall anymore, but it doesn't look like this has shown up in the SLOW monitor channel anyways. Disabling the MC autolocker / closing the PSL shutter had no effect. I walked over to the amplifier setup in 1X2, and noticed that the SMA cable connecting the output of the amplifier to the EOM drive was flaky. By touching the cable a little, I noticed that the trace on the scope appeared normal again. Turning off the 29.5MHz modulation source completely returned the trace to normal.

So I just made a new cable of similar length (with the double heat shrink prescription). The PMC transmission looks normal on the scope now. I also re-aligned the PMC for good measure. So presumably, we were not driving the EOM with the full +27dBm of available power. Now, the In1 Gain on the MC servo board is set to +2dB, and I changed the nominal FSS FAST gain to +18dB. The IMC OLTF now has a UGF of ~165kHz, though the phase margin is only ~27 degrees.. 

PZT Buzzer Box (Thorlabs HV Supply + Manual + 2*PZT Buzzers) ---> Cryo Lab (Brittany + Aaron)

Following the discussion at the meeting today, I wanted to finish up the WFS tuning and then hand over the IFO to Johannes for his loss stuff. So I did the following:

1. First I set the dark offsets on the WFS (with PSL shutter closed). Then I hand aligned the MC to maximize transmission, centered the beam on the WFS, and set the RF offsets with the MC unlocked.
2. Given that the demod phase for the IMC PDH demodulation board changed by |45 degrees|, I tried changing the digital demod phases in each of the WFS quadrant signals by +/- 45 degrees. Turns out +45 degrees put all the error signal into the I Phase, which is what we use for the WFS loops.
3. Then I attempted to check the WFS loops. I estimated that we have ~25 times the modulation depth now, so I reduced the WFS1/2 P/Y gains by this factor (but left the MC2 TRANS P/Y gains as is). The loop gain seemed overall too low, so I upped the gain till I saw instability in the loop (error signals ringing up). Then I set the loop gains to 1/3 of this value - it was 0.01 before, and I found the loop behaved well (no oscillations, MC TRANS stabilized) at a gain of 0.002.

At this point, I figured I would leave the WFS in this state and observe its behaviour overnight. But abruptly, the IMC behaviour changed dramatically. I saw first that the IMC had trouble re-acquiring lock. Moreover, the PC Drive seemed saturated at 10.0V, even when there was no error signal to the MC Servo board. Looking at the MEDM screen, I noticed that the "C1-IOO_MC_SUM_MON" channel had picked up a large (~3V) DC offset, even with In1 and In2 disabled. Moreover, this phenomenon seemed completely correlated with opening/closing the PSL shutter. Johannes and I did some debugging to make sure that this wasn't a sticky button/slider issue, by disconnecting all the cables from the front panel of the servo board - but the behaviour persisted, there seemed to be some integration of the above-mentioned channel as soon as I opened the PSL shutter.

Next, I blocked first the MC REFL PD, and then each of the WFS - turns out, if the light to WFS2 was blocked and the PSL shutter opened, there was no integrating behaviour. But still, locking the MC was impossible. So I suspected that something was wrong with the LO inputs to the WFS Demod Boards. Sure enough, when I disconnected and terminated those outputs of the RF distribution box, I was able to re-lock the MC fine.

I can't explain this bizzare behaviour - why should an internal monitor channel of the MC Servo board integrate anything when the only input to it is the backplane connector (all front panel inputs physically disconnected, In1 and In2 MEDM switches off)? Also, I am not sure how my work on the WFS could have affected any hardware - I did not mess around at the 1X1 rack in the evening, and the light has been incident on the WFS heads for the past few days. The change in modulation depth shouldn't have resulted in the RF power in this chain crossing any sort of damage threshold since the measured power before the changes was at the level of -70dBm, and so should be at most -40dBm now (at the WFS demod board input). The only thing different today was that the digital inputs of the WFS servos were turned on...

So for tonight I am leaving the two outputs of the RF distribution box that serve as the LO for the WFS demod boards terminated, and have also blocked the light to both WFS with beam blocks. The IMC seems to be holding lock steady, PC drive levels look normal...

Unrelated to this work, but I have committed to the svn the updated versions of the mcup and mcdown scripts, to reflect the new gains for the autolocker...

