Using the equation for thermal resistance

R_thermal = L/(k*A)

where k is the thermal conductivity of a material, L is the length, and A is the surface area through which the heat passes, I could find the thermal resistance of the copper and stainless steel on the reference cavity. To reduce temperature gradients across the vacuum chamber, the thermal resistance of the copper must be the same or less than that of the stainless steel. Since the copper is directly on top of the stainless steel, the length and width will be the same for both, just the thickness will be different (for ease of calculation, I assumed flat, rectangular strips of the metal). Assuming we wish to have a thermal resistance of the copper n times less than that of the stainless steel, we have

R_Cu = R_SS/n

or

L/(k_Cu*w*t_Cu) = L/(k_SS*w*t_SS*n)

so that

t_Cu/t_SS = n*k_SS/k_Cu

We know that k_SS = 401 W/m*K and K_Cu = 16 W/m*K, so

t_Cu/t_SS = 0.0399*n

By using the drawings for the short reference cavity vacuum chamber (the only one I could find drawings for online) I found a thickness of the walls of 0.12 in or 0.3048 cm. So for the same thermal resistance in both metals, the copper must be 0.0122 cm thick and for a thermal resistance 10 times less, it must be 0.122 cm thick. So we will have to keep wrapping the copper on the vacuum chamber!

It looks like something wrong happened around the PSL front end.  One of the PSL channel, C1:PSL-PMC_LOCALC, got crazy. 

We found it by the donkey alarm 10 minutes ago.

The attached picture is a screen shot of the PMC medm screen.

The value of C1:PSL-PMC_LOCALC ( middle left on the picture ) shows wired characters. It returns "nan" when we do ezcaread.

Joe went to the rack and powered off / on the crate, but it still remains the same. It might be an analog issue (?)

The problem seems to be a software one.

In any case, Kiwamu and I looked at the at the PMC crystal board and demod board, in search of a possible bad connection. We found a weak connection of the RG cable going into the PD input of the demod board. The cable was bent and almost broken.

I replaced the SMA connector of the cable with a new one that I soldered in situ. Then I made sure that the connection was good and didn't have any short due to the soldering.

[Alberto, Koji]

By looking at the reference pictures of the rack in the wiki, it turned out that the Sorensen which provides the 10V to the 1Y1 rack was on halt (red light on). It had been like that since 1.30pm today. It might have probably got disabled by a short somewhere or inadvertently by someone working nearby it.

Turning it off and on reset it. The crazy LO calibrated amplitude on the PMC screen got fixed.

Then it was again possible to lock PMC and FSS.

We also had to burtrestore the PSL computer becasue of the several reboots done on it today.

So...who was working around the PSL rack this morning and afternoon? Looks like there was some VCO phase noise work at the bottom of

the rack as well as some disconnecting of the Guralp cables from that rack. Who did which when and who needs to be punished?

The ref cavity ion pump was running at 7.7kV instead of 5kV

This Digitel SPC-1 20 l/s ion pump should be running at 5kV

This is the trend so far with the copper foil wrapping. According to Megan's calculation, we need ~1 mm of foil and the thickness of each layer is 0.002" (1/20th of a mm), so we need ~20 layers. We have ~5 layers so far.

As you can see the out-of-loop temperature sensor (RCTEMP) is much better than before. We need another week to tell how well the frequency is doing -

the recent spate of power cycles / reboots of the PSL have interrupted the trend smoothness so far.

I wrapped another ~3 layers onto there. It occurs to me now that we could just get some 2mm thick copper plates made to fit over the stainless steel can.

They don't have to completely cover it, just mostly. I also took the copper circles that Steve had made and marked them with the correct beam height

and put them on Steve's desk. We need a 1" dia. hole cut into these on Monday.

To compensate for the cooling during my work, I've set the heater for max heating for 1 hour and then to engage the temperature servo.

I also noticed the HEPA VARIAC on the PSL was set to 100. Please set it back to 20 after completing your PSL work so that it doesn't disturb the RC temperature..

I bet you thought that the NPRO slow actuator response could be well represented by a pole at ~0.1 Hz? Well, that's just what they want you to believe.

