I've noticed that we're experiencing this bug which was previously seen at LHO. We cannot enter 10 digit GPS times into the time fields for DTT due to a limit in TLGEntry.cc, which Jim Batch fixed in September of last year. Seems like we're running an old version of the GDS tools.

I checked the Lidax tool (which you can get from the GDS Mainmenu). It does, in fact, allow 10 digit entries.

MC and PMC vis:

MC REFL Unlocked    = 4.4

MC REFL Locked      = 0.67

 1 - Locked/Unlocked = 85%

PMC REFL Unlocked   = 0.270

PMC REFL Locked     = 0.013

 1 - Locked/Unlocked = 95%

I checked (by looking through recent trends) that the zero level is zero on both channels. I tried to do a proper mode scan, but we have lost the PSL fast channels during the upgrade sadly. Also, the DC signal for the PMC REFL needs some gain. Unlocked level should be more like 3-5 V.

Also used the instructions from this page to add Google's sources to rosalba's apt-get list and then installed Chrome.

 It is HIGHLY unlikely that the IMC mirrors are having any effect on the ringdown. The ringdowns take ~20 usec to happen. The mirrors are 0.25 kg and you can calculate that its very hard to get enough force to move them any appreciable distance in that time.

 I found this entry in the old 40m ilog which describes the STACIS performance. It shows that even though the STACIS is bad for the differential arm motion below 3 Hz. It has quite a big and positive effect at 10-30 Hz. The OSEMs show a bigger effect than what the single arm does. I think this is because the single arm is limited by the MC frequency noise above 10 Hz.

We should figure out how to turn on the STACIS but set the lower UGF to be ~5 Hz.

I turned on some filters and gain in the SUS-MC2_MCL filter bank tonight so as suppress the seismic noise influence on MC_F. This may help the MC stay in lock in the daytime.

Koji updated the mcdown and mcup scripts to turn the MCL path on and off and to engage the Boost filters at the right time.

The attached PNG shows the MCL screen with the filters all ON. In this state the crossover frequency is ~45 Hz. MC_F at low frequencies is reduced by more than 10x.

I also think that this may help the X-Arm lock. The number of fringes per second should be 2-3x less.

 On Friday, Koji and I adjusted the beam pointing into the DRMI using the PZT yaw and found that the beam inside the DRMI (as seen on the AS camera) looked OK (not distorted too much).

So it seems that the issue seen before, namely that the DRMI resonant mode is very strange, is no longer true.

The camera image at the AS port still looks elliptical. So Jenne and Mike have started to make this beam round by adjusting the lenses.

Our plan now is:

1) Fix AS camera optics to get a round beam (single bounce off of ITMY).

2) Flash DRMI to make sure the beam at AS is still round.

3) Using the moveable Watec camera and Sensoray, get images of the spot on all DRMI mirrors with DRMI flashing. Use targets and rulers whenever possible to get quantitative measurements of the beam positions. (i.e. just saying "Oh, its pretty much in the center" is the Mickey Mouse approach to science)

4) Align all pickoff beams in this situation. Make sure there is no in vac clipping. Align IP POS and ANG using this input beam pointing.

5) Pump down.

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.

After looking at the in-vacuum layout I think we should make two changes during the next vent:

1) Reduce the number of mirrors between the FI and its camera. We install a large silvered mirror in the vacuum flange which holds the Faraday cam (in the inside of the viewport). That points directly at the input to the Faraday. We get to remove all of the steering mirror junk on the IO stack.

2) Take the Faraday output (IFO REFL) out onto the little table holding the BS and PRM Oplevs. We then relocate all 4 of the REFL RFPDs as well as the REFL OSA and the REFL camera onto this table. This will reduce the path length from the FI REFL port to the diodes and reduce the beam clutter on the AS table.

 Looks good. Any way that you can tell in an unambiguous way, where the beam is, is very good. Ideally we want to have1-2 mm accuracy.

 This was in response to my suggestion to move the REFL beam path to the table containing the BS/PRM Oplevs. From this seismic data it is clear that the BS table is no worse than the AS table, so we should plan to make the layout change during the next vent.

 My hope is that the DRMI flashes will be bright enough to see on the PO beams. IF we get 10 mW through the Faraday, you should get some buildup when the carrier resonates in the DRMI.

If the recycling gain is 10 and the pickoff fraction is 100 ppm you ought to get ~10 uW on PO. How much of the recycling cavity power gets out of POP?

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'.

  What was the reasoning / resolution of the POP forward/backward beam? Are we going to have the right beam for DRMI locking?