Summary:

Craig and I have been trying to put together a Simulink diagram of the proposed alternative calibration scheme. Each time I talk the idea over with someone, I convince myself it makes sense, but then I try and explain it to someone else and get more confused. Probably I am not even thinking about this in the right way. So I am putting what I have here for comments/suggestions.

What's the general idea?

Suppose the PSL is locked to the MC cavity, and the AUX laser is locked to the arm cavity (with sufficiently high BW). Then by driving a line in the arm cavity length, and beating the PSL and AUX lasers, we can determine how much we are modulating the arm cavity length in metres by reading out the beat frequency between the two lasers, provided the arm cavity length is precisely known.

So we need:

1. Both lasers to be stabilized to be able to sense the line we are driving
2. A high bandwidth PDH loop for locking the AUX laser to the arm cavity such that the AUX laser frequency is able to track the line we are driving
3. An accurate and precise way to read out the beat frequency (the proposal here is to use an FPGA based readout)
4. An accurate measurement of the arm length (I think we know the arm lengths to <0.1% so this shouldn't dominate any systematic error).

To be able to sense a 1kHz line being driven at 1e-16 m amplitude, I estimate we need a beat note stability of ~1mHz/rtHz at 1kHz.

Requirements and what we have currently:

• The PSL is locked to the mode-cleaner, and the arm cavity is locked to the PSL. The former PDH loop is high BW, and so we expect the stabilized PSL to have frequency noise of ~1mHz/rtHz at about 1kHz (to be measured and confirmed)
• The AUX laser is locked to the arm cavity with a medium-BW (~10kHz UGF) PDH servo. From past out-of-loop ALS beat measurements, I estimate the expected frequency noise of the AUX laser at 1kHz to be ~1Hz/rtHz with the current PDH setup
• Rana suggested we "borrow" the stability of the PSL by locking the AUX laser and PSL in a high bandwidth PLL - if we want this loop to have ~300kHz BW, then we need to use an EOM as an actuator. The attached Simulink diagram (schematic representation only, though I think I have measurements of many of those transfer functions/gains anyways) shows the topology I had in mind. Perhaps I did not understand this correctly, but if we have such a loop with high gain at 1kHz, and the error signal being the beat between PSL and AUX, won't it squish the modulation we are applying @1kHz?
• Is it feasible to instead add a parallel path to the end PDH loop with an EOM as an actuator (similar to what we do for the IMC locking)? Ideally, what we want is an end PDH loop which squishes the free-running NPRO noise to ~1mHz/rtHz at 1kHz instead of the 1Hz/rtHz we have currently. This loop would then also have negligible tracking error at 1kHz. Then, we could have a low bandwidth PLL offloading onto the temperature of the crystal to keep the beat between the two lasers hovering around the PSL frequency.

Hardware:

On the hardware side of things, we need:

• Broadband EOM
• FSS box to drive the EOM (Rana mentioned there is a spare available in the Cryo lab)

Koji and I briefly looked through the fiber inventory we have yesterday. We have some couplers (one mounted) and short (5m) patch fibers. But I think the fiber infrastructure we have in place currently is adequate - we have the AUX light brought to the PSL table, and there is a spare fiber running the other way if we want to bring the PSL IR to the end as well.

I need to also think about where we can stick the EOM in given physical constraints on the EX table and the beam diameter/aperture of EOM...

[Koji, gautam]

Turns out the "problem" with WFS2 and the apparent offset accumulation on the IMC Servo board is probably a slow machine problem.

Today, Koji and I looked at the situation a little more closely. This anomalous behaviour of the C1:IOO-MC_SUM channel picking up an offset seems correlated with light being incident on WFS2 head. Placing an ND filter in front of WFS 2 slowed down the rate of accumulation (though it was still present). But we also looked at the in-loop error signal on the IMC board (using the "Out 2" BNC on the front panel), and this didn't seem to show any offset accumulation. Anyways, the ability of the Autolocker doesn't seem to be affected by this change, so I am leaving the WFS servo turned on.

The new demod phases (old +45degrees) and gains (old gains *0.2) have been updated in the SDF table. It remains to see that the WFS loops don't drag the alignment over longer timescales. I will post a more detailed analysis here over the weekend...

