The figure below shows the time series of the Y arm + PRMI trail.

(Top plot )

  Normalized TRY (intracavity power). It is normalized such that it shows 1 when the arm is locked with the recycling mirrors misaligned.

(Middle plot)

ASDC and REFLDC in arbitrary unit.

(Bottom plot)

The amount of the arm length detuning observed at the fine frequency discriminator.

(Sequence)

At t = 20 sec, the amount of detuning was adjusted so that the cavity power goes to the maximum. At this point the PRM was misaligned.

At t = 30 sec, the cavity length started being slowly detuned to 10 nm. As it is being detuned the intracavity power goes down to almost zero.

At t = 45 sec, the alignment of PRM was restored. Because of that, the REFLDC and ASDC diodes started receiving a large amount of light.

At t = 85 sec, the PRCL and MICH were locked. The REFLDC signal became a high value as the carrier light is mostly reflected. The ASDC goes to a low value as the MICH is kept in the dark condition.

At t = 100 sec, the length started being slowly back to the resonance while the PRMI lock was maintained.

At t = 150 sec, the lock of the PRCL and MICH were destroyed. With the arm fully resonance, I wasn't able to recover the PRMI lock with the same demod signals.

 Isn't the point that the 11 and 55 MHz signals have the carrier effect, but the 3f signals are better?

Last night I tried the "Y arm + central part" locking again. Three different configuration were investigated :

•  Y arm + DRMI
•  Y arm + PRMI
•  Y arm + MICH

In all the configurations I displaced the Y arm by 20 nm from the resonance.

As for the DRMI and PRMI configurations I wasn't able to acquire the locks.

As for the MICH configuration, the MICH could be locked with AS55. But after bringing the Y arm to the resonance point the lock of MICH was destroyed.

With the newly amplified POY signal, locking the mode cleaner to the Y arm at ~30kHz bandwidth was quite straightforward. The offset jumps still happen, and are visible in POY11_I_ERR, but are never big enough to cause much power degradation in TRY (except when turning on CM board boosts, but its still not enough to lose lock). The script which accomplishes this is at scripts/YARM, and is in the svn. The MC2/AO crossover is at about 150Hz with 40deg margin.

For now, I'm using IN1 of the CM board, because I haven't removed the op27s that I put into IN2's gain stages. I believe the slew rate limitations of these prevent them from working completely during the offset jumps. I'll put AD829s back soon. 

At first, I had ITMX misalgined to use AS55 as an out of loop sensor, then I aligned and locked the X arm on POX to compare.

Weirdly enough, locking the mode cleaner to the Y arm with 30kHz UGF and two boosts on make no real visible difference in the X arm control signal. This is strange, as the whole point of this affair was to remove the presumably large influence of frequency noise on the X arm signals... Maybe this is injecting too much POY sensor noise?

Below 100 Hz, I suppose this means that the X arm is now limited by the quadrature sum of the X and Y arm seismic noise.

The noise budget on the Y arm ALS has begun.

Right now the fluctuation of the green beat-note seems mostly covered by unknown noise which is relatively white.

(Though I feel I made a wrong calibration ... I have to check it again)

(Measurement condition)

Scripting of the single arm automated lock script is 80% done.

The remaining 20 % is not something immediately needed and I start decreasing the priority on the Y arm ALS.

(Remaining stuff)

• Automated optimization of I/Q phases at the frequency discriminator's signal.
  • this part will be done after we install Jamie's new beat box
• A routine function which checks if the beat note is within a reasonable bandwidth
  • This part can be done with the frequency-divided signal and the digital delay line frequency discriminator
  • Another approach is to install a frequency counter, which doesn't have to be so precise
• A state bit which tells us how far the script goes
• An exit handler.
  • This should run whenever the script is unexpectedly force-quite, to gently bring the ALS system down.
• A servo which brings the beat frequency to exactly a point where the infrared light is on a resonance point
  • Currently this part is partially human-aided. I put a little bit of correction in the frequency offset by looking at time series
  • To automate this part, we need another LOCKIN system to shake the arm length and demodulates the transmitted light

Locking activity last night :

  The free run beat-note in 532 nm has been measured.

