I added the steering mirror for Pos  and centered both qpds

C1:IOO-QPD_ANG_VERT beam movement  in 1 degree C temp change in 3 hrs

I was measuring things to see how big my adapter plate needs to be, and I decided that we'd had enough days of the HEPA being on full blast, so I turned it down to 50, from 100.  I think it's been on full since Katrin was working on the Y-green beat a week or so ago.

[Koji, Suresh]

8:50PM HEPA@100% for the test

8:55PM HEPA@0%

9:20-35PM HEPA level varies from 0%-50%

9:35PM HEPA@40% and left it running at this level

Nov18 1:40 AM HEPA@80% for a work around the PSL table (by KI)

Nov18 4:35 AM HEPA@40% (by KI)

I left the HEPA at the 50% level @5AM, Nov 24

PMC trans was only ~0.79, where it should be ~0.84 something.  The MC was also not stellar. 

I aligned the beam to the PMC, and am now getting PMC trans 0.837 .

Then I aligned the PSL zigzag to the MC, and got MC Refl down to ~0.6 . 

I then aligned the WFS to the unlocked MC, and the MC Trans QPD to the locked MC.

Things seem good.  MC axis is still in a good place, since we get good michelson fringes at the AS port.

I have realigned the steering mirrors for PMC because the transmitted light had been at ~ 0.741

After the alignment it went back to ~ 0.850.

I found the PSL laser has been off for four hours. Nobody seemed to know why.

I just turned it on and it is now providing about 10% lower power compared with one before the shutdown.
Let's keep the eyes on the power if it can recover as the housing gets warm.

It appears that the old PSL fast channels never made it into the new DAQ system.  We need to figure out what to do with them.

A D990155 DAQ Interface card in far right of the 1X1 PSL EuroCard ("VME") crate is supposed output various PMC/FSS/ISS fast channels, which would then connect to the 1U "lemo breakout" ADC interface chassis.  Some connections are made from the DAQ interface card to the lemo breakout, but they are not used in any RTS model, so they're not being recorded anywhere.

An old elog entry from Rana listing the various PSL DAQ channels should be used as reference, to figure out which channels are coming out, and which we should be recording.

The new ALS channels will need some of these DAQ channels, so we need to figure out which ones we're going to use, and clear out the rest.

I realigned the steering mirrors for the PMC. The trans value went up from 0.79 to 0.83.

The misalignment was largely in the pitch direction.

We removed the curved mirror behind the AOM (ROC=0.3m) on PSL table. The mirror is now in PSL lab. See PSL:905 for more detail.

[Koji, Den]

We have aligned PMC,  the WFS are not working yet.

I was interested what whitening filter do we have between MC servo and ADC. The shape is in the figure below, SR provided 1 V white noise. Before the whitening filter MC_F is measured in Volts with SR and ADC (for ADC the shape is calculated using the whitening filter form):

I also wondered if FSS or PZT servo can add noise to the mode cleaner length signal and what is their gain. It should be big, as the laser's calibration is ~1 MHz/V => to account for seismic noise of 10^-6 m at 1 Hz, the voltage given to the laser should be ~ 1 V. And it is indeed the case. The gain is ~1000. I measured the coherence between MC_F and the laser fast input. It is 1 in the range measured (0.05 - 100 Hz). FSS and PZT do not add significant noise.

Unfortunately, after the measurement when I unplugged BNS connector from the laser, I misaligned PMC. For several hours I adjusted the mirrors but could not significantly improve transmitted signal. I'll return to this issue tomorrow.

I suspect that it was just unlocked when you had disconnected the cable.

There is not reflection now. It seems that it is now misaligned after the alignment work.

So what you need is "align while scanning PZT -> lock -> align".

 No, no, it was unlocked after I connected the cable back. The beam was even not on the PMC. I'll try PZT -> lock -> align.

No matter how you connect/disconnect, touching the laser may cause the PMC unlocked.

At least, I don't see the PMC reflection on the PD.
This means that the beam towards the PMC is largely misaligned.

If you are not sure what is misaligned, stop touching the table.
Close the shutter of the laser on the laser housing and leave the optics as they are.

[Koji, Den]

Koji was right that I misaligned everything during the alignment work. I assumed that PMC should autolock and when I saw that it did not, I thought the laser is misaligned.

