The AUX laser is down to 5.4 mW output power

What's worse, because we wanted those fast switching times by the AOM for ringdowns, I made the beam really small, which

1. came with a severe tradeoff against conversion efficiency. I tried to squeeze the last out of it today, but there's only about 1.3 mW of diffracted light in the first order that reaches the fiber, with higher diffraction orders already visible.
2. produced a very elliptical mode which was difficult to match into the fiber. Gautam and I measured 600 uW coming out of the fiber on the AS table. This per se is enough for the SRC spectroscopy demonstration, but with the current setup of the drive electronics there's no amplitude modulation of the deflected beam.

When going though the labs with Koji last week I discovered a stash of modulators in the Crackle lab. Among them there's an 80 MHz AOM with compact driver that had a modulation bandwidth of 30MHz. The fall time with this one should be around 100ns, and since the arm cavities have linewidths of ~10kHz their ringdown times are a few microseconds, so that would be sufficient. I suggest we swap this or a similar one in for the current one, make the beam larger, and redo the fiber modematching. That way we may get ~3mW onto the AS table.

I think I want to use AS110 for the ringdowns, so in the next couple days I'll look into its noise to get a better idea about what power we need for the arm ringdowns.

I brought the NPRO from the Crackle experiment over to the 40m Lab and set it up on the PSL table to replace the slowly dying AUX laser. I also brought along a Faraday isolator, broadband EOM, and an ISOMET AOM with driver electronics from the optics storage in the Crackle Lab.

This laser is a much newer model, made in 2008, and still has all its mojo, but we should probably keep up the practice of turning it off when it's not going to be used for a while. I measured 320 mW leaving the laser, and 299mW of that going through the Faraday isolator, whose Brewster-angle polarizer I had to clean because they were a little dusty. While the laser output is going strong, the controller displays a power output of only 10 mW, which makes me think that the power monitoring PD is busted. This is a completely different failure mode from what we've seen with the other NPROs that we can hopefully get repaired at some point, particularly because the laser is newer, but for now it's installed on the PSL table. This likely means that the noise eater isn't working on this unit either, for different reasons, but at least we have plenty of optical power.

The setup is very similar to before, with the addition of a Faraday isolator and a broadband EOM, in case we decide to get more bandwidth in the PLL. I changed the Crystal Technologies 3200-113 200 MHz AOM for an ISOMET 80 MHz AOM with RF driver from the Crackle lab's optics storage and sized the AUX beam to a diameter of 200 micron. I couldn't locate an appropriate heat sink for the driver, which is still in factory condiction, but since the PSL AOM also runs on 80MHz I used that one instead. The two AOMs saturate at different RF powers, so care must be taken to not drive the AUX AOM too high. At 600 mV input to the driver the deflection into the first order was maximal at 73 % of the input power, with the second order beam and the first order on the other side cleary visible.

In order to speed things up I didn't spend too much time on mode-matching, but the advantage of the fiber setup is that we can always improve later if need be without affecting things downstream. I coupled the first order beam into the fiber to the AS table with 58% efficiency, and restored the beat with the PSL laser on the NewFocus 1611. The contrast there is only about 20%, netting a -20 dBm beat note. This is only a marginal improvement from before, so the PLL will work as usual, but if we get the visibility up a little in the future we won't need to amplify the PD signal for the PLL anymore.

Some more things I wanted to do but didn't get to today are

• Measure intensity noise of aux laser
• Measure rise and fall times of new AOM
• Get PLL back up and running
• Place 90/10 beamsplitter in AS path and couple IFO output into fiber (= couple fiber output into IFO)

I'll resume this work tomorrow. I turned the aux laser and the AOM driver input off. For the PSL beat the AOM drive is not needed, and the power in the optical fiber should not exceed 100 mW, so the offset voltage to the AOM RF driver has to remain below 300 mV.

> While the laser output is going strong, the controller displays a power output of only 10 mW, which makes me think that the power monitoring PD is busted.

NPRO internal power monitor often shows smaller value than the actual due to a broken PD or misalignment. I don't think we need to fix it.

STEVE: Aux Lightwave M126-1064-200, sn259 [July 2009] 1.76A, ADJ 9,  9mW on it's display should not mislead you. It's output  320mW

Among the things that we hadn't taken care of yesterday before beginning to look for transmission signals were the polarization of the AUX beam on the AS table and optimizing the PLL feedback. The AUX beam is s-polarized on the PSL table (choice due to availablility of mirrors), and I added a half waveplate in front of the fiber to match it's axes. I placed another half-waveplate at the fiber output and send the reflection port of a PBS cube onto a PDA1CS photodetector. By alternatingly turning the waveplates I minimized the reflected light, giving strongly p-polarized light on the AS table for best results when interfering with the IFO beam. I wiggled the fiber and found no strong dependency of the output polarization on fiber bending. Attachment 2 shows the current layout.

