In this past weekend I replaced a summing amplifier for the end green PDH locking by a home-made summing circuit box in order to increase the control range.

It's been working well so far.

However due to this circuit box, the demodulation phase of the PDH locking is now somewhat different from the past, so we have to readjust it at some point.

(background)

    At the X end station, the voltage going to the NPRO PZT had been limited up +/- 4 V because of the summing amplifier : SR560.

Therefore the laser was following the cavity motion only up to ~ +/- 4 MHz, which is not wide enough. (it's okay for night time)

So we decided to put a passive circuit instead of SR560 to have a wider range.

(summing box)

   We made a passive summing circuit and put it into a Pomona box.

The circuit diagram is shown below. Note that we assume the capacitance of the 1W Innolight has the same capacitance as that of the PSL Innolight (see #3640).

The feedback signal from a PDH box goes into the feedback input of the circuit.

Then the signal will be low passed with the corner frequency of 200 kHz because of the combination of RC (where R is 681 Ohm and C is capacitance of the PZT).

Because of this low pass filter, we don't drive the PZT unnecessarily at high frequency.

On the other hand the modulation signal from a function generator goes into the other input and will be high passed by 50 pF mica capacitor with the corner frequency of 200 kHz.

This high pass filter will cut off noise coming from the function generator at low frequency.

In addition to it, the 50 pF capacitor gives a sufficient amount of attenuation for the modulation because we don't want have too big modulation depth.

Here is a plot for the expected transfer functions.

You can see that the modulation transfer function (blue curve) has non-zero phase at 216 kHz, which is our modulation frequency.

-- Alignment

     - C1ASS

     - MC WFS 

    - OPLEVs

-- Optimization of Suspended Optics

  - diagonalizations

  - damping control

  - upgrading of electronics

   - weekly check

-- Input Optics

   - PMC

         * mode matching
         * epics LO HI values

   - FSS and ISS

        * recover FSS
        * make ISS working

   - EOM

   - doubling and RFPD for green

-- Length Sensing and Control

   - digital system and electronics

-- Green Locking

    - X end station

    - Y arm green locking ==> Suresh/Bryan

    - digital control systems

      - noise budget

   - cavity scan and handing off

-- misc.

 The power ratio of the beatnote signal vs. the 216kHz sideband has been measured.

The measured ratio was -55 dB, which is smaller by about 20 dB than Aidan's estimation.

To confirm this fact we should check the modulation depth of the end PDH somehow.

The below is a picture showing the sidebands around the beatnote locked at 66.45 MHz.

Other than the +/-216 kHz sidebands, we can see some funny peaks at +/- 50 kHz and +/-150 kHz

I wonder if they come from the servo oscillation of the MC servo whose UGF is at 24 kHz.  We can check it by unlocking the MC.

 I somehow screwed up the PDH box at the X end station. 

Right now it's not working, so I am going to check and fix it today.

 In the last evening I found that one of the gain stages on the PDH box wasn't fully functional.

So I started investigating it and I though it was going to finish soon, but actually it wasn't so easy.

  The PDH box has several gain stages. So an input signal goes through a buffer, a filter, a boost and an output buffer stages sequentially.

The boost stage is supposed to have gain of 10, but I found it didn't have such gain.

In fact the gain was something like -30dB which is pretty small. Plus this boost stage was imposing an wired bump on the transfer function around 50 kHz.

I checked the voltages on some components around the boost stage and confirmed there were no strange voltage.

Then I suspected that the op-amp : LF356 had been broken for some reason. So I replaced it by LT1792 to see if it fixes the issue.

Indeed it did make it functional. However after few minutes of the replacement, it went back to the same bad condition.

I have no idea about what was going on at that time. Anyway it needs more careful investigations.

  I temporarily put a jumper cable on the board to skip this stage, but now the PDH lock is not healthy at all.

I made a noise budget for the ALS noise measurement that I did a week ago (see #4352).