What we did:

1. Aligned mirrors to get the beam on the PD PMC REFL and PMCR camera. The PSL-PMC_RFPDDC was ~800 mV.

2. We disabled PMC servo, switching it to test position and changed "DC output adjust" by 0.01 in a loop

while true
do
    ezcawrite "C1:PSL-PMC_RAMP" -4.50
    ezcastep "C1:PSL-PMC_RAMP" "+0.01,450" -s "0.1"
    ezcawrite "C1:PSL-PMC_RAMP" 0.0
    ezcastep -s "0.1" -- "C1:PSL-PMC_RAMP" "-0.01,450"
done

3. While the script was running we adjusted the position of the beam on the far PMC mirror looking at an IR viewer. The goal is to align two steering mirrors to catch some resonances. We monitored them on the oscilloscope and on the PMCT camera.

4. We locked PMC and aligned steering mirrors.

 I noticed that the ion pump was turned off.

It was turned ON. It showed 0.00 microA at 5kV  The current display is not sensitive enough. There must be some small outgassing or leak. It adds up if we stop pumping.

We want to keep the reference cavity in pristine condition. It required the ion pump running all times.

 Nice PSL summaries from LHO:

https://alog.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/aLOG/index.php?callRep=3187

The PMC was unlocked earlier this morning, for ~20min, presumably from the rocks next door.  I relocked it.

Then, a few min ago, the PMC suddenly decided that it wouldn't lock with a transmission greater than ~0.7 .  I found that the laser temp adjust on the FSS screen was at -1.9ish.  I put it back to zero, and now the PMC locks happily again.  I think we got into a PSL mode-hopping temperature region on accident.

Jenne, Den, Rana

The PMC transmission has been varying a lot and the MC seems unstable. Superstitious people might blame this on the El-nino or the alignment with Sagitarius, but we are ostensibly scientists.

WE found that the PMC EPICS values had not been toggled since the reboot and so the RF phase and Amplitude were totally wrong (we should replace this with a fixed oscillator box as we did with FSS).

Also, the NPRO SLOW slider was at -2 V which made the mode going into the PMC funny (although the mode was OK this morning before I started playing with the PMC sliders).

Before adjustment, there was a strong correlation between the seismic motions and the PMC reflection. This means that the PMC gain was low and it couldn't stay locked. Now, after fixing the RF and upping the gain slider it looks more stable. Let's watch it for a few days to see if there's an improvement in the trends.

The 10-minute trend of the lat 400 days shows that nothing has changed much this year; its been equally bad for a long while.

 PMC transmission is oscillating  in the range 0.5 - 0.85. PMC PZT voltage is 1-2 V.

FSS slow controls was -2.5 V. I adjusted it to 0 and PMC stabilized. PMC PZT voltage is 128, transmission is 0.845.

But most probably, slow control will drift again.

I added a subblock to the IOO model, and gave it a top_names of PSL, so the channels show up as C1:PSL-......

So far, there are just 2 channels acquired, C1:PSL-FSS_MIXER and C1:PSL-FSS_FAST, since those were already connected to the ADC.  Those signals are both on the DAQ OUT of the FSS board in the rack.  They are DQ channels now too.

 So there was a problem with the channel name C1:PSL-FSS_FAST, which conflicts with an existing slow channel.  This was causing daqd to fail to start (shockingly, with an appropriate error message!).  I renamed the channel to be C1:PSL-FSS_NPRO until we come up with something better.

After the change everthing worked and fb came back.

The PMC was locking right the way, but it's transmission would not go up.  Finally I get it back up by moving the "sticky" DC Gain slider up and down a few times.

 The FSS was -2.9, and the PMC won't lock happily unless you bring this back to 0.  The symptom that this is happening is that the PMC reflection camera is totally saturated, but the PMC still looks like it's locked on 00.

[Koji Rana]

The FSS Slow DC servo was turned off.

As MCL stabilizes the MC_F (Fast PZT), we no longer need to use the laser temp to do so.

In other word, if you like to turn off the MCL servo for some reason, we need to turn it on in order to keep the MC locked.

as usual.

PMC transmission started going down this afternoon, around 3pm-ish.  Right now it's 0.775, which is very, very low.  The new MC locking stuff is engaged, so it's not the FSS slow servo's fault. 

EDIT: I just realized that the limit of 0 counts output of the MC2 MCL filter bank was still engaged, from a time earlier this afternoon when I had switched back to the old servo, so there was no feedback going back to keep the slow drift of the laser in check.  PMC trans isn't coming back instantly, so I'll check it again when I come in tomorrow.

By adjusting the PMC steering mirrors, Jenne and I realigned the PMC input beam. Transmission is at 0.829 now. 

[Jenne, Eric]

We installed a Half Wave Plate -> Polarized Beam Splitter -> Half Wave Plate in the PSL beam line, immediately after the EOM, to be used for attenuating the beam when we vent, as in Entry 6892.

It was illuminating to discover that the optics labeled QWP0-1064-10-2 are indeed half wave plates, instead of quarter wave plates as QWP suggests. 