The beat signal between AUX and PSL table is at -20dBm, and I adjusted the PLL gain and PI-corner to get reliable locking behavior. I think it's a good idea to keep the AUX beam on the AS table blocked while it's not in use, and only unblock it when it is phaselocked to avoid a rogue beam with no fixed phase relation to the PSL in the IFO.I blocked the beam after completing this work today.

I used the signal chain that Keerthana, Koji, and I set up yesterday to look for mode flashed of the AUX light in the YARM using the RF beat with the PSL carrier in transmission. To align the AUX beam to the arm the following steps were performed:

1. Using a spectrum analyzer to look at the RF power at the target frequency between frequency-shifted AUX beam and PSL carrier on AS110, align the beam using the mirror pair closest to the fiber coupler for maximum signal.
2. Initiate a sweep of the PLL LO frequency sourced by the Marconi using GPIB scripts over about 1 FSR. A strong peak was visible at ~31.76 MHz offset frequency
3. Tune and hold LO frequency (in this case at 48.2526 MHz) such that AUX beam resonates in the arm. Optimize alignment by maximizing RF signal on PD in transmission.

This was followed by a sweep over two full FSRs. Attachment #1 shows the trace recorded by the AG4395 using the max data hold setting during the sweep. Essentially the beat between AUX and PSL carrier traced out the arm's transmission curve. At minimum transmission there was still a ~82dB beat on the transmission PD visible.

The YEND QPD is currently blocked and sees no light.

It's true.

I went through the wiring of the c1auxex crate today to disentangle the pin assignments. The full detail can be found in attachment #1, #2 has less detail but is more eye candy. The red flagged channels are now marked for removal at the next opportunity. This will free up DAQ channels as follows:

This should be enough for temperature sensing, NPRO diagnostics, and even eventual remote PDH control with new servo boxes.

Bad wording, sorry. Should have been channels in excess of ETMX controls. I'll add the others to the list as well.

Updated channel list and wiring diagram attached. Labels are 'F' for 'Front' and 'R' for - you guessed it - 'Rear', the number identifies the slot panel the breakout is attached to.

[Jon, Gautam, Johannes]

Jon spent some time trying to align the AUX beam to the SRC today, I got to the game kind of late so maybe others can add more detail.

The AUX beam that is reflected by the SRM looks terribly misshapen - it is quite elongated in vertical direction. Unfortunately I didn't snap a picture of it - anybody? It seemed at first as if this could be clipping - but after confirming the alignment of the AUX beam with the PSL output beam with aligned SRM, a slow dither of the SRM just moved the ugly pattern on the AS camera with no change to its shape - so clipping is unlikely. I'm now thinking that this is just the output beam of the fiber coupler after propagating ~15 meters to the SRM and back - even though this aspheric lens triplet coupler is supposed to be super-duper. I found that if I loosen the fiber slightly and pull it back just a bit at least the spot on the AS camera becomes nice and round - so maybe the fiber just doesn't sit well in this collimator? Not sure why that would be. I checked the fiber tip with the microscope, and while there was some gunk present, the central region and the core were clear (still cleaned using the fiber cleaning kit, which got rid of the debris). Either way, before switching to a different collimator I think we should give the Guoy phase measurement a shot - after all there was plenty of RF signal present on both AS110 and the PDA10CF placed at the YEND.

Looking for rogue beams on the AS table, I started placing some beam dumps. There was one particularly strong source of stray beams - a lens that was labeled with KPX094AR.33_F100. It became apparent after alignment efforts to the IFO had moved the AUX beam signifcantly off-center on this lens. According to the label it should have an AR coating for 1064nm, however judging by the amount of reflected light, it was certainly NOT AR-coated for 1064nm. I replaced it with a bi-convex f=100mm lens with confirmed AR-behavior.

The AUX laser is currently shuttered.

Per our Wednesday meeting, some items to work on are

• Align the zero-order AUX beam into a second collimator on the PSL table, so we can switch the fiber output and look for RF signals at the offset-phaselock frequency without the additional frequency shift from the AOM. This will simpligy the mode spectroscopy scheme significantly
• Abandon the R10/T90 beamsplitters in favor of R90/T10 beamsplitters. We'll swap the large mirror in front of the AS camera with an R90/T10 BS, and follow it up with a second R90/T10 BS that sends the AUX beam to the IFO. This way we'll have identical power levels on AS110 and AS55, and still 90% of the current AUX light going into the IFO, but without strong secondary beams from R10/T90 optics.