However I couldn't close the ALS loop somehow.

Every time I tried closing the loop it broke the Y end PDH lock in a couple of minutes.

 (Things to be done)

   1.  Optimization of the Y end PDH servo loop

   2. Refinement of the broadband RFPD setup

Here is a new time series plot showing how stably ALS can control the arm length.

In the middle of the plot the cavity length was held at the resonance point for ~ 2 min. and then it passed through the resonance point to show the full shape of the PDH signal.

Apparently the PDH signal is now quieter than before (#6133)

                        One of my goals this week is to get people to make plots with physical units:

That ALS plot would be 5x cooler if the POY11 signal could be in meters instead of counts or cubits.

Here are the latest plots that I have obtained from the Friday night:

    Time Series   

The residual motion in the arm displacements reached 70 pm in rms.

 Locking activity last night:

  It became able to close the ALS loop (beat-note signal was fed back to ETMY).

The UGF was about 60 Hz, but somehow I couldn't bring the UGF higher than that.

Every time when I increased the UGF more than 60 Hz, the Y end PDH was unlocked (or maybe ETMY became crazy at first).

Perhaps it could be a too much noise injection above 60 Hz, since I was using the coarse frequency discriminator.

Anyway I will try a cavity sweep and the successive noise budgeting while holding the arm length by the beat-note signal.

Another thing : I need a temperature feedback in the Y end green PDH loop, so that the PZT voltage will be offloaded to the laser temperature.

Handing off the servo from ALS to LSC for one arm is quite easy because servo filters are pretty much same for ALS and LSC. I demonstrated it Y arm during MI is locked.
We need DARM/CARM-kind of handing off in the near future.

What I did:
  1. Brought both arms to IR resonance.
  2. Brought X arm to off resonance.
  3. Locked MI in bright fringe(why can't I lock in dark fringe, when one arm is on resonance?) using AS55_Q and BS.
  4. Ran /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/ALS/handofftoLSC.py Yarm to handoff. It decreases ALS gain and increases LSC gain in 30 sec ramp time. It also turns on some filters for LSC. Make sure you turn off filter triggers for LSC.

 Below is the plot of what I did. You can see LSC feedback signal gradually increasing and TRY getting more stable.
 I was dissapointed with ALS not having any DQ channels for feedback signal. I will make them DQ channels tomorrow.

One of my goals in this week is : measurement of the current best ALS noise budget.

Last night I took a new noise spectra of the Y arm ALS, which is shown in the attached figure below.

The displacement of the arm cavity observed from the IR PDH is at 66 pm in rms. In the measurement the arm length was stabilized with the ALS technique.

I did some more stuff for the Y arm ALS and updated the noise budget:

After the works, the rms displacement improved a little bit, so it is now at 24 pm in rms.

Though, it turned out that the MFD's ADC is now limiting the noise in a frequency band of 200 mHz - 5 Hz.

So tonight I will increase the gain of the whitening filter to push down the ADC noise more.

(What I did)

 + added the DAC noise and comparator noise based on measurements.

 + redesigned the servo filter shape to suppress the seismic noise below 10 Hz.

 The attached plot below shows the newly designed open loop transfer function together with the old one for a comparison.

UGF is at 120 Hz and the phase margin is about 27 deg.

• FM7 = resonant gain (17)
• FM6 = resonant gain (3)
• FM5 = zero(1) * pole(500)
• FM4 = pole(1) * zero(40.) * 40.
• FM3 = pole(1) * zero(40.) * 40.
• FM2 = pole(0.001)*zero(1)*1000.

Surprisingly increasing the gain of the whitening filter didn't improve the noise curve.

It suggests that the ADC noise is not the limiting factor below 10 Hz.

[Masayuki, Manasa]

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

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

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

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

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

The servos of C1ASS for the Y arm and the beam axis alignments were fixed.

Now we can correctly run the Y arm ASS from the C1IFO_CONFIGURE window as usual.

The sign of some control gains had been flipped for some reasons, so I changed them to the correct signs.

Next : Health-check for the X arm ASS, the loss measurements.

The X arm ASS was also fixed. So both X and Y arm ASS are now back to normal.