I am going to post some details about this plot later because I am now too sleepy.

Here I explain how I estimate the contribution from the differential noise shown in the plot on my last entry (#4376) .

(background)

 According to the measurement done about a week ago, there is a broadband noise in the green beatnote path when both Green and IR are locked to the X arm.

The noise can be found on the first plot on this entry (#4352) drawn in purple. We call it differential noise.

However, remember, the thing we care is the noise appearing in the IR PDH port when the ALS standard configuration is applied (i.e. taking the beatnote and feeding it back to ETMX).

So we have to somehow convert the noise to that in terms of the ALS configuration.

In the ALS configuration, since the loop topology is slightly different from that when the differential noise was measured, we have to apply a transfer function to properly estimate the contribution.

(How to estimate)

 It's not so difficult to calculate the contribution from the differential noise under some reasonable assumptions.

Let us assume that the MC servo and the end PDH servo have a higher UGF than the ALS, and assume their gains are sufficiently big.

Then those assumptions allow us to simplify the control loop to like the diagram below:

 Since we saw the differential noise from the beatnote path, I inject the noise after the frequency comparison in this model.

Eventually the noise is going to propagate to the f_IR_PDH port by multiplying by G/(1+G), where G is the open loop transfer function of the ALS.

The plot below shows the open loop transfer function which I used and the resultant G/(1+G).
 

In the curve of G/(1+G), you can see there is a broad bump with the gain of more than 1,  approximately from 20 Hz to 60 Hz.

Because of this bump, the resultant contribution from the differential noise at this region is now prominent as shown in the plot on the last entry (#4376).

[Jenne, Chris, Kiwamu]

 A photo diode and an AOM driver have been newly setup on the PSL table to measure the intensity noise coupling to the beat note signal.

We tried taking a transfer function from the PD to the beat, but the SNR wasn't sufficient on the PD. So we didn't get reasonable data.

(what we did)

  - put a DCPD after the doubling crystal on the PSL table. The PD is sitting after the Y1 mirror, which has been used for picking off the undesired IR beam.

  - installed the AOM driver (the AOM itself had been already in place)

  - injected some signals onto the AOM to see if we can see an intensity fluctuation on the PD as well as the beat signal

(intensity noise)

  In order to have better SNR for the intensity measurement, we put an AC coupled SR560 with the gain of 100 just before the ADCs.

When a single frequency signal was applied from a Stanford Research's function generator to the AOM, we could clearly see a peak at the doubled frequency of the injected signal.

Also a peak at the same frequency was found on the beat note signal as well.

But when random noise was injected from the same function generator, the random noise looked below the ADC noise.

Jenne adjusted the output voltage from the PD to about 1 V to avoid a saturation in the analog path, but later we realized that the ADC counts was marely ~ 20 counts.

So we will check the ADC tomorrow. Hopefully we will get a good SNR.

[Joe/Kiwamu]

 We found there are some filter names that we can not properly build for some reason.

The following names are not properly going to be built :

 - REFL_DC

 - AUX

If we use the names shown above for filters, it doesn't compile any filter modules.

We took a quick look around the src files including feCodegen.pl, but didn't find any obvious bugs.

Noise below 10 Hz became larger again compared with the data before (see here #4352)

Note that the Y-axis is in MHz.

Here is a diagram for our intensity noise coupling measurement.

The below is a plot for the intensity noise on the DCPD. (I forgot to take a spectra of the PD dark noise)

For some reason, the RIN spectrum becomes sometimes noisier and sometimes quieter. Note that after 10 pm it's been in the quiet state for most of the time.

An interesting thing is that the structure below 3 Hz looks like excited by motion of the MC when it's in the louder state.

[Koji, Steve, Suresh, Kiwamu]

The following video cables have been newly laid down :

  - MC1F/MC3F (65 ft.)

  - PMCR (100 ft.)

  - PSL spare (100 ft.)

  - PSL1  (100 ft.)