Also, we thought it would be nice to have DQ channels for the WFS error signals for analysis of the servo (rather than wait for 30 mins to grab live fine resolution spectra of the error signals with the loop On/Off). So I have added 16 DQ channels [recorded at 2048 Hz] to the c1ioo model (for the I and Q demodulated signal from each quadrant for the 8 quadrants). The "DRATE" for the c1ioo model has increased from ~200 to 410. Comparing to the "DRATE" of c1lsc, which is around 3200, we think this isn't significantly stretching the DAQ abilities of the c1ioo model...

Here is a comparison of the error signal spectra after increasing the IMC modulation depth, to the contribution with RF inputs / whitening inputs terminated (which I borrowed from Koji's characterization of the same in Dec 2016, these shouldn't have changed).

Some general observations:

1. This data was taken with the WFS servos disabled, but with the IMC hand-aligned to a good state (MC_TRANS ~15,000). The error signal spectra are from the new DQ channels (but still sampled at 2048Hz, I had not implemented the change to 512Hz).
2. The error signals seem to have increased by ~25x , which is consistent with how much we expect the modulation depth to have increased
3. The bump around 1 Hz is now cleaerly visible in all 16 channels, as is the bounce peak at 16Hz (relative to Dec 2016). In general, between 0.1Hz and 5Hz, there is now a fair bit of daylight between the error signals and the electronics noise contribution. 

I will update with the in-loop error signal spectra, which should give us some idea of the loop bandwidth.

I will look into lowering the sampling rate, and how much out-of-band power is aliasing into the 0-256 Hz band and update with my findings.

I've now made a DCC page for the mirror specifications, all revisions should be reflected there.

Over the last couple of days, I've been playing around with Rana's coating optimization code to come up with a coating design that will work for us. The basic idea is a to use MATLAB's particle swarm constrained optimization tool to minimize an error function that is a composite of four penalties:

1. Thermal noise - we use the proxy function from E0900068-v3 to do this
2. Deviation from target T @1064nm, p-pol
3. Deviation from target T @532nm, p and s-pol
4. HR Surface field

On the AR side, I only considered 2 and 3. The weighting of these four components were set somewhat arbitrarily, but I seem to be able to get reasonable results so I am going with this for now. 

From my first pass at it, the numbers I've been able to get, for 19 layer pairs, are (along with some plots):

HR Side:

• T = 50ppm, 1064nm p-pol
• T = 99%, 532nm s and p-pol

       (in this picture, the substrate is to the right of layer 38)

AR Side:

• R ~50ppm for 532nm, s and p-pol

   (substrate to the right of layer 38)

These numbers are already matching the specs we have on the DCC page currently. I am not sure how much better we can get the specs on the HR side keeping with 19 layer pairs... 

All of this data, plus the code used to generate them, is on the gitlab coatings page...

Since it would be nice to have the latest version of Matlab, with all its swanky new features (?), available on the control room computers and Optimus, I downloaded Matlab R2016b and activated it with the Caltech Campus license. I installed it into /cvs/cds/caltech/apps/linux64/matlab16b. Specifically, I would like to run the coating optimization code on Optimus, where I can try giving it more stringent convergence criterion to see if it converges to a better spot.

I trust that this way, we don't interfere with any of the rtcds stuff.

If I've done something illegal license-wise or if this is likely to cause havoc, please point me to what is the correct way to do this.

GV 18 Mar 2017: Though I installed this using the campus network license key, this seems to only work on Rossa. If I run it on the other control room machines/Optimus, it throws up a licensing error. I will check with Larry W. as to how to resolve this...

The alignment wasn't disturbed for the photo-taking - I just re-checked that the spot is indeed incident on the MC REFL PD. MC REFL appeared dark because I had placed a physical beam block in the path to avoid accidental PSL shutter opening to send a high power beam during the photo-taking. I removed this beam block, but MC wouldn't lock. I double checked the alignment onto the MC REFL PD, and verified that it was ok.

Walking over to the 1X1, I noticed that the +24V Sorensen that should be pushing 2.9A of current when our new 29.5MHz amplifier is running, was displaying 2.4A. This suggests the amplifier is not being powered. I toggled the power switch at the back and noticed no difference in either the MC locking behaviour or the current draw from the Sorensen.