The PBS transmits "P"/Horizontal polarization, but the beam coming from the EOM is "S"/Vertically polarized, and we want to keep that, since we do not want the beam attenuated quite yet. 

So, we use the HWP to rotate the P from the EOM to S, so that the majority of the power passes through the PBS. The second HWP then rotates the transmitted S back into P, which continues to the mode cleaner. When we want to attenuate, we will simply rotate the first HWP to change the proportion of S polarized light that will pass straight through the PBS and towards the mode cleaner. 

After setting the proper HWP angles, we aligned the PBS via minimizing the MC reflection.

Since we have not yet attenuated the power, we have not yet changed the BS for the MC reflection, since this would damage the PD. The beam splitter will be changed out for a 100% reflectivity mirror to increase the power to the PD when we do.

We have now reduced the power being input to the MC from 1.25W to 10mW, and changed out the MC refl BS for a mirror. 

The power was reduced via the PBS we introduced in Entry 7295.

While we were in there, we took a look at the AS beam, which was looking clipped on the monitor. Jenne felt that it appears that the clipping seems to be occurring inside the vacuum, possibly on the faraday. This will be investigated during the vent. 

 I stopped the regular MC autolocker and told the crontab to startup the low power Mc autolocker on op340m.  Also, since we now have the new MC2 transmission setup, the power that gets to the 'regular' MC trans PD is lower, so I've lowered the lock threshold to 50 counts, from 100 counts.

 Before we did this, I centered PSL POS and ANG, which gives us a reference of where the PSL beam was good when the MC spots were ~centered.  There had been a beam dump blocking them, possibly from the last time we put in the power attenuator optics.  This beam dump was moved a little to be out of the way of the PSL QPDs, and the PBS placed closer to the lens after the EOM, so that the PBS reflected beam is dumped.  However, we should not remove that razor dump when we remove the attenuation optics, since it is also dumping a stray IR beam from the PSL QPD pickoff windowd.

 The power has been increased to 20mW. We got the 10mW number from the linked elog entry above. However, after venting we were having problems locking the MC. Upon investigating past elog posts, we found that 20mW was actually the power used in the past. The MC will now autolock. 

The biggest reason why we could not lock the MC was that the beam was not properly hitting the MC REFL diode.

Now the MC REFL DC is about ~0.1 and 1.2 when the MC is and is not locked.

We increased the power according to the quantitative analysis of the intracavity power in this earlier entry

Autolocker script for the low power MC was modified so that the initial VCO gain is 3 in stead of 10.
The 2 steps of super boost were also enabled again.

 I adjusted the PMC alignment this morning, brought the transmission up to 0.83V.

After the lunch meeting, we found the the MC transmission was higher than recently seen. Turned out the HWP had drifted, causing 30mW to be input to the MC. I adjusted it back down to 20mW. 

The PMC reflection made it seem that the beam going into it was misaligned. I went to the table and aligned the input beam to maximize the PMC transmission. I got ~10% improvement.

Just to check if something was loose, I started tapping things upstream of the Faraday. When I tapped the actual PMC body it seemed to get unseated and the reflected (unlocked) power jumped up by more than a factor of two.

I don't understand how this could be. The attached trend of the PMC channels shows that ever since the PSL upgrade, the PMC refl has been at the low level of ~0.3 V, except for a brief phase soon after the upgrade late in 2010 and then also for a few hours early in May of 2012.

If the PMC body actually moved, it seems that the pointing into the MC would also change and I don't see that. So what else can it be? Is there some clipping or dust or a burn spot on the PMC REFL path?

The PMC refl image was lost after the body re-settled itself. Jenne and I re-aligned it and added a 0.5 ND filter to the existing ND in order to account for the higher power. We should hide all of the reflective ND filters and just use absorbtive ND for the cameras to prevent reflections.

This image of the past hour shows the event at just before midnight (0650 UTC) where the PMC reflection goes up from 0.28 to 0.85.

 {Jan, Manasa}

We tried towards calibrating the RF driver of the AOM. We decided to use the normal power supply for both the driver control voltage and the ALC voltage.  But we could not figure out the type of the ALC port to find a compatible mating connector...it did not match with SMA, SMB or SMP. Finally I wrote to the company and got to know it is a filtered feed through. Now that we know how to control the ALC voltage, we will try looking at the signal for varying ALC voltage and see how that goes. 

But when we tried to see the 2W RF signal through the RF scope, with ALC open, we found that the RF signal was distorted and did not measure 80MHz.  It was lame that we did not get a snapshot 

P.S. The AOM has been left disconnected from the RF driver. 