  - PSL2  (100 ft.)

Here is a new plot for the differential noise measurement. I plot a noise contribution from the intensity noise (brown curve).

If we believe this data, the differential noise is NOT dominated by the intensity noise of the PSL.

(intensity noise coupling measurement)

 Here is a plot for the transfer functions (TFs) from the intensity noise DCPD to the beat signal.

   In principle these TFs tell us how much intensity noise are contributed into the differential noise.

When I measured the spectra shown above, the frequency offset of the beatnote was at about 8 MHz from the zero cross point.

Keeping the same lock, I measured the transfer function (red curve) by using the swept sine technique on DTT. The setup for this measurement is depicted on the last entry (#4389).

Then I made the spectra above by multiplying the intensity spectrum by this TF.

  Later I measured another transfer function when the beatnote was at about 2 MHz from the zero cross point.

According to this measurement, our MFD gets insensitive to the intensity noise as the beat offset goes close to the zero cross point. This is consistent with what we expected.

For some reason the c1ioo machine suddenly died just 30 miteus before.

It died after we added a DAQ channel for c1gcv and rebooted the frame builder.

It didn't respond to a ping command. Therefore I rebooted the machine by clicking the physical reset button.

Now it seems fine.

We are limited by the intensity noise of the X arm transmitted green light.

Since the intensity noise from the PSL wasn't big enough to explain the differential noise (#4392), so this time I measured the noise contribution from the X arm transmitted light.

(coupling measurement)

  I performed the same intensity noise coupling measurement, but this time between the DC signal of the beatnote RFPD and the beatnote signal.

 While measuring it, I excited the intensity of the PSL laser by using the same AOM like I did yesterday. This AM cause the observable intensity noise on the beatnote RFPD.

With the excited AM, we can pretend to have an excited AM on the green transmitted light from the X arm, of course assuming the intensity noise coupling from the PSL is less.

The next steps we should do are :

 Prior to the works on the Y end setup I propose to perform the temperature scan business like Koji and Suresh did before (see this entry).

This business will allow us to easily find a beatnote at 532nm after the installation on the Y end.

 I guess the right persons for this work are Bryan and Suresh.

Bryan will have a safety guidance from Steve in this after noon. So after that they can start working on it.

/* - - - coarse plan - - - */

* remove Alberto's laser from the AS table

* setup Alberto's laser on the PSL table

* put some stuff such as lenses, mirrors and etc. (Use the IR beam picked off after the doubling crystal for the main laser source)

* mode matching

* measurement

Which laser are we going to use,  Alberto's laser or MOPA laser ?

Just for a record. We got 4 new laser pointers (2 greens, 1 blue, and 1 green and red combination). Don't lose them.

They reside in a bucket on the SP table, where IR viewers and sensor cards also reside.

We use Alberto's laser for the Y end Green Locking.

- Plan for this week

  * Intensity stabilization for the end green laser (Matt / Kiwamu)

  * Hand off the servo from Green to Red (Matt / Kiwamu)

  * Y end green locking (Suresh / Bryan) (rough schedule)

  * Reconnect the X end mechanical shutter to 1X9 (Kiwamu)

  * Connect the end DCPD signal to a DAC (done)

  * Make a LPF in a Pomona box for the temperature (Larisa)

  * Clean up and finalize the X end setup (Kiwamu)

  * Make a item lists for electronics. Order the electronics. (Aidan / Kiwamu)

I added a new ADC channel for a DC signal from the X end green PD.

It is called C1:GCX-REFL_DC and connected to adc_0_1, which is the second channel of ADC_0.

By the way, when I tried connecting it to an ADC I found that most of the channels on the AA board on 1X9 were not working.

Since the outputs form the board are too small the circuits may have benn broken. See the picture below.

In addition to that  I realized that the signal from the PDH box for the temperature actuation is limited by +/- 2V due to the range of this AA board.

In fact the signal is frequently saturated due to this small voltage range.