Now we can align the arms any time from the buttons on the C1IFO_CONFIGURE window.

(notes)

The reason why the servo didn't work was that the sign of some control gains had been flipped.

This was exactly the same situation as that in the Y arm ASS (#5067).

[Attachment #1]: ITMY HR face after cleaning. I determined this to be sufficiently clean and re-installed the optic.

[Attachment #2]: ETMY HR face after cleaning. This is what the HR face looks like after 3 rounds of First-Contact application. After the first round, we noticed some arc-shaped lines near the center of the optic's clear aperture. We were worried this was a scratch, but we now believe it to be First-Contact residue, because we were able to remove it after drag wiping with acetone and isopropanol. However, we mistrust the quality of the solvents used - they are not any special dehydrated kind, and we are looking into acquiring some dehydrated solvents for future cleaning efforts.

[Attachment #3]: Top view of ETMY cage meant to show increased clearance between the IFO axis and the elliptical reflector.

Many more photos (including table leveling checks) on the google-photos page for this vent. The estimated time between F.C. peeling and pumpdown is ~24 hours for ITMY and ~15 hours for ETMY, but for the former, the heavy doors were put on ~1 hour after the peeling.

The first task is to fix the damping of ETMY.

[Koji, Manasa]

The Y arm locks stably for IR PDH now.  

The reason for ETMY getting kicked during lock acquisition was finally found to be related to the limiter value set in the Y arm servo. We reduced the limiter value unintentionally and found that the lock acquisition stayed smooth. The limiter value was stepped in 1000s from 7000 and eventually found that the ETMY suspension was kicked when we try to acquire lock with the limiter value was set at 11000. 

The limiter for X arm at 11000 is not causing any trouble at the moment.

In the process, we did a bunch of things through the evening to troubleshoot IR locking of the Y arm.

Earlier today running the IFO configure script did not restore the arms to lock and both the ETMs needed to be aligned to lock the arms. The arms stayed locked for 15 minutes and the Y arm lost lock eventually leaving the ETMY in a misaligned state. 

The state of the Y arm was similar to what Jenne has explained in ELOG where the ETMY was kicked during lock acquisition and would move to a misaligned state.

To trouble shoot, there were several things that were done. A few of them might not have any direct correlation to the locking issue but could just be a coincidence.  

1.  The trigger time for the filters in the arm filter modules were set such that they switch on after the SUS violin filters. Arm FM trigger time = 3 s (previously set at 0.1s) and SUS violin trigger time = 1s. This reduced the number of lock loss events.

2. There was some drop in transmission when the bounce filter of Y arm (FM6) turned ON. This was fixed by changing its ramp time (initially set at 1s). The filter has been modified to turn on immediately upon arm lock acquisition before the other triggered filters in the filter module turn on.

3. The QPD and SUS signal cables running to the rack were checked to be intact. Koji found some of them to be loose. But this had no evident correlation with the arm locking problem.

4.The oplev and PD alignment was checked at the Y end. The high gain trans PD for Y arm was checked for good alignment by looking at TRY. It was found that the EXIT light at the Y end is injecting some noise to the transmission PD. 

5. The ETMY was given offsets in PIT, YAW and POS and the OSEM sensor values were checked to see if the suspension is behaving well. It was behaving well.

The qpd was removed from the east end table and threaded adaptor ring epoxied on it's shell.

This tube will cut down the amount of emergency exit light getting into the qpd.

[Jamie / Valera / Kiwamu]

 The incident beam pointing was improved a lot by using C1ASS realtime code.

Some more details will be posted later. The below is the list of the highlights today.

 - The Y arm cavity was aligned to have good beam centering on the mirrors.

 - The input PZTs were also aligned to the aligned Y arm by hand.

 - Automation of the  Y arm alignment using C1ASS_LOCKIN got partially functional with two loops closed. C1ASS correctly servos the centering on ETMY

 - The amount of the off-centering on ITMY and ETMY look roughly within 1 mm.

 - As a result the intracavity power got bigger by a factor of about 3.5

I started doing a scan of the Y arm cavity with IR with ALS enabled.

ALS servo tuning:

The servo tuning procedure is basically the same as described in elog 8831.