To avoid driving a possibly un-powered RF amplifier, I turned off the Marconi and the 29.5MHz source. I can't debug this anymore tonight so I'm leaving things in this state so that Lydia can check that her box works fine...

I've been sitting on some data for a while now which I finally got around to plotting. Here is a quick summary:

Attachment #1: I applied a step input to the offset of each of the six WFS loops and observed the step response. The 1/e time constant for all 4 WFS loops is <10s suggesting a bandwidth a little above 0.1Hz. However, the MC2 P and Y loops have a much longer time contant of ~150s. Moreover, it looks like the DC centering of the spot on the QPD isn't great - the upper two quadrants (as per the MEDM screen) have ~3x the cts of the lower pair.
I did not (yet) try increasing the gain of this loop to see if this could be mitigated. I accidentally saved this as a png, I will put up the pdf plot

Attachment #2: This is a comparison of the WFS error signals with the loops engaged (solid lines) vs disabled (dashed lines). Though these measurements were taken at slightly different times, they are consistent with the WFS loop bandwidths being ~0.1Hz.

Attachment #3: Comparison of the spectra of the testpoint channels and their DQ counterparts at the same time which are sampled at 512Hz. It does not look like there is any dramatic aliasing going on, although it is hard to tell what exactly is the order of the digital AA filter implemented by the RCG. Further investigation remains to be done... For reference, here are some notes: T1600059, T1400719

GV 7 March 2017 6pm: It looks like we use RCG v2.9.6, so it should be the latter document that is applicable. I've been going through some directories to try and find the actual C-code where the filter coeffs are defined, but have been unsuccessful so far...

For a few days now, the "code status" page has been telling us that the summary pages are DEAD, even though the pages themselves seemed to be generating plots. I logged into the 40m shared account on the cluster and checked the status of the condor job (with condor_q), and did not find anything odd there. I decided to consult Max, who pointed out that the script that checks the code status (/home/40m/DetectorChar/bin/checkstatus) was looking for a particular string in the log files ("gw_daily_summary"), while the recent change in the default output of condor_q meant that the string actually being written to the log files was "gw_daily_summa". This script has now been modified to look for instances of "gw_daily" instead, and so the code status indicator seems to be working again...

The execution of the summary page scripts has also been moved back to pcdev1 (from pcdev2, where it was moved to temporarily because of some technical problems with pcdev1).

This was still running at ~9.30am today morning, at which point I manually terminated it after confirming with Johannes that it was okay to do so. Judging by the StripTool traces in the control room, the mode cleaner remained locked for most of the night, there should be plenty of usable data...

Note that I re-aligned the Y-arm (to experiment further with photo-taking) at about 9.30am, so the data after this time should be disregarded...

Rana suggested including some additional terms to the cost function to penalize high sensitivity to deviations in the layer thickness (L). So the list of terms contributing to the cost function now reads:

1. Thermal noise - we use the proxy function from E0900068-v3 to do this
2. Deviation from target T @1064nm, p-pol
3. Deviation from target T @532nm, p and s-pol
4. HR Surface field
5. The ratio  with dL/L = 1%, evaluated at 1064nm p-pol and 532nm p and s-pol (only the latter two for the AR side)

I did not include other sensitivity terms, like sensitivity to the refractive index values for the low and high index materials (which are just taken from GWINC).

There is still some arbitrariness in how I chose to weight the relative contributions to the cost function, but after some playing around, I think I have a solution that I think will work. Here are the spectral reflectivity and layer thickness plots for the HR and AR sides respectively. 

HR side: for a 1% increase in the thickness of all layers, the transmission changes by 5% @ 1064nm p-pol and 0.5% @ 532nm s and p-pol

AR side: for a 1% change in the thickness of all layers, the transmission changes by <0.5% @ 532nm s and p-pol

  (substrate to the right of layer 38)

I've also checked that we need 19 layer pairs to meet the spec requirements, running the code with fewer layer pairs leads to (in particular) large deviations from the target value of 50ppm @ 1064nm p-pol.

Do these look reasonable? 