We have to enlarge the range of this AA board like Valera did before for the suspensions (see this entry).

Some tasks for the daytime tomorrow.

  * Beam profile measurements of the Y end laser  (Suresh / Bryan)

  * Taking care of CDS and the simulated plant (Jamie / Joe)

  * Reconnect the X end mechanical shutter to 1X9 (Kiwamu)

  * LPF for the X end temperature feedback (Larisa)

 A comparator has been installed before the MFDs (mixer-based frequency discriminator) to eliminate the effect from the amplitude fluctuation (i.e. intensity noise).

As a result we reached an rms displacement of 580 Hz or 80 pm.

(differential noise measurement)

  Here is the resultant plot of the usual differential noise measurement.

The measurement has been done when the both green and red lasers were locked to the X arm.

In the blue curve I used only MFD. In the black curve I used the combination of the comparator and the MFD.

Noise below 3 Hz become lower by a factor of about 4, resulting in a better rms integrated from 40 Hz.

Note that the blue and the black curve were taken while I kept the same lock.

A calibration was done by injecting a peak at 311 Hz with an amplitude of 200 cnt on the ETMX_SUS_POS path.

(installation)

  Yesterday Koji modified his comparator circuit such that we can take a signal after it goes thorough the comparator.

The function of this comparator is to convert a sinusoidal signal to a square wave signal so that the amplitude fluctuation doesn't affect the frequency detection in the MFD.

I installed it and put the beat-note signal to it. Then the output signal from the comparator box is connected to the MFDs.

The input power for the comparator circuit has been reduced to -5 dBm so that it doesn't exceeds the maximum power rate.

  - Plan for tomorrow

    * Video cable session (I need ETMY_TRNAS) (team)

    * Characterization of the Y end laser  (Bryan / Suresh)

    * LPF for the X end laser temperature control (Larisa)

    * Frequency Divider  (Matt)

    * X end mechanical shutter (Kiwamu)

Succeeded in handing off the servo from the green to the red.

(noise performance)

 This time we found that the fluctuation in the IR signals became lesser as the gain of the ALS servo increased.

Therefore I increased the UGF from 40 Hz to 180 Hz to have less noise in the IR PDH signal.

Here is a preliminary plot for today's noise spectra.

The blue curve is the ALS in-loop spectrum, that corresponds to the beat fluctuation.

The red curve is an out-of-loop spectrum taken by measuring the IR PDH signal.

Since the UGF is at about 180 Hz the rms is integrated from 200 Hz.

The residual displacement noise in the IR PDH signal is now 1.2 kHz in rms.

I am going to analyze this residual noise by comparing with the differential noise that I took yesterday (see the last entry ).

   I measured some laser powers associated with the beat-note detection system on the PSL table.

The diagram below is a summary of the measurement. All the data were taken by the Newport power meter.

 The reflection from the beat-note PD is indeed significant as we have seen.

In addition to it the BS has a funny R/T ratio maybe because we are using an unknown BS from the Drever cabinet. I will replace it by a right BS.

(background)

 During my work for making a noise budget I noticed that we haven't carefully characterize the beat-note detection system.

The final goal of this work is to draw noise curves for all the possible noise sources in one plot.

To draw the shot noise as well as the PD dark noise in the plot, I started collecting the data associated with the beat-note detection system.

(Next actions)

 * Estimation and measurement of the shot noise

 * measurement of the PD electrical noise (dark noise)

 * modeling for the PD electrical noise

 * measurement of the doubling efficiency

 * measurement of an amplitude noise coupling in the frequency discriminators

In the last week Matt and I modified the MFD configuration because the mixer had been illegally used.

Since the output from the comparator is normally about 10 dBm, a 4-way power splitter reduced the power down to 4 dBm in each output port.

In order to reserve a 7 dBm signal to a level-7 mixer, we decided to use an asymmetric power splitter, which is just a combination of 2-way and 3-way splitter shown in the diagram above.