This time I had a stronger beat note(-14 dBm instead of -24 dBm of the last measurement) thanks to a better alignment.

Plot1 shows the Power spectrum of the BEATY_PHASE_OUT. The RMS is smaller by a factor of 2 (400Hz), corresponding to a residual motion of about 25 pm.

Offset setting avity scan

In order to give an offset linearly growing in time, I used the ezcastep script instead of giving the offset in OFFSETTER2. If the ramp time is long enough, it is not necessary to enable the 30mHz filter.

To span 2 FSR, I started from an offset of 450 and I gave a maximum value of 1600 with a delay of 0.2s between two consecutive steps.

Cavity scan

I did a first scan with the cavity well aligned, basically to know the position of the 00 peaks and choose the best offset range (Plot2)

Then I misaligned the TT2, first in PITCH and yhen in YAW, in order to enhance the HOMs. (Plot3 and Plot4)

More investigation and measurements needed. 

Yesterday I did a cavity scan with IR while holding the Yarm with green.

ALS servo tuning:

• C1ALS-BEATY_FINE_PHASE

             The gain of the loop is set such that BEATY_FINE_Q_ERR x GAIN = 120k. This is a kind of "empirical low" in order to have the UGF around 1kHz. 

• C1ALS_YARM

             Start with FM5 [1000:1] enabled, determine the sign of the gain increasing it in small steps and making sure that the mirror doesn't get a kick. Then gradually raise it while looking at the BEATY_PHASE_OUT power spectrum.

             Enable FM7 [RG16.5], FM6 [RG3.2], FM3 [1:5], FM2[0:1], FM10 [40:7].

Plot 1 shows the power spectrum of BEATY_PHASE_OUT (calibrated in Hz).

1. blue curve - ALS disabled
2. green curve - in loop measurement, ALS enabled and servo tuned as described above
3. grey curve - RMS of the in loop measurement
4. red curve - out of loop measurement (arm locked with IR)
5. pink curve -  RMS of the out of loop measurement

Offset setting and cavity scan

The C1ALS_OFFSETTER2 was used to set an offset for ALS scan.

• LPF30m enabled
• Ramp time set to 150s
• Offset set to 1500 (approximately 3 FSR in this interval)

Many scans have been done to find the optimal offset conditions, I only attached one (Plot 2).

I also misaligned the END mirror in pitch to enhance the HOMs peaks, but it turned out that it was not enough, because I didn't see a very big difference between the "aligned" and the "slightly misaligned" measurements (Plot 3). 

NEXT STEPS

Increase the cavity misalignment both in pitch and in yaw and repeat the measurement.

[Annalisa, Terra, Koji, Gautam]

Summary: We find a configuration for arm scans which significantly reduces phase noise. We run several arm scans and we were able to resolve several HOM peaks; analysis to come.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As first, we made a measurement with the already established setup and, as Jon already pointed out, we found lots of phase noise. We hypothesized that it could either come from the PLL or from the motion of the optics between the AUX injection point (AS port) and the Y arm. 

• We first characterized the PLL loop phase noise by comparing the beat signal against the Agilent reference signal, and we found that the beat had lots of phase noise with respect to the reference. Decreasing the PLL gain, we got rid of the phase noise in the beat signal.
• Next, for the optical path length induced phase noise, we took the transfer function between TransMon and REFL signal rather than TransMon and Agilent reference signal. This takes advatage of the fact that the TransMon and REFL both see optical path length phase noise, which therefore gets canceled out in the transfer function. 

In this configuration, we were able to do arm scans where the phase variation at each peak was pretty clear and well defined. We took several 10MHz scan, we also zoomed around some specific HOM peak, and we were able to resolve some frequency split. 

We add some pictures of the setup and of the scan.

The data are saved in users/OLD/annalisa/Yscans. More analysis and plots will follow tomorrow. 