I did a quick measurement of the beam size on the MC REFL PD today morning. I disabled the MC autolocker while this measurement was in progress. The measurement set up was as follows:

This way I was able to get right up to the heat sink - so this is approximately 2cm away from the active area of the PD. I could also measure the beam size in both the horizontal and vertical directions.

The measured and fitted data are:

The beam size is ~0.4mm in diameter, while the active area of the photodiode is 2mm in diameter according to the datasheet. So the beam is ~5x smaller than the active area of the PD. I couldn't find anything in the datasheet about what the damage threshold is in terms of incident optical power, but there is ~100mW on th MC REFL PD when the MC is unlocked, which corresponds to a peak intensity of ~1.7 W / mm^2...

Even though no optics were intentionally touched for this measurement, I quickly verified that the spot is centered on the MC REFL PD by looking at the DC output of the PD, and then re-enabled the autolocker.

There is no internet connectivity on any of the control room machines. 

I have been trying to debug by tracing the cabling situation in the rack in the office area, and will update if/when this problem has been resolved. I had last come into the lab on Saturday and there was no problem then. There 40m wireless network servicing the office area seems to work fine.

Koji diagnosed that the NAT router was to blame for this problem. I simply power cycled this router, and now the connectivity has been restored. 

It was possible to log into nodus and then to pianosa - and it was also possible to log into the various control room machines once logged into nodus. However, the outward packets seemed to not get transmitted. Anyways, power cycling the NAT Router unit seems to have done the job.

[valera, gautam]

Last night, Valera and I looked into two aspects of the IMC:

1. How can we accurately set the offset at the error point of the PDH servo such that we lock to the true center of the resonance?
2. What's up with the large common mode offset on the WFS?

I will post a more detailed elog about last night's work, but Valera also thought it might be a good idea to try and improve the mode-matching into the IMC. I couldn't find anything on the wiki/elog about the mode matching situation on the PSL table, so I quickly went over yesterday to measure some lengths. From looking at the MCREFL DC levels when the mode cleaner is locked (~0.37V) and unlocked (~5.7V), the current mode matching efficiency seems to be about 88%, so there is definitely some headroom for improvement.

Here is my cartoon of the situation on the PSL table. All lengths are measured in mm, and I would say correct to +/- 5 mm, so there could be considerable error here...

  (L1 : f=+200mm. L2: f=-150mm. L3:  f=+400mm)

I extracted the lengths from the edge of the PSL table to IM1 and MC1 from (what I think are) the latest CAD drawings on the DCC. I then put all this into an a la mode script [Attachment #5] - I assumed a waist of 370um at the PMC output mirror, and a waist of 1.78mm at MC1. I neglected the passage through the in-vac Faraday, EOM and BS1 (on the sketch above) and the MC1 substrate. I was able to achieve a theoretical mode-matching efficiency of 1 by just moving the positions of L2 and L3. 

Given that there are probably errors of the order 0.5cm in the lengths on the PSL table, and also the in-vacuum distance to MC1, I figured it would be ideal to just move one lens and see if we can improve the efficiency. It looks like it may be more effective to move L2 than L3. The plot on the right shows that the sensitivity is approximately equal to the positioning of L2 and L3. Judging by this plot, looks like w.r.t. the coordinates in this plot, we are somewhere around (0.02,-0.02).

It looks like if we want to do this, moving L2 (f = -150mm) may be the best way to go.

The arrangement of filters in the WFS loop filter banks have been altered, Rana will update with details of the motivation behind these changes. Here is how the screen looks now:

I have updated the C1IOO SDF table, and also the mcwfson script to reflect these changes. The latter has been svn committed.

[valera, gautam]

We implemented the plan outlined in the previous elog. The visibility (Pmax-Pmin)/(Pmax+Pmin) calculated with the MC REFL PD levels with the MC locked/unlocked is now ~96% (up from 88%). The MC REFL DC level in lock is now ~0.12V (compared to 0.4V). Assuming a modulation depth of 0.1 @ 29.5MHz, about 25% of this (i.e. 0.03V) is from sideband light.

The procedure followed was (see sketch in previous elog for various optic labels):

1. Move L2 back (towards PMC) by ~2cm.
2. Walk the beam using M3 and M4 to minimize MCREFL, re-lock IMC, run WFS. 
3. Move L3 back (towards PMC) by ~2cm.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3, the latter with smaller steps, monitor MCREFL DC level.