With this configuration we can reserve a 7 dBm signal for a mixer in the fine path.

However on the other hand we sacrificed the coarse path because the power going to the mixer is now 2.2 dBm in each port.

According to the data sheet for the mixer, 1 dB compression point for the RF input is 1dBm. Therefore we put a 1 dB attenuator for the RF port in the coarse system.

In the delay line of the fine path we found that the delay cable was quite lossy and it reduced the power from 2.2 dBm to about 0 dBm.

PLEASE DO NOT DISMANTLE THE SETUP !

Actually we tried looking for a level-3 or a smaller mixer, but we didn't find them at that moment. That's why we kept the level-7 mixer for the coarse path.

As you pointed out we can try an RF amplifier for it.

 *  Temporary strain relief for the heliax cables on 1X2 (Steve)

 *  RF diagrams and check lists (Suresh)

      => In the lunch meeting we will discuss the details about what we will do for the RF installation.

 *  Electronics design and plan for Green locking (Aidan / Kiwamu)

      => In the lunch meeting we will discuss the details.

 *  LSC model (Koji)

 *  Video cable session (team)

 * LPF for the laser temperature control (Larisa)

[Steve / Kiwamu]

 As a part of the video cable session, we reconnected some power cords on 1Y1 rack.

During the work we momentarily turned off c1aux, which handles DMF, Illumintators, mechanical shutters and the old video epics.

I think it automatically reverted the things, but we may need to check them.

After I did several things to add new DAQ channels on c1iscex it suddenly became out of network. Maybe crashed.

Then c1iscex didn't respond to a ping and all the epics values associated with c1iscex became not accessible.

I physically shut it down by pushing the reset button. Then it came back and is now running fine.

(how I broke it)

Since activateDAQ.py has screwed up the 'ini' files including C1SCX.ini, I was not able to add a channel to C1SCX.ini by the usual daqconfig GUI.

So I started editing it in a manual way with an editor and changed some sentences to that shown below

Then I rebooted fb to reflect the new DAQ channels.

After that I looked at the C1_FE_STATUS.adl screen and found some indicator lights were red.

So I pushed "Diag reset" button and "DAQ Reload" button on the C1SCX_GDS_TP.adl screen and then c1iscex died.

After the reboot the new DAQ channels looked acquired happily.

This is my second time to crash a front end machine (see this entry)

I made a coarse noise budget in order to decide our next actions for the X arm green locking.

So be careful, this is not an accurate noise budget !

 Some data are just coming from rough estimations and some data are not well calibrated.

 Assuming all the noise are not so terribly off from the true values, the noise at high frequency is limited by the dark noise of the PD or it already reaches to the IR inloop signal.

The noise at low frequency is dominated by the intensity noise from the transmitted green light although we thought it has been eliminated by the comparator.

In any case I will gradually make this noise budget more accurate  by collecting some data and calibrating them.

According to the plot what we should do are :

  * More accurate PD noise measurement

  * More accurate shot noise estimation

  * Searching for a cause of the small beat signal (see here) because a bigger beat signal lowers the PD noise.

  * Investigation of the Intensity noise

According to the measurement done by Aidan and me, there are two beat-note state.

One gave us a small beat signal and the other gave us a bigger signal by approximately 20 dB.

 A possible reason for this phenomenon is that the end laser is operating at a special temperature that somehow drives the laser with two different modes at the same time.

So that it permits the laser sometimes locked with one of the two modes and sometimes with the other mode.

For the first step we will change the temperature such that the laser can run with a single stable mode.

Then for investigating it we will put a scanning cavity on the X end table to see if it really exhibits a two modes or not.

It turned out that the dark noise from the beat PD and the shot noise on the beat PD was overestimated.

So I corrected them in the plot of the last noise budget (#4482).

Additionally I added the end laser error signal in the plot. Here is the latest plot.

 The end laser error spectrum is big enough to cover most of the frequency range.
 (although it was taken at a different time from the other curves.)