EY:

• A clean cart was setup adjacent to the HEPA-enclosed mini cleanroom area (it cannot be inside the mini cleanroom, because of lack of space). 
• The FC tools (first contact, acetone, beakers, brushes, PEEK mesh, clean scissors, clean tweezers, Canon camera, green flashlight) were laid out on this cart for easy access.
• I inspected the optic - the barrel had a few specks of dust, and the outer 1.5" annular region of the HR face looked to have some streak marks
  • I was advised not to pre-wipe the HR side with any solvents
  • The FC was only applied to the centran ~1-1.5" of the optic
• After applying the FC, I spent a few minutes inspecting the status of the OSEMs 
  • Three out of the four face OSEMs, as well as the side OSEM, did not have a filter in
  • I inserted filters into them.
• Closed up the chamber with light door, left HEPA unit on and the mini cleanroom setup intact for now. We will dismantle everything after the pumpdown.

IY:

• Similar setup to EY was implemented
• Removed side OSEM from ITMY.
• Double-checked that EQ stops were engaged.
• Moved the OSEM cable tower to free up some space for accommodating ITMY.
• Undid the clamps of ITMY, moved it to the NE corner of the IY table.
• Inspected the optic - it was much cleaner than the 2016 inspection, although the barrel did have some specks of dust.
• Once again, I applied first contact to the central ~1.5" of the HR surface.
• Checked status of filters on OSEMs - this time, only the UL coil required a filter.
  • Attachment #3 shows the sensor voltage DC level before and after the insertion of the filter. There is ~0.1% change.
  • The filters were found in a box that suggests they were made in 2002 - but Steve tells me that it is just stored in a box with that label, and that since there are >100 filters inside that box, he thinks they are the new ones we procured in 2016. The coating specs and type of glass used are different between the two versions.

The attached photo shows the two optics with FC applied.

My original plan was to attempt to close up tomorrow. However, we are still struggling with Satellite box issues. So rather than rush it, we will attempt to recover the Y arm cavity alignment on Monday, satellite box permitting. The main motivation is to reduce the deadtime between peeling off the F.C and starting the pumpdown. We will start working on recovering the cavity alignment once the Sat box issues are solved.

In an earlier elog, I had claimed that the suspected clipping of the cavity axis in the Y arm was not solved even after shifting the heater. I now think that it is extremely unlikely that there is still clipping due to the heater. Nevertheless, the ASS system is not working well. Some notes:

1. The heater has been shifted nearly 1-inch relative to the cavity axis compared to its old position - see Attachment #1 which compares the overhead shot of the suspension cage before and after the Jan 2019 vent.
2. On Sunday, I was able to recover TRY ~ 1.0 (but not as high as I was able to get by intentionally setting a yaw offset to the ASS) by hand alignment with the spot on ETMY much closer to the center of the optic, judging by the camera. There are offsets on the dither alignment error signals which depend on the dither frequency, so the A2L signals are not good judges of how well centered we are on the optic.
3. By calculating the power lost by clipping a Gaussian beam cross-section with a rectangular block from one side (an admittedly naive model of clipping), I find that we'd have to be within 15 mm of the line connecting the centers of ITMY and ETMY to even see ~10 ppm loss, see Attachment #2. So it is hard to believe that this is still a problem. Also, see  Attachment #3 which compares side-by-side the view of ETMY as seen through the EY optical table viewport before and after the Jan 2019 vent.

We have to systematically re-commission the ASS system to get to the bottom of this.

Estimate loss along the Y arm beat path:

1. Measured the beam powers (before the beam combiner): 
Y Arm green = 35 uW
Y PSL green = 90 uW

==> P_beat ~ 2 * sqrt (35 uW * 90 uW) ~ 112 uW

2. Expected power of RF signal
Assuming the PD to have transimpedance ~ 2kV/A and responsivity ~ 0.3A/W, 
the expected power of the RF signal = (P_beat * Transimpledance* Responsivity)^2 / (2 * 50ohm) ~ 45uW = -13.5 dBm

3. Measured power of Y arm beat signal

Turned OFF the beat PDs and rerouted the RF cables such that the spectrum analyzer was reading the RF signal from the Y beat PD itself (without any amplifiers or the beat box itself in the path).  
Turned ON the beat PDs and the Y arm beat signal power on the spectrum analyzer measured -58dBm
Even if we consider for losses along the length of the cables, we are still at a very bad state. 