I attach the response measured in FSS-FAST (with no feedback to the SLOW actuator) when the SLOW is given a step. As you may remember from

kindergarten, the response of a single pole low pass should just be an exponential. Clearly, there's more here than 1 pole.

 I also inserted a factor of 0.01 in the FSSSlowServo code so I could make the gain sliders have reasonable values (they used to all be ~1e-3). The SVN and the MEDM snapshot are updated.

We start the work on the cables at around the PSL table.

Aug 5th 10am-4pm?: (Kiwamu, Alberto, Koji)
- Removal of the unused cables around the PSL table and the control room
- Removal of the cable ties on the PSL frame

- Removal of the big nuts at the side of the PSL table

Aug 6th 10am-4pm?: (Kiwamu, Alberto, Koji, Jenne (~noon) )
- Labeling of the cables
- Planning of the disconnection

Aug 9th  9am-5pm: (Steve, Jenne, Alberto, Koji)
- Shutting down of the PSL
- Disconnection of the cables
- Draining of the cooling water
- Removal of the accelerometers
- Removal of the PSL chamber
- Sealing of the table with the plastic sheets

[Alberto, Kiwamu, and Koji]

We removed the BNC cables from the control room.
The work was as hard as the one I had when I swept a 300m tunnel with a vacuum...

If we could remove the video cables, that would be a real epoch.

We found that the cabling behind the AP table is still quite ugly....grurrrh

PSL preparation work

Aug 5th 10am-4pm?: (Kiwamu, Alberto, Koji)

• Removing the unused cables around the PSL table and the control room

Aug 6th 10am-4pm?: (Kiwamu (ex. noon-2pm), Alberto, Koji, Jenne ('till noon) )

• Labeling the cables to be disconnected / making the records ==> All
• Removals
  • the big nuts at the side of the PSL table ==> Steve
  • the cable ties on the PSL frame ==> Easy
  • Innolight 2W ==> Kiwamu
  • the green pickoff optics at the edge, if necessary ==> Kiwamu talking with Steve
  • Optics on the shelf ==> Jenne / Koji
  • Oscilloscopes on the shelf ==> Jenne / Koji
  • CCD camera connections (optional, as far as not critical for the operation)
• Put poles on the table (for the plastic sheet) ==> Alberto / Koji

Aug 9th  9am-5pm: (Steve, Jenne, Alberto, Koji)

• Disconnecting the cables ==> All
• Shutting down the PSL ==> Steve/Koji
  • Draining the cooling water  ==> Steve
• Removals
  • The accelerometers ==> Jenne
  • the PSL chamber ==> Steve
  • Periscopes ==> Alberto
• Sealing of the table with the plastic sheets

• The chiller is planned to go to MIT

Monday, August 9

 We should move the reference cavity too. Will this cavity be pumped while relocated?

Check and insure that attached and cut-free cables of PSL have enough room to tolerate the raising of the enclosure by 6"

I had second thoughts about the power line to the OMC. Koji was right, we should disconnect them from the power supplies.

The PSL enclosure doors on the north side will have to be removed some times to move exiting and entering ports.

PSL preparation work report

Aug 6th 10am-5pm: (Steve, Jenne, Alberto, Kiwamu, Koji)

- We labeled the cables to be disconnected

• These will be disconnected in order to isolate the PSL table and the frame (housing) from the other part of the lab.
• Upon the labeling we made the list and the map of the cables to be removed.
• On Monday we disconnect those cables one by one accoding to the list.

- The following stuffs have been removed from the PSL table

• The big nuts at the side of the PSL table
• The cable ties on the PSL frame
• Innolight 2W
• The green pickoff optics at the edge
• The optics on the shelf
• The oscilloscopes on the shelf

- The OMC power supply cable was visited.

• The connections to the power supply were removed. There are two HV outputs.

- We put thick and long optical poles

• They are placed at the edge of the table so that we can put the plastic sheets on the table without touching the optics.