An RF combiner should be included in the triple resonant box because it eases impedance mismatching and hence lowers undesired RF reflections.

Therefore we should use three cables to send the RF signals to the box and then combine them in the box.

(RF combiner)

 With proper terminations an RF combiner shows 50 Ohm input impedance.

But it still shows nearly 50 Ohm input impedance even if the source port is not properly terminated (i.e. non 50 Ohm termination).

This means any bad impedance mismatching on the source port can be somewhat brought close to 50 Ohm by a combiner.

  The amount of deviation from 50 Ohm in the input impedance depends on the circuit configuration of  the combiner as well as the termination impedance.

For example a resistive 3-way splitter shows 40 Ohm when the source port is shorten and the other ports are terminated with 50 Ohm.

Also it shows 62.5 Ohm when the source port is open and the other ports are terminated with 50 Ohm.

In this way an RF combiner eases  impedance mismatching on the source port.

(RF signal transfer at the 40m)

 According to the prototype test of the resonant box it will most likely have a non-50 Ohm input impedance at each modulation freqeucy.

If we install the resonant box apart from the combiner it will create RF reflections due to the mismatch (Case 1 in the diagram below)

The reflection creates standing waves which may excite higher harmonics and in the worst case it damages the RF sources.

 To reduce such a reflection one thing we can do is to install the combiner as a part of the resonant box (Case 2).

It will reduce the amount of the mismatching in the input impedance of the resonant circuit and results less reflections.

A rule we should remember is that a cable always needs to be impedance matched.

 The input impedance of the resonant box was measured when an RF combiner was attached to the box.

Indeed the combiner makes the impedance more 50 Ohm and reduces the reflection.

**** measurement conditions ****

* The output of box, where the EOM will be connected,  was open so that the box tries resonating with a parasitic capacitor instead of the real EOM.

* ZFSC-3-13, a 3-way combiner from mini circuit, was used.

* The S-port of the combiner was directly attached to the box with a short connector (~ 30 mm).

* Port 1 and 2 are terminated by 50 Ohm.

* The input impedance was measured on port 3 with AG4395A net work analyzer.

* Reflection coefficient 'Gamma' were calculated from the measured impedance 'Z' by using an equation Gamma = (50-Z)/(50+Z).

The resonances are found at 11, 29 and 73 MHz (55 MHz resonance was shifted to 73 MHz because of no EOM).

Note that the resonances are at frequencies where the notches appear in the reflection coefficient plot.

Don't be confused by a peak at 70 MHz in the impedance. This is an extra resonance due to a leakage inductance from the transformer in the circuit.

I realized that my impedance matching theory on an RF combiner was wrong !

In fact an RF combiner behaves more like an attenuator according to a reflection measurement that I did today.

A 3-way combiner reduces power of an input signal by a factor of 4.8 dB because it can be also considered as a 3-way splitter.

So it is just a lossy component or in other words it is just an attenuator.

(reflection measurement)

To check my speculation that I posted on #4504 I measured reflection coefficients for both cases.

In the measurement I used a heliax cable, which goes from 1X2 rack to the PSL table with a length of about 10 m. Note that this is the cable that had been used as '33 MHz EOM'.

At the input of the heliax cable it was connected to a direction coupler to pick off reflections and the reflected signal was sampled in AG4395A.

The other end of the cable (output side of the cable) was basically connected to the resonant box.

Then I did a reflection measurement for both cases as drawn in this entry (see #4504).

  - case 1 -  the combiner was inserted at the input side of the heliax cable.

  - case 2 - the combiner was directly attached to the resonant box

On the combiner, ZFSC-3-13, the port 1 and 2 were terminated with 50 Ohm, therefore the port 3 was used as an input and the source port is the output.

Here is a resultant plot of the reflection measurements.

Note that whole data are calibrated so that it gives 0 dB when the output side of the heliax is open.