I'm running a comsol job on optimus in a tmux session named cryocavs. Should be done in less than 24 hours, judging by past durations.

Is the 10% specified for P-Pol or for UNP? I contacted CVI about beamsplitters, since their website doesn't list a BS1-1064-90-... option on the website. They say a R=90% beamsplitter would be a custom job. The closest stock item they got is BS1-1064-95-2025-45UNP specified at R=95% for UNPolarized beams. They were kind enough to sent me the measured transmission curves for a recent lot of these, which is attached was uploaded to the wiki [Elog Police K: NO PROPRIETARY DOCUMENTS ON THE ELOG, which is public. Put it on our wiki and put the link here]. The figure is not labeled, but according to the contact Red is S-Pol and Blue is P-Pol, which means that this one actually has R=~90% for P, pretty much what we want. We'll need to buy two of these to make the swap in the setup.

Back to your original point: There's only a BS1-1064-10-2025-45UNP on the website, so unless we got these as custom items, the R for P-Pol is probably NOT actually 10%, just somewhere between 0% and 20%

We did swap a lens as discussed in elog 13968, but they both had f=100mm specified, the difference being one was AR-coated for 1064 and bi-convex, while the other one was plano-convex and had a different coating. The reason for the large beam spot was something else: The fiber wasn't sitting in the coupler properly. When reconnecting the fiber after taking it out make sure to align the key on the fiber end with the notch in the coupler before tightening. After discovering this the following was done:

• Fixed fiber mounting situation
• Tested AUX alignment into fiber on PSL table, was still good
• The AUX polarization was aligned to the wrong fiber axis. I fixed this. The coupler on the PSL table has it's noth oriented vertically since we're using s-polarized light. The AS-table coupler is rotated by 90 degrees, such that the notch points to the side. This way we technically don't need any halfwaveplates for rotation. However, there are still current HWPs installed.
• Locked both arms and ran dither alignment until satisfactory
• Misaligned ITMX and ETMX, and further set the ITMX pitch offset to 0.0
• Started overlapping the expectedly misaligned beams by eye. For this I turned the power of the deflected beam down to 50mV bias voltage, which gives the PSL and AUX lasers similar card-brightness on the shared path
• Misaligned SRM more because there was still the strong prompt reflection coming out the AS port.
• Restored phaselock between AUX and PSL, with beat at 30MHz between 1st-order diffracted in fiber and PSL
• Immediately saw STRONG 30MHz RF signal on AG4395. Disappeared when blocking AUX, and optimized alignment brought the signal up to -10dBm, as shown in attachment #1
• Checked YEND PDA10CF and saw a -80dBm RF signal at 30 MHz (#2), compatible with earlier observations.

Before leaving I restored the XARM alignment. SRM remains misaligned, LSC off. Alignment shouldn't change drastically over night, so I suggest when picking this work up tomorrow to directly look for the beats after phaselocking AUX and PSL

At some point we want to change the AUX injection on the AS table to interfere less with the normal interferometer path, and avoid 10/90 beamsplitters which produce a fair amount of ghosting. The plan is to replace the 99/1 BS whose reflection goes to AS110 and AS55, while the transmission goes to the AS camera, with a 90/10 BS as shown in the attachment. This results in ~10% less light on the PDs compared to the pre-AUX era. Between this BS and the AS camera there will be a second 90/10 BS that sends the AUX light into the IFO, so we end up with marginally less AUX power into the IFO and the same PSL power on the AS cam. We're short optics, so this has to wait until two new beamsplitters arrive from CVI.

EDIT: After discussing with Koji and checking the existing M2ISS PDs I put the two C30642G back and took two C30665GH (active diameter: 3mm) diodes. Only one of this type remains in storage.

I removed two C30642G photodiodes from the stash for the new M2ISS hardware and updated the wiki page accordingly.

I expanded the previous panels to 6U height for the new DAQ chassis we're buying for the upgrade. I figure it's best if we stick to the modular design, so I'm showing a panel for 8 BNC connectors as an example. The front panel has 12 slots, the back has 10 plus power connectors, switches, and the ethernet plug.

I moved the power switch to the rear because it's a waste of space to put it in the front, and it's not like we're power cycling this thing all the time. Note that the unit only requires +24V (for general operation, +20V also does the trick, as is the situation for ETMX) and +15V (excitation field for the binary I/O modules). While these could fit into a single CONEC power connector, it's probably for the better if we don't make a version that supplies a large positive voltage where negative is expected, so I put in two CONEC plugs for +/- 15 and +/- 24.

I want to order 5-6 of these as soon as possible, so if anyone wants anything changed or sees a problem, please do tell!