Plan on Monday

Aug 9th  9am-5pm: (Steve, Jenne, Alberto, Koji)

• Disconnecting the cables ==> All
• Shutting down the PSL ==> Steve/Koji
  • Draining the cooling water  ==> Steve
• Removals
  • The accelerometers ==> Jenne
  • The reference cavity chamber ==> Steve
  • The small periscope ==> Alberto
• Sealing of the table with the plastic sheets

• The chiller is planned to go to MIT 

Jenne asked us to keep th MC locked and let the seismometers happy through this weekend.
Note that the work at the control room and the desks are no problem as far as you are quiet.

Nancy told Jenne and me that she finished the work and reverted the WFS to the old state at 4:30AM.
She could not make the elog as it has been crashed.

MC and old MC WFS looks working as usual.

From 6:40AM to 9:40AM the oscillation of the PMC looks present.

At 10:30AM I reduced the gain of the PMC from +15dB to +13dB.

Work on Aug 9th

Steve, Jenne, Koji, Alberto, Aidan, Jan, Sharmila, Katherine

From 9am to 6pm

• Shutting down the PSL after the 90885 hours of service
• Removals
  • The accelerometers
    
  • The reference cavity chamber
    
  • The periscopes were left so far
• The cables between the PSL table and the outside have been disconnected
  • Listed items on Friday
  • Some unlisted items recorded and disconnected
  • Drained the cooling water from the chiller lines
  • Pulled out the chiller connections at the control room as well as the chiller control cables (temp sens & RS232C)
• Sealed the PSL table with plastic sheets
  • Put antistatic films to the table (they are supported by the long optical poles)
  • Used capton tapes to fix the films on to the table
  • Put the white huge plastic sheet to cover the table at once
  • Some spaces at the edge of the tables are left flat such that the C-clamps can be attached
• Sealed the AP and the ITMY tables by capton tapes

Some photos are attached in this entry. All of the photos found in the picasa album (click the slideshow)

http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/PSL/LayoutUpgrade

P-pol = purple

S-pol = red

The .graffle file for this is in the 40m SVN's omnigraffle dir/

I used the free software called 'ABCD' for Mac to construct this mode matching solution for going from the PMC to the IMC.

After getting it close by eye, I plugged the initial guess into Matlab and let it optimize the distances. I then plugged this into 'ABCD'

to get the exact solution. ABCD doesn't actually optimize anything; it just makes a nice table and graphically plots the solution.

• The first waist between the first lens (f = +200 mm) and the second lens (f = -150 mm) is where the triple mod EOM goes. I have not accounted for the index (1.75) of the KTP.
• The third lens we need is a f = +400 mm lens. I have put the lenses in the new layout drawing at the positions indicated in the Omnigraffle drawing. Each grid square corresponds to 1 inch.

The part numbers for these lenses are:

PLCX-25.4-103.0-UV-1064

PLCC-25.4-77.3-UV-1064

PLCX-25.4-206.0-UV-1064

In a manner similar to the now classic 'Mode Matching from PMC to IMC' entry, I have calculated the lenses and positions needed to match the 2W NPRO beam into the PMC.

The added complication is that we also want to have a reasonable beam size to get into the Faraday and the AOM. It seems that this should be possible using one lens.

After the beam comes out of the AOM, there's another lens to match to the PMC. Its possible to do this with more lenses, but this is just an effort to minimize the number

of surfaces in the beam.

Thoughts on where to take the pickoff for the SHG for the PSL-green?  We discussed today at the meeting the possibility of putting a 90/10 beam splitter right after the PMC, so that the green team would get somewhere between 100-200mW. 

[Rana, Jenne]

Like a new phoenix, the 40m PSL is in the process of being reborn...

We cleared many old optics and components (including Alberto's favorite periscope) off of the north end of the PSL table.  Some optics are stored on the SP table, others on the shelf inside the PSL enclosure.

The new Innolight 2W NPRO is on the table, the PMC has been moved, and the main path of the laser has been sketched out using steering mirrors. Since we still don't have a beam, we're roughly placing all of our optics, and we'll finalize the alignment after turning on the laser.

Using a leveled HeNe, I checked the height of optics we should use to match the height of optics in the chambers by shining the light at the first steering mirror in the chamber, and ensuring that the beam hit the center of that optic .  Since the new PSL table height is identical to the AP table, it's not a surprise that from now on we will be using a 4" beam height on the PSL table, rather than the old PSL 3" beam height.