There are two things we can notice from this plot:

 (1) The reflection coefficient at the resonant frequencies (where notches appear) are the same for both cases.

 (2) Over the measured frequency range the reflections were attenuated by a factor of about 9.6 dB , which is twice as large as the insertion loss of the combiner.

These facts basically indicates that  the RF combiner behaves as a 4.8 dB attenuator.

Hence the location of the combiner doesn't change the situation in terms of RF reflections.

[Koji / Kiwamu]

The Michelson was locked with the new LSC realtime code.

(what we did)

 --  Fine alignment of the Michelson, including PZTs, BS and ITMY.

  Since the X arm has been nicely aligned we intentionally avoided touching ITMX. The IR beam now is hitting the center of both end mirrors.

  At the end we lost X arm's resonance for IR. This probably means the PZTs need more careful alignments.

-- Signal acquisition

 We replaced the RFPD (AS55) that Aidan and Jamie nicely installed by POY11 because we haven't yet  installed a 55MHz RF source.

The maximum DC voltage from the PD went to about 50 mV after aligning steering mirrors on the AP table.

The RF signal from the PD is transferred by a heliax cable which has been labeled 'REFL33'.

Then the RF signal is demodulated at a demodulation board 'AS11', which is one of the demodulation boards that Suresh recently modified.

Although we haven't fully characterized the demod board the I and Q signal looked healthy.

Finally the demod signals go to ADC_0_3 and ADC_0_4 which are the third and fourth channel.

They finally show up in REFL33 path in the digital world.

-- Control

 With the new LSC code we fedback the signal to BS. We put anti-whitening filters in the I and Q input filter banks.

We found that dataviewer didn't show correct channels, for example C1LSC_NREFL33I showed just ADC noise and C1LSC_NREFL33Q showed NREFL_33I.

Due to this fact we gave up adjusting the digital phase rotation and decided to use only the I-phase signal.

Applying a 1000:10 filter gave us a moderate lock of the Michelson. The gain was -100 in C1LSC_MICH_GAIN and this gave us the UGF of about 300 Hz.

 Note that during the locking both ETMs were intentionally misaligned in order not to have Fabry-Perot fringes.

During checking the 11MHz demod boards I found that the I-Q relative phase showed funny LO power dependence.

It is now under investigation.

 In the plot above the green curve represents the I-Q phase of a 11MHz demod board (see here).

It showed a strong dependence on the LO power and it changes from -60 deg to -130 deg as the LO power changes.

This is not a good situation because any power modulation on the LO will cause a phase jitter.

For a comparison I also took I-Q relative phase of a 33MHz demod board, which hasn't been modified recently.

 It shows a nice flat curve up to 5 dBm although it looks like my rough measurement adds a systematic error of about -5 deg.

 - to do -

* check RF power in every point of LO path on the circuit

* check if there is saturation by looking at wave forms.

[Rana, Koji, Kiwamu]

 Moreover the amplitude of the I and Q signals are highly unbalanced, depending on the LO power again.

This implies the coil for a 90 degree splitting won't work at 11 MHz since the coil is home made and used to be designed for a specific frequency (i.g. 24.5 MHz).

We decided to use a Mini circuit 90 deg splitter instead. Steve will order few of them soon and we will test it out.

Here is the idea how we upgrade the demodulation boards.

Basically we go ahead with two steps as depicted in the cartoon diagram below.

Once we finish the first step of upgrade, the board will be ready to install although the circuit won't be awesome in terms of noise performance.

* * * (details) * * *

 First of all we will replace the home-made 90 degree splitter (see this entry) by a commercial splitter, PSCQ-2-51-W+ from Mini circuit. This is the step 1 basically.

At this point the boards will be ready to use in principle. I asked Steve to get three 90 degree splitters so that we can have at least three demodulators for the dual-recycled Michelson locking.

If they work very fine we will buy some more 90 degree splitters for full locking.