We could probably tweak the fine positioning of L2 and L3 and improve the efficiency a little more, but the primary objective here was to see if there was any effect on the large common mode offset on the WFS demodulated "SUM" output. Unfortunately, we saw no effect.

Here are two photos of the relevant section of the PSL table before (left) and after (right) our work there:

[valera, gautam]

Motivation: see this elog

I was fiddling around for a few days trying to implement the method outlined in this paper to null this offset - I will post a separate elog about my efforts but Valera pointed out that we could try injecting an AF modulation at the IN2 input of the MC Servo Board. Last night, we hooked up an SR function generator (f = 312Hz, A = 0.01Vpp, IN2 gain = -5dB) to the unused BNC IN2 input of the MC Servo board. To avoid any additional offsets from the AO path during this measurement, I disconnected the LEMO cable (it is labelled).

We looked at the spectrum of the MC transmission around 312Hz and also 2*f = 624Hz. As a result of this modulation, we expect in the transmitted power, dP/P, a 2f term with amplitude ~(X_mod/X_0)^2 and a term at f with amplitude ~(X_offset * X_mod / X_0^2) - I may have missed out some numerical factors of order 1. So the latter should vanish if the offset at the error point is truly zero and the lock-point is the center of the resonance. Last night, we found that an offset in the range of -0.25 V to -0.19 V nulled this peak in the DTT spectrum. Today, the number was -0.05V. So the true offset seems to vary from lock to lock. Here are spectra around f=312Hz for a few different values of the offset slider (the center of the resonance seems to be -0.05V on the MEDM slider at this time).

Do these numbers make sense? Some time ago, I had pulled out the MC Servo board to find out what exactly is going on at this offset summing point. The MEDM slider goes from -10V to 10V, and by measuring the voltage at TP5 (see schematic below), I found that there is a 1/40 scaling factor between what is actually applied and the number on the MEDM slider (so for example, the numbers in the legend in the above plot have to be divided by 40). I've modified the MC Servo Board MEDM screen to reflect this. When I had pulled the board out, I noticed that in addition to the offset voltage applied via the backplane connector, there was also a potentiometer (R50 in the schematic below). I had nulled the voltage at TP5 using this potentiometer, but I guess drifts of ~5mV are possible. 

Discussion on calibration of offset slider in Hz/V:

I've yet to do a rigorous calibration of this slider into Hz, but looking at the spectrum of the transmitted intensity at 2f, we estimated the coefficient (X_mod/X_0) ~ 3e-3 for an offset of 0.2V. dP/P ~1 when the applied modulation equals the linewidth of the cavity, which is 3.6kHz. So 0.2V of offset slider corresponds to ~ 10Hz frequency offset. In other words, I estimate the slider calibration to be 50Hz/V. So with the full range of +/- 10V, we should be able to scan ~1kHz of frequency offset. What does this imply about the variation of the offset slider value that removes the peak at 1f between locks? As mentioned above, this variation is ~0.2V over a day - with the calibration mentioned above, this corresponds to a change in cavity length of ~10um, which seems reasonable to me...

So how did all of this tie in with WFS SUM offsets? We did the following:

• After nulling the length offset using the procedure detailed above, we noticed non-zero offsets on both WFS1 and WFS2 "I" SUM outputs
• So we set the dark offsets and RF offsets for the WFS, with no light incident on the WFS (PSL shutter closed). 
• Re-locking the IMC and closing the WFS loops, we noticed that WFS2 SUM offset was still hovering around 0, but WFS1 SUM offset was ~ -2000cts.
• Looking at some trends on dataviewer, this offset seems to drift around over a few days timescale by a few thousand counts - for example, the WFS1 offset today was +2000cts. Moreover, the WFS1 offset seems to drift around by ~factor of 3 times as much as WFS2 offset in the 24 hour period I looked up (plot to follow)...
• Misaligned MC2 and looked at the sum offset with just the single bounce beam off MC1 onto the WFS

I neglected to screenshot the StripTool from the times we were doing these trials but I have the times, I will pull up some dataviewer plots and upload them here tomorrow...