On the to-do list is to make a plate with 4 through holes to raise the PMC up by 1 inch, and to make an adapter plate (or come up with another plan) for mounting the AOM that goes directly after the NPRO/Faraday, among many other things.  We also still need to make some space for the RefCav to be put in its new place on the table, and then install it with Steve's help.   

In fact, many of the mounts need to be adapted to 4": the beefy steering mirrors going into the PMC, the PMC RFPD, the ISS AOM, the Faraday between the NPRO and the AOM, the NPRO itself, the ISS PDs.

Also for the FSS: the 21.5 MHz EOM, the PBS, the AOM, the refcav periscope, and the RFPD.

Its obvious, in retrospect, that we would have to do this, but it somehow didn't occur to me until actually trying to put things on the table...

The NPRO itself is already tapped with 3 (metric) M3 holes. It also has 4 (un-tapped) holes at its 4 corners which look like they are for feet. Anyone have a mount design for the Innolight NPRO already?

We also started labeling the table with the new coordinate system. In this system, the NE corner is the origin. The screw hole which is most NE is 1,1. The numbering increases in the south (+X) direction and goes negative in the west (-Y) direction.

Jenne and Koji

Last week Jenne has put the accelerometers on and under the PSL table immediately after the plastic sheets were removed.

So I took the same measurement as I did on 9th Aug.

Here is the comparison of the vibrational performance of the table before and after the modification.

Basically the table is now stiffer and more damped than it was before.
We don't find any eminent structure below (at least) 70Hz.
This result is obtained despite elevating of the table.

1) Attachment 1

For the horizontal comparison (top),  it is clearly seen that the large resonant peak at 20Hz was eliminated.
At least the new resonances went up to 70-90Hz region. Y is basically equivalent to X.

For the vertical comparison (bottom), it is clearly seen that the resonant peaks at around 50 & 70Hz were eliminated. 
At least no new resonance is seen.

2) Attachment 2

All-in-one plot for the measurement --- spectra, coherences, transfer functions --- after the upgrade. I put the same plot for the one before the upgrade.

The lifting and resetting of the BLUE PSL enclosure has made it unstable somehow. When I push on it a little it rocks back and forth a lot.

Steve, please look into what's happening and stiffen it if you can. Its too unstable right now.

To test out this website - emachineshop.com, Jenne and I are designing some of the mounts for the new beam height.

It took me a few hours to figure out how to do it, but the software is easy enough for simple stuff. This is a brass mount with M4 clearance holes which are countersunk and a lip so that it can be dogged down to the table.

1. Steve is handling the mount height increase for the PMC and RC steering mirrors, as well as a mount (non-steerable) for the ISS' AOM.
2. Rana is working on the laser mount.
3. Jenne is drawing and getting the PMC mount made.
4. We got the lenses from CVI for the mode matching, but not the metric screws for the laser mounting. I am tempted to tap holes in the laser base.

I am feeling that it is ok to carefully make new holes and threads as far as the holes do not penetrate the plate.
The thickness of the plate can be measured by the four holes at the corners.

1. I can not see whether the attaching surface is flat or not.
It should have ~1mm step to avoid "the legs" of the laser at the four corners.
Otherwise we will have ~0.5mm space between the block and the laser
and will squish this gap by the screws => cause the deformation of the block and the laser.

2. The countersinks for the M4 screws can be much deeper so that we can use the existing M4 screws.
In any case, the long M4 screws are not rigid and also not common.

[Rana, Jenne]

More PSL progress. 

The new laser was raised to a 4 inch beam height using basically the most randomly thrown together method possible.  (It'll work just fine for aligning things, but we seriously need to get a nice block made.)  The PMC and the nice Osamu-mirror mount to go into the PMC also have temporary risers, so we'll need to replace them with the real deal as soon as we get things back from the shop.

So far we've got (1) the lens after the laser, (2) a Half Wave Plate (no quarter wave plate yet), (3) steering mirror that will go after the EOM, (4) 2 steering mirrors to get into the PMC, in addition to all of the stuff that we did the other day.  With all of this stuff we've got the beam hitting the 1st PMC mirror. We still don't have the EOM and AOM in the beam path however.