4. Bad mode matching??
I don't think mode matching is our main problem here.
Toggling the shutter several times, even with the non-00 modes, the maximum beat power we can see is -50dBm which is still very far from the actual expected value.

The Y arm green transmission had come down to 0.3 and the green steering mirrors on the Y end table required some minor alignment adjustments to bring back transmission to around 0.75 counts.

The beam axis of the Y green light has been aligned.

Now I can see TEM00 mode is flashing on the ETMY camera.

-- (What I will do tonight)

The next step is to refine some electronics in the PDH loops to get the green light locked to the Y arm cavity.

If the beam isn't locked, I guess the in-vac-work will be so difficult because of the low intensity of the green light.

According to a brief check on the circuits, a low pass filter after the demodulation mixer is in a sad situation.

It doesn't pass any signals and in fact it behaves more like an absorber.

On the other hand, the modulation system looks fine to me because I was able to see the 270 kHz sideband converted into AM due to the fringing.

I succeeded in locking the green light to the Y arm cavity, but it wasn't so robust. Something is unhealthy in the electronics.

I am leaving the Y green system as it is because I already can see a plenty of the green light flashing in the BS chamber.

So just a flashing of the green light is good enough for the in-vac-work.

DONE.

I closed all 8 dither loops for the Y arm initial alignment: 2x2 centering servo (this worked before) and 2x2 input beam servo for both pitch and yaw.

So far it looks pretty good - the error points go to zero and the arm power goes up to 1.

The offloading to the alignment biases and the PZTs is not yet automated.

Today the PMC, MC, and Y arm were very cooperative and a pleasure to work with.

 Just a quick update... the Lightwave laser has now been moved up to the end of the Y arm. It's also been mounted on the new mounting block and heatsinks attached with indium as the heat transfer medium.

A couple of nice piccies...

Calibrating error signal to beat frequency;
  I injected 0 dBm RF sine wave into the beatbox and sweeped the frequency(just like we did in elog #6815).
  This time, we have different whitening filters. I sweeped the frequency from 0 to 100 MHz in 200 sec.
  The length of the delay line is ~1.5 m for COARSE.


Y arm length;
  Here, I think we need some assumption. Let's assume wavelength of IR lamb_IR = 1064 nm and Y end green frequency is nu_g = 2*nu_IR.
  There is a relation
    dnu_g / nu_g = dL / L
  So,
    dnu_g / (dL/lamb_IR) = 2*nu_IR * lamb_IR / L = 2c/L
  We know that dL/lamb_IR = 1/2 for difference in beat frequency between TEM00s. Therefore, slope of the dnu_g vs dL/lamb_IR plot gives us the arm length L(figure below, middle plot).

  Error estimation is not done yet, but I think the COARSE_I_IN1 error signal to the beat frequency calibration has the largest error because it seems like the amplitude of sine wave changes ~10% day by day.

Calibrating beat frequency to Y arm length change;
  I used L = 32.36 m (figure above, bottom plot).
    dnu_g / dL = c / lamb_g / L = 1.74 MHz/m

Wow. This is way too short.

You don't need to use Albertoo's arm length as his measurement was done before the upgrade.

I know!
But I think there's some error (~ 10% ?) in calibrating the beatbox. In elog #6815, slope near zero crossing point is about 68 counts/MHz, but now, its 60 counts/MHz. Also, zero crossing point in elog #6815 was 47 MHz, but now, its 45 MHz. 5FSR scan was done between these two calibration measurement.

The Y arm has been locked with the IR beam. The purpose is to use the arm as an alignment reference for the input PZTs.

Detail will be posted later. Here is a picture of ITMY suspension. You can see there is a beam spot in the middle of the test mass.

First of all, the conclusions / results from the exercise of the Y arm locking yesterday are:

   The position of the beam spots on both ETMY and ITMY are now not so bad ( ~ 5 mm off from the center).

   The input PZTs are coarsely aligned to the Y arm.

   Nevertheless IP_ANG is still too high to come out from the view port at the Y end station.

  After the alignments of PRM, SRM and Michelson, POP is still largely clipped.

(what I did)

  - Alignments of the Input PZTs

  - Adjustment of the demodulation phase  for the Y arm PDH.