 {Jan, Manasa}

We started again to calibrate the RF driver. We connected the ALC to the power supply and observed the output RF power on the scope. The RF power did change with ALC voltage, but the RF signal still seems not to be operating at 80MHz 

There is some kind of additional disturbance to the waveform at 80MHz (the frequency of just the waveform with tall peaks or small peaks alone). We made sure we get a snapshot this time!! I am not sure if it will be safe to feed this RF signal to the AOM as such

 AOM driver has been removed from the PSL table for testing. However the AOM is still inside; so there should be no problems with the alignment. 

Mannasa and Unni and I looked at the RF driver for the AOM. It was fine.

With the ALC input left unconnected, with the power supply set to +28V, it was drawing 0.56 A.

By adjusting the modulation input we were able to get 1.1 Vrms into the scope (terminated at 50 Ohms) after going through 2 10dB attenuators. 11 Vrms into 50 Ohms is 33.8 dBm ~ 2W.

The RF power trimpot on the front of the driver is now adjusted so that -0.31 to 0.69 V takes the driver output from off to 2W output at 80 MHz.

The previous distorted signal that Jan and Manasa saw was at a level of ~100 mVrms, which is ~0.5 mW of power. At this tiny drive level, the internal amplifier is not linear and is mostly putting out a signal at ~160 MHz.

We checked by putting a square wave into the modulation input that the RF power from the driver would indeed shut off with a time scale of ~20 ns. Manasa will add a picture to this entry. We are ready now to calibrate the transmitted power of the AOM v. the modulation input voltage and then to measure the step time of the AOM.

Remember: do NOT believe the spec sheet of whatever PD you are using. All commercial PDs are slower than they advertise. In order to measure a <1 us step time you must use a PD with a >50 MHz 'bandwidth'.

    {Jan, Manasa}

We installed the AOM driver back on the PSL table this morning. To calibrate the AOM RF output we connected a 1V dc to the modulation input of the driver and we are convinced with the setup.

Before we direct the rf signal to the AOM, in order to check its diffraction efficiency, we would like to setup an rf PD at the AOM output. We think we have place for a filter and PD after the AOM (replacing a beam dump) and would like to confirm the position before we actually install them. The layout is the picture below showing sweet spots for the new pd to sit. If you think it may disturb the system in any way, let us know!

The rf PD and filter have been installed at the earlier proposed spot on the PSL table.  

{Jan, Manasa}

We set start to check the performance of the AOM on the PSL table. The AOM driver spits out ~1.5W rf at 80MHz for 1V DC at its modulation input. In order to align the AOM, we reduced the input power to the AOM to ~10% using the QWP between the PBS and the laser. We touched the steering mirror before the AOM...but did not succeed in getting any appreciable first order deflection. We then released the AOM mount and moved it a few microns in and out until we obtained a significant change in power along the zero-order beam from 400mV to 100mV when the rf power was changed from 0 to ~1.5W (by changing modulation input from 0 to 1V).  The AOM was clamped at this alignment and the QWP was rotated to give maximum input power. 

During the course of aligning the AOM, the PMC unlocked and was restored after the alignment. 

All went well without having to make any emergency calls to anyone

We will now have to think about switching the AOM on and off for ringdown measurements. This could be done by either using a high-power rf switch or by switching the modulation DC input between 0 and 1V; whichever will be more comfortable to take many many ringdown measurements.

After the AOM work the beam wasn't well aligned to the PMC. The PMC REFL CCD shows large misalignment in yaw.

 {Jan, Manasa, Den}

We wanted to align the PMC and followed Koji's procedure detailed to us by mail. We touched the 2 steering mirrors in front of the PMC for alignment.

- Stand in front of the PMC.
- Find an oscillosocpe on the shelf in the PSL enclosure.
- This has two signals connected. One is the PMC refl dc.
  The other is the PMC trans dc.
- Minimize the refl. Maximize the trans.
- You have the CRT monitor on the MC chamber.
- Project the image of the PMC refl CCD.
  This should show some what symmetric image like an LG mode.
- Use the dataviewer to see how C1:PSL-PMC_PMCTRANSPD is recovered.

We were able to obtain 0.7 at PMC trans; but the PMC was never really stable dropped from 0.7 to 0 abruptly from time to time.

Jenne and Jamie also find that the PMC is behaving very weird 

Summary: Problem unresolved 

 Can someone detail what "weird" means? Is it singing old songs from Guns & Roses?

 It isn't singing Jan..it's dancing between 0.7 to 0 and we are not able to figure out whose the DJ ; there seems to be something else that is controlling the PMC as there is no coordination between what we do (tweaking the mirrors) and what we observe (the PD signals).