To get the rough alignment that we did, we turned on the new 2W NPRO, operating at the minimum power we could see on a card.  We turned it off after use, so it is still off.  Steve, we left the cable for the interlock sitting on the PSL table on the NW corner....can you please hook it up tomorrow?  Also, after the interlock is installed we should go back to regular running laser hazard mode. 

NPRO

Koji and I inspected and photographed the laser after opening up its case. I then drilled the clearance holes in the 4 corners and tapped holes for 1/4-20. I was careful to tap with the laser sideways, to avoid shavings getting into the laser and suctioned out as much of the pieces as I could. The laser is now mounted on some bad 1/4-20 based NewFocus style pedestals. The riser block can now be made with 1/4-20 through holes and the laser will sit on its for corner feet. We'll make the base aluminum to avoid differential CTE based stress in the laser base.

We checked the level of the laser. With the new mounting the beam is level to within ~1 mrad and has a 4" beam height.

Faraday

I've mounted the Faraday Rotator from the old MOPA. It has 8-32 mounting holes (who's shafts are curiously not parallel). We need an aluminum block of the proper height (2 3/4" ??) to make a permanent solution.

I've also mounted the thin-film polarizer. This works well, but it also needs a block machined to get the mounting to be less Mickey Mouse.

Pockel Cell for phase correction and 35.5 MHz PMC modulation

The EOM is mounted as before on the angle bracket to align it for P-pol light. The beam now goes cleanly through there. No further mounting hardware required.

Lenses

The 2 lenses in the 'mode matching telescope' between the laser and the PMC are in place, but not placed with any accuracy.

By sheer luck, I saw the PMC flashing in the TEM27 mode without any alignment from me. Next step is to get the lens positions tuned and then do the beam scan on the beam going towards the PMC to verify the approximate mode matching. This is all crude, but I just want to get the beam going into the vacuum as fast as possible.

Rana and I were poking around on the PSL table today, getting a few more items raised to the correct height.

I checked the polarization state of the new NPRO by using a HWP to minimize the transmission through a PBS cube, and then compared the power transmitted through the cube vs. reflected.  When the NPRO current was 0.772 \pm 0.001 (as read on the LCD), the transmission through the cube was 1.44mW, while the reflected was 10.53mW.  The reading of the Ophir power meter with no incident light was 0.03mW.  This factor of 10 means that the NPRO beam is ~10% circularly polarized and ~90% linearly polarized.  In order to improve the beam, we need a Quarter Wave Plate, which it turns out we don't have.  We need a QWP!

After that, using the linearly polarized part of my beam (maximizing the transmission through the PBS by rotating my HWP by 45deg), I tried to tune the angle of the polarizers that Rana pulled out of the MOPA.  I think I'm confused / too tired, because I can only get the polarizer to reflect a bunch of light, and I can't get it to pass any significant amount of light through, no matter where in its actuation range I put it (It's on a rotation stage with a few degrees of range).  It should just be a Brewster's Angle thing, and since I already have P-pol coming through the BS cube, this shouldn't be so hard.....

In any case, it may not be useful to do the final fine tuning of these polarizers until they are in their final places.  The hacky stack of mounts that I have has some slop in the position / alignment of the base of the polarizer, so no matter what we'll have to redo the tuning after the mounts are finalized.

To bypass the polarizer issue, I just used cubes. One I took from the FSS-Refcav path and the other from the power control part of the old MOPA, just downstream of the MOPA's periscope.

We'll swab these out with the thin-film polarizers after we get the mounts made.

With the cubes in, I also installed the Faraday + its 1/2-wave plate. The transmission looks good and we're getting into the PMC and its flashing a TEM00 mode sometimes. I set up a signal generator to drive the SLOW actuator by 1 FSR at 0.1 Hz.

I have set up a PMC transmission camera and transPD so that its easy to align. The flashing mode already allows us to align most of the rest of the table (except FSS).

Our next step should be to run the cables for locking the PMC:

1. RF cables to the PMC_REFL
2. Dsub for the PMC RFPD
3. HV cable between the PMC servo board and the PMC PZT (why is this not RED? we have to make sure to abide by the cabling color code).
4. RF cable from 35.5 MHz Frequency Reference card to the PMC EOM via the RF summing box on the table.