  - Activation of oplev on ITMY

  - PDH locking

(Broken or likely broken stuff)

 * IP_ANG doesn't give a signal to the digital side.

 * ETMY coils look weak and 2 - 3 times weaker than the other test masses. (or OSEM readout gain maybe lower)

 * reload button on sitemap.adl doesn't work.

 * Farfalla, a lab laptop, seems out of network.

As far as I know, this button works only once after the launch of MEDM...

 If you look at the real host table instead of the misleading host table in the wiki, you will see that someone has deleted Farfalla from there. She needs to be re-added.

[johannes, lydia, gautam]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Y arm locked on green carrier in 00 mode!

It locked at almost 280 cts, and the transmitted power on the PSL table is  about 40 uW.

To make it lock on the carrier I had to flip the sign of the error signal in the PDH loop, so I put a phase shifter (a Pomona box with a 23 uF capacitor) right before the LO input of the PDH box (on the model of the X arm).

Tomorrow I will put more details about the power budget and the phase shifter transfer function.

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

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

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

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

[Annalisa, Nic]

After connecting the PD with the reflection from the arm  to the PDH box, theY  arm has been locked on the 01 mode.  Maximizing the alignment, we obtained a 00 mode locking, but we couldn't maximize the power.

The size of the reflected beam was different with respect to the size of the incoming beam, so probably a bad mode matching was one of the issues.

Moreover, the reflected beam is very low power. We need to figure out why it is so (bad alignment? related to mode matching?)

After measuring better all the distances, I did a new mode matching calculation. I put the lenses after measuring the beam waist, so the size of the beam on the lenses was the same as expected from the calculation. Nevertheless, the beam size on the beam splitter looks bigger than expected, and also in this case green flashes into the cavity at some HOM (again 01).

I also tried to lock again the cavity and maximize the alignment, but I didn't get any improvement with respect to the previous mode matching.

Still no good locking!

After making the reflected beam size closer to the injected one, I maximized alignment. I locked again in 00 mode, but I couldn't maximize the power. 

I just realized that maybe I'm not using the correct radius of curvature for the ETMY in the simulation. Tomorrow I will start checking from that.

 Also make sure you are taking into account the substrate of the ETM.

 For the mode matching calculation I was using the ETMY focal length that I found on Kiwamu's plot on the wiki page. 

Taking into account also the substrate, the focal length turns out to be

fl = ((n-1)*(1/R1 - 1/R2 + (n-1)d/(nR1R2)))^(-1) = -125.81 m

with n = 1.46071 (refraction index of fused silica at 532nm)

R1 = 5625 m (radius of curvature of the first surface)

R2 = 57.37 m (radius of curvature of the second surface)

d = 25mm (thickness)

The value of the focal length is sligthly different from the one I was using before in the calculation, but maybe it is enough to change the coupling.

The mode matching solution I found is very sensitive to the lenses position. 

The beam waist position can vary up to 20m varying by 1cm the first lens position, while it is slightly less sensitive to the second lens displacement.

As shown in the picture, along the green beam path there is also a 1m focal length lens. It's position is fixed, because it is along the IR transmetted beam path also. I tried to get a better solution without it, but I found that the waist position was still strongly dependent on one of the two lenses position, so it would not solve the problem to remove this lens.

I think that the main issue of this mode matching is related to the "space contraints", because the two lenses' positions can vary in a very small space, even though the green beam path on the table is quite long.

Eventually, I put the MM lenses found from this last simulation on the table, and it seems to work, since I've seen very strong 00 flashes. Unfortunately, while trying to maximize the alignment I broke it  and I have to do it again, but I feel confident! 

After restoring alignment I could see again strong 00 flashes (about 250-300 counts on ALS-TRY). So I locked the arm with IR and after enabling the PDH servo for the green locking, I also locked the green on the Y arm in 00 mode. Then I moved the two mode matching lenses to maximize the power into the 00 mode, but I didn't reach more than 30-35 counts.

Green power injected into the Y arm                    0.680mW

Green power reflected back                                  0.090mW

Green power transmitted on the PSL                  few uW

I would expect more power on the PSL table (maybe 10x more).