Changed the list of channels to be written to frames from having the IN1 suffix to OUT. Now we can load the calibration of the channel into the filter module and the DQ channel will be calibrated.

We should do this wherever possible so that our channels will have real calibrations associated with them.
SEIS_GUR1_X_OUT 256
SEIS_GUR1_Y_OUT 256
SEIS_GUR1_Z_OUT 256
SEIS_GUR2_X_OUT 256
SEIS_GUR2_Y_OUT 256
SEIS_GUR2_Z_OUT 256
SEIS_STS_1_X_OUT 256
SEIS_STS_1_Y_OUT 256
SEIS_STS_1_Z_OUT 256
SEIS_STS_2_X_OUT 256
SEIS_STS_2_Y_OUT 256
SEIS_STS_2_Z_OUT 256
SEIS_STS_3_X_OUT 256
SEIS_STS_3_Y_OUT 256
SEIS_STS_3_Z_OUT 256
MIC_1_OUT 2048
MIC_2_OUT 2048
MIC_3_OUT 2048
MIC_4_OUT 2048
MIC_5_OUT 2048
MIC_6_OUT 2048
ACC_MC1_X_OUT 2048
ACC_MC1_Y_OUT 2048
ACC_MC1_Z_OUT 2048
ACC_MC2_X_OUT 2048
ACC_MC2_Y_OUT 2048
ACC_MC2_Z_OUT 2048
XARM_DIFFERENTIAL_MOTION_IN1 256
XARM_DIFFERENTIAL_MOTION_OUT 256
YARM_DIFFERENTIAL_MOTION_IN1 256
YARM_DIFFERENTIAL_MOTION_OUT 256

Next we should up the rate at which the model runs up to 16 kHz so that we can record the microphones at 16 kHz. FM radio has information up to 20 kHz. AM radio goes up to ~8 kHz. We should be at least as modern as AM radio. How do we make the change? How do we make sure the FOTON file stays OK?

I have made some changes to the daily summary file to compensate. New files is /users/public_html/40m-summary/share/c1_summary_page.ini.

 Problems with Slow Machines?

Read ELOG

 I guess that the estimated state has the same low pass filter, effectively, that we use to low pass the feedback signal in SUSPOS. I wonder if there is an advantage to the state estimation or not. Doesn't the algorithm also need to know about the expected seismic noise transmission from the ground to the optic?

 The shame:

There is no situation in which it is OK to install a mount like this. Steve had installed this flaky and shaky mount to optimize the beam size on the OL QPD.

Everyone in the lab should know better. Putting in something like this is just like sabotage - it creates extra noise in our interferometer in a sneaky way and just makes locking harder. All mounts for anything useful (including QPDs) must have highly rigid mounts. 

Use the example from the PSL relayout: use the 3/4" steel mounts and the wide aluminum bases from Newport. No more art projects using home made mounting crap, Steve.

 Absolutely hokey. What are our requirements for this RFPD? What are the power levels and SNR that we want (I seem to remember that its for 22 as well as 110 MHz)? Perhaps we can test an aLIGO one if Rich has one sitting around, or if the aLIGO idea is to use a broadband PD I guess we can just keep using what we have.

 Since we upgraded the CDS system, I guess our ADC ranges have gone up but we never did anything to the OLs to match the ADC ranges. From Liz's daily summary page of the OL, I see this:

So we need a factor of 5-10 increase in the electronics gain (why isn't the BS SUM on there?). This might be accomplished in the head, but for the ones with whitening boards, might be better to do there.

(** add to Jamie's list of long term tasks **)

 VENT NOW and FIX ALIGNMENT!

Too bad - I thought it would at least give a little damping. Since we want the viscous-like energy loss to be ~49x larger, we need to have the field modulation in the damper (not dumper) increase by ~7.

  We have to change the sample rate and AA filter for the mic channels before going too far with the circuit design.

  That's no good - we need BLRMS channels for many PEM channels, not just two. And the channel names should have the same name as they had in the past so that we can look at long term BLRMS trends.

I suggest:

1. Have a separate model for Mics and Magnetometers. This model should run at 32 kHz and not have low frequency poles and zeros. Still would have acoustic frequency BLRMS.
2. Have a low frequency (f_sample = 2 kHz) model for seis an acc. Seismometers run out of poop by 100 Hz, but we want to have the ACC signal up to 800 Hz since we do have optical mount resonances up to there.
3. Never remove or rename the BLRMS channels - this makes it too hard to keep long term trends.
4. Do a simple noise analysis to make sure we are matching the noise of the preamps to the noise / range of the ADCs.
5. Immediately stop using bench supplies for the power. Use ONLY fused, power lines from the 1U rack supplies.

 Maybe we have already discarded this idea, but why not do the alignment without the MC?

Just lock the green beam on the Yarm and then use the transmitted beam through the ITMY to line up the PRC and the PZTs? I think our estimate is that since the differential index of refraction from 532 to 1064 nm is less than 0.01, using the green should be OK. We can do the same with the Xarm and then do a final check using the MC beam.

In this way, all of the initial alignment can be done with green and require no laser Goggles (close the shutter on the PSL NPRO face).

  But these jumps in the OSEMs are all at the level of 10-20 microns. Seems like that wouldn't be enough to account for anything; 20 microns / (pend length) ~ 50-60 microradians.

 I vote against it. We don't know about the grease inside the screw bushings - scans are not everything if adjusting the screw loosens up the grease. If we need more pick off mirrors lets just make some of the kind that we already use inside for the 2" optics.

  That's good, but I request two things:

1) Check that the REFL beam is coming from the HR surface and not the AR surface. The real REFL beam should have as much power as the Faraday output. And where does the AR surface reflection go?

2) Use frame grabber to get as many images of the spot positions on the mirrors as is reasonable. Don't endanger bumping the tables again, but take what images can be gotten by remote camera views.

The way to usually do image subtraction is to:

1) Turn off the room lights.

2) Take 500 images with no beam.

3) Use Mean averaging to get a reference image.

4) Same with the beam on.

5) Subtract the two averaged images. If that doesn't work, I guess its best to just take an image of the green beam on the mirrors using the new DSLR.

 With Picos, we lose the ability to dither the input beam as well as align the beam with the IFO locked. And the active TT will still have hysteresis, but also actuators. Once in vacuum, I'm not sure how we adjust them - what's the error signal for PR2/PR3 ?

If the interferometer is aligned, why not just pump down now? I'm not sure that we have evidence of TT hysteresis issues once people stop touching them.

 Mounts:

1. No more mounts using the 1" dia. pedestal / fork technology.
2. No more mounts using the 1/2" post / post holder technology. Both of these are loose, weak, and cause noise.
3. All steerable mirror mounts which carry the important sensing beams should use steel mounts (e.g. Polaris from Thorlabs). Aluminum mirror mounts are not to be used.
4. The mounts must be mounted to a 3/4" steel post (these are the custom ones we used in the PSL; Steve should get some more of them made).
5. The post is then mounted on an aluminum base (The BA2 or BA3 (2" x 3" aluminum) from Thorlabs is OK. The 1" x 3" ones are not). These must be fastened to the table using 2 screws, each with a SS washer.

For the loop diagnosis, its best to use the method of "IN1/IN2", rather than manipulate the close loop gain. In this way, you can directly plot the swept sine measurement from DTT as the open loop gain.

Also, for reporting calibration, we should all try to record the current settings better. Anything that may change the loop gain should be recorded along with the Bode plot and the DATA must be posted to the elog - no more of just posting plots.

We need to know, e.g.

1. what is the power in the arms?
2. are the LSC whitening filters on?
3. are the SUS dewhitening filters on?
4. What normalization is being used in the LSC?
5. What digital filters are on in the X/YARM loop filter bank?

Resistance is feudal.

An error this evening on rossa: dataviewer not working due to some font errors:

controls@rossa:~ 0$ dataviewer
Connecting.... done
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning: Not all children have same parent in XtManageChildren
Warning:
    Name: FilterText
    Class: XmTextField
    Character '\52' not supported in font.  Discarded.

Warning:
    Name: FilterText
    Class: XmTextField
    Character '\56' not supported in font.  Discarded.

Warning:
    Name: FilterText
    Class: XmTextField
    Character '\170' not supported in font.  Discarded.

Warning:

etc.............

This is how to post PDF:

From DTT, print the plot as a postscript file.

Then use ps2pdf to make a archival PDF version (the flag is the key!). Example:

ps2pdf -dPDFX /home/controls/Desktop/darm.ps

 Whoever was working around the BS chamber at 11 AM on Friday should admit it now and take the punishment.

For those of you who like to do work on the interferometer without reporting it in the elog because you think that what you did doesn't affect anything, this is your example of how our time can be wasted by such laziness.

  If you can't find the PMC sidebands in the transmission, its because the SNR is too small.

It may be a better idea to look at the PMC error signal