On Tuesday, we need to make sure that all of our mounts' drawings are in the cue for the shop. I'll put the list of mounts onto the PSL upgrade wiki page.

We also have to come up with a plan for wiring some of the 2W NPRO's channels into the cross-connect so that we can have some laser channels recorded by EPICS.

We ran the cables for the PMC: The RF cable for the 35.5 MHz drive was cheap and so we swapped the 29.5 MHz cable for it.

There now remain 1 RG-174 cable to drive the FSS PC (21.5 MHz) and 3 Heliax for the Kiwamu Tri-Mod EOM (11, 29.5, and 55 MHz).

We also changed the BLACK HV drive cable for the RED one (previously used for the MZ). All HV cables MUST be RED.

The BLACK cable is now used for the PMC_REFL DC.

The Heliax cables are routed onto the table - it remains a Alberto/Kiwamu job to strain relieve them and attach them to the TriMod box and EOM in the morning.

The PMC is locked and we did some partially bootless alignment and mode-matching. It locks easily on a TEM00 mode (with very poor visibility), but the

rest of the beam train can now be aligned while Valera does the PMC matching mambo.   

Also, Kiwamu has modified the layout drawing to add the green PLL stuff. This has collapsed the reference cavity's wave function placing it close to its original position.

WE (maybe Valera and Steve) can now put the reference cavity back on the table.

I put some green stuff on the layout drawing.

I continue to refine the positions of these stuff.

Notes :

 1. I flipped the reference cavity. So now the cavity is sitting on the left hand side of the layout.

  2. I removed the ISS stuf. We should think about where ISS should be.

 I started mode matching of the beam going to IMC. The work is still going on.

According to Rana's calculation (see here), I put the first lens (f=200mm) in between two steering mirrors after PMC.

The distance from PMC to the first lens was adjusted by using a metal ruler.  So I believe the accuracy is something like 1mm.

I aligned the beam path going through the broadband EOM and the mode matching lenses.

  I could find the optimum position for the second lens  (f=-150mm) by sliding the position of the lens and measuring the mode after it.

But the optimum position looked a bit far from the EOM. It's off by about 3-4 inch from the designed position.

Somehow I feel that the beam before the second lens goes with a smaller divergence angle than that of designed.

So tomorrow I am going to restart the work from checking the mode before the second lens.

Maybe at first I should measure the mode without going through the EOM because it changes the waist position and makes the system not straightforward.

Over the last couple nights we got the beam into the FSS path and all the way to the IMC and out onto the AP table.

Tara and Valera have calculated a mode-matching solution for the reference cavity. It utilizes only a single lens between the AOM and the reference cavity. Valera and Steve will move the reference cavity into place in the morning.

We noticed that the layout was too tight on the end going into the MC and so we adjusted the angle of the final zig-zag. This will put the final mode-matching lens in between the final steering mirrors (which is generally undesirable) but the lens in this case is only f=400 mm. In addition, this lens may provide some more decoupling between the steering mirrors.

The whole layout has to be a little adjusted because of a calculation mistake I made in the mode-matching. I used only the nominal focal lengths from the CVI catalog and not the effective one. For the UV-grade fused silica lenses, the effective focal length is actually 20-30% longer. Today we measured that the "f=200 mm" lens we got is actually f = 238 mm. The BK7 lenses are much closer to the nominal.

We also replaced the Klinger mount ahead of the PMC with a Polanski style so that we could get the PMC REFL beam out without hitting the mount. Valera will continue to refine this section on the weekend.

Tomorrow, we will lock the MC using feedback only to the NPRO. The 0-150 V piezo driver is on the PSL table ready for action.

I also got a LCD video monitor from Frank and hooked it up on the PSL table. If we like this kind of thing, we can get many of them. They are pretty cheap. It would be handy to have 3-4 of them on the PSL and one on every of the ISC tables. They take the standard video for input and need +12V for power. Right now the one in there is looking at the PMC transmission.

The Omnigraffle layout as of tonight is attached.

- The PMC REFL PD was moved from the temporary location to the one called for by the PSL layout (picture attached). The leakage beams were dumped.

- The FSS reference cavity was aligned using temporary periscope and scanned using NPRO temperature sweep. The amplitude of the sweep (sine wave 0.03 Hz) was set such that the PMC control voltage was going about 100 V p-p with. With rough alignment the visibility was as high as 50% - it will be better when the cavity is locked and better aligned but not better than 80% expected from the mode astigmatism that Tara and I measured on Thursday. The astigmatism appear to come from the FSS AOM as it depends on the AOM drive. We reduced the drive control voltage from 5 V to 4V beyond that the diffraction efficiency went below 50%. The FSS REFL PD was set up for this measurement as shown in the attached picture. There is also a camera in transmission not shown in the picture.

I have been working on the mode matching lenses which are sitting after the boradband EOM.

Last Friday I checked the mode profile after the first mode matching lens (f=-150mm). The measured mode was good.

According to the calculation done by ABCD software, the waist size is supposed to be 80.9 um after that lens.

The measured waists are 80.5 um for the vertical mode and 79.4 um for the horizontal mode.

The screenshot of the ABCD's result and the plot for the mode measurement are shown below.

I didn't  carefully check the mode after the last convex lens (f=200mm), but it must be already good because the beam looks having a long rayleigh range.

Now the beam is reflected back from MC1 and goes to the AP table since I coarsely aligned the beam axis to the MC.

/****  fitting result ****/

w0_v =  80.4615      +/- 0.1695 [um] 

w0_h =  79.4468      +/- 0.1889 [um]

z_v =  -0.115234        +/- 0.0005206  [m]

z_h =  -0.109722        +/- 0.0005753 [m]

The IR sensitive Olympus 570 camera gives us a really nice view of these IR beams. Its actually a lot better than what you can get with the analog IR viewers:

PSLAOMdogs

On Friday, Valera and I calculated the modematching for reference cavity from AOM.

We scan the beam profile where the spot should be.

The first beam waist in the AOM is 103 um, the lens (f= 183 mm, I'm not sure if I have the focal length right) is 280 mm away.

The data is attached. The first column is marking on the rail in inches,

the second column is distance from the lens, the third and fourth column are

vertical and horizontal spot radius in micron. Note that the beam is very elliptic because of the AOM.

- connected the TTFSS cables (FSS fast goes directly to NPRO PZT for now)

- measured the reference cavity 21.5 MHz EOM drive to be 17.8 dBm

-  turned on the HV for the FSS phase correcting EOM (aka PC) drive

- connected and turned on the reference cavity temperature stabilization

- connected the RefCav TRANS PD

- fine tuned the RefCav REFL PD angle

The RefCav is locked and aligned. I changed the fast gain sign by changing the jumper setting on the TTFSS board. The RefCav visibility is 70%. The FSS loop ugf is about 80 kHz (plot attached. there is 10 dB gain in the test point path. this is why the ugf is at 10 dB when measured using in1 and in2 spigots on the front of the board.)  with FSS common gain max out at 30 dB. There is about 250 mW coming out of the laser and 1 mW going to RefCav out of the back of the PMC. So the ugf can be made higher at full power. I have not made any changes to account for the PMC pole (the FSS is after the PMC now). The FSS fast gain was also maxed out at 30 dB to account for the factor of 5 smaller PZT actuation coefficient - it used to be 16 dB according to the (previous) snap shot. The RefCav TRANS PD and camera are aligned. I tuned up the phase of the error signal by putting cables in the LO and PD paths. The maximum response of the mixer output to the fast actuator sweep of the fringe was with about 2 feet of extra cable in the PD leg.

I am leaving the FSS unlocked for the night in case it will start oscillating as the phase margin is not good at this ugf.

Brilliant! This is the VERY way how the things are to be conquered!

Our new 2W Mephisto has a pretty zippy "SLOW" temperature input. Tuning the perl PID servo, I found that the best response came from setting

the "P" and "D" terms to zero. This is because the internal temperature stabilization servo has a fairly high UGF. In the attached

image you can see how the open loop step response looks (loop is open then the "KI" parameter is set to zero). The internal servo

really has too little damping. There is a 30% overshoot when it gets a temperature step. For this kind of servo Innolight would have done better

to back off on the gain until they got back some phase margin.

New SLOW parameters:

timestep = 1.9 s

KP = 0

KI = 0.035

KD = 0

The PSL out  2" OD beam guide tube was cut  1.5" shorter to 13.5"

The 10" OD  0.25" wall Al tube was replaced by a  lighter, not anodized and thinner  wall 0.094" tube of 15.5" lenght, that is 0.75" shorter.

The new position of the PSL table made these cuts necessary.

Big Johnny and I hacked a function generator output into the cross-connect of the 80 MHz VCO driver so that we could modulate the

amplitude of the light going into the RefCav. The goal of this is to measure the coefficient between cavity power fluctuations and the

apparent length fluctuations. This is to see if the thermo-optic noise in coatings behaves like we expect.

To do this we disconnected the wire #2 (white wire) at the cross-connect for the 9-pin D-sub which powers the VCO driver. This is

called VCOMODLEVEL (on the schematic and the screen). In the box, this modulates the gain in the homemade high power Amp which

sends the actual VCO signal to the AOM.

This signal is filtered inside the box by 2 poles at 34 Hz. I injected a sine wave of 3 Vpp into this input. The mean value was 4.6 V. The

RCTRANSPD = 0.83 Vdc. We measure a a peak there of 1.5 mVrms. To measure the frequency peak we look in

the FSS_FAST signal from the VME interface card. With a 10 mHz linewidth, there's no peak in the data above the background. This signal

is basically a direct measure of the signal going to the NPRO PZT, so the calibration is 1.1 MHz/V.

We expect a coefficient of ~20 Hz/uW (input power fluctuations). We have ~1 mW into the RC, so we might expect a ~20 Hz frequency shift.

That would be a peak-height of 20 uV. In fact, we get an upper limit of 10 uV.

 Later, with more averaging, we get an upper limit of 1e-3 V/V which translates to 1e-3 * 1.1 MHz / 1 mW ~ 1 Hz/uW. This is substantially lower

than the numbers in most of the frequency stabilization papers. Perhaps, this cavity has a very low absorption?

We added the Thorlabs HV Driver in between the FSS and the NPRO today. The FSS is locking with it, but we haven't taken any loop gain measurements.

This box takes 0-10 V and puts out 0-150 V. I set up the FSS SLOW loop so that it now servos the output of FAST ot be at +5V instead of 0V. This is an OK

temporary solution. In the future, we should add an offset into the output of the FSS board so that the natural output is 0-10 V.

I am suspicious that the Thorlabs box has not got enough zip to give us a nice crossover and so we should make sure to measure its frequency response with a capacitive load.

I found that several linux libraries have been moved around and disabled today. In particular, I see a bunch of new stuff in apps/linux/ and ezca tools are not working.

Who did this and why is there no ELOG ???

Also found that someone has pulled the power cable to the function generator I was using to set the VCO offset. This is the one on top of the Rb clocks. Why?? Why no elog? This is again a big waste of time.

 We measured the Thorlabs HV Driver's TF today. It is quite flat from 1k to 10k before going up to 25 dB at 100k,

and the response does not change with the DC offset input.

The driver is used for driving the NPRO's PZT which requires higher voltage than that of the previous setup.

We need to understand how the driver might effect the FSS loop TF, and we want to make sure that the driver

will have the same response with DC input offset.

Setup

We used SR785 to measure the TF. Source ch was split by a T, one connected to Driver's input, another one connected to the reference (ch A). See fig2.

The driver output was split by another T. One output was connected to NPRO,

another was connected to a 1nF capacitor in a Pomona box, as a high pass filer (for high voltage), then to the response (ch B)

 The source input is  DC offset by 2V which corresponds to 38 V DC offset on the driver's output.

The capacitance of the PZT on the NPRO is 2.36 nF, as measured by LC meter.

 The result shows that the driver's TF is flat from 1k to 10k, and goes up at higher frequency, see fig1.

The next step is trying to roll of the gain at high frequency for PZT. A capacitor connected to ground might be used to roll off the frequency of the driver's output.

We will inspect the TF at higher frequency (above 100 kHz) as well.