While we try to lock the dual-recycled Michelson once we will get a Cougar amplifier, remove all ERA-5s and install it such that we don't have to gain up and down in the circuit. This is the last step.

 We will make them all green !!

Again, all the files are available in the svn.

https://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:30889/svn/trunk/suresh/40m_RF_upgrade/

To understand the situation of the ADC cabling at the LSC rack I looked around the rack and the cables.

The final goal of this investigation is to have nice and noise less cables for the ADCs (i.e. non-ribbon cable)

Here is just a report about the current cabling.

(current configuration)

At the moment there is only one ribbon-twisted cable going from 1Y2 to 1Y3. (We are supposed to have 4 cables).

At the 1Y2 rack the cable is connected to an AA board with a 40 pin female IDC connector.

At the 1Y3 rack the cable is connected to an ADC board with a 37 pin female D-sub connector.

The ribbon cable is 28AWG with 0.05" conductor spacing and has 25 twisted pairs (50 wires).

(things to be done)

 - searching for a twisted-shielded cable which can nicely fits to the 40 pin IDC and 37 pin D-sub connectors.

 - estimating how long cable we need and getting the quote from a vendor.

 - designing a strain relief support

[Steve / Suresh / Kiwamu]

90 % of unused video cables have been removed.

Still a couple of video cables are floating around the video MUX. They will be removed in the next week's session.

A new 90 degree splitter, PSCQ-2-51W, has arrived today and I installed it on a demod board called AS11.

Results of the I-Q phase measurement with the new splitter will be reported soon.

 * Picture 1 = before removal of the handmade coil

 * Picture 2 = after removal of the coil and the associated capacitors

 * Picture 3 = after soldering PSCQ-2-51-W

A less LO power dependence on the relative phase was found. The new 90 deg splitter works better.

From -3 dBm to 10 dBm in LO power, the relative phase is within 90 +/- 5 deg.

As a comparison I plot the phase that I measured when the handmade coil had been there (green curve in the plot).

 I will also measure amplitude unbalances between I and Q.

Amplitude imbalance between I and Q in a demod board, AS11, with the new 90 deg splitter was measured.

It shows roughly 10% amplitude imbalance when the LO power is in a range from 0 to 5 dBm. Not so bad.

  With the handmade coil there used to be a huge imbalance (either I or Q goes to zero volt while the other keeps about 1 V rms) as the LO power decreases.

But with the new 90 deg splitter now there are no more such a huge imbalance.

The remaining 10 % imbalance possibly comes from the fact that we are using ERA-5 in each I and Q path. They may have such gain imbalance of 10%.

We should check the ERA-5 gains so that we can confidently say ERA-5 causes the amplitude imbalance.

Then our plan replacing the ERA-5s (see here) will sound more reasonable.

To design a new resonant EOM box I started reviewing the prototype that I've built.

As a part of reviewing I checked an important thing that I haven't carefully done so far :

I compared the measured input impedance with that of predicted from a circuit model. I found that they show a good agreement.

So I am now confident that we can predict / design a new circuit performance.

* * * (input impedance) * * *

 Performance of a resonant circuit is close related to its input impedance and hence, in other words, determined by the input impedance.

Therefore an investigation of input impedance is a way to check the performance of a circuit. That's why I always use impedance for checking the circuit.

The plot below is a comparison of input impedance for the measured one and one predicted from a model. They show a good agreement.

(Note that the input impedance is supposed to have 50 Ohm peaks at 11, 29.5 and 55 MHz.)

 
* * * (circuit model) * * *

To make the things simpler I assume the following three conditions in my model:

 1. inductor's loss is dominated by its DC resistance (DCR)

 2. capacitor's loss is characterized only by Q-value

 3. Transformer's loss is dominated by DCR and its leakage inductance

All the parameters are quoted from either datasheet or my measurement. The model I am using is depicted in the schematic below.

Basically the Q-vaules for the capacitors that I used are quite low. I think higher Q capacitors will improve the performance and bring them to more 50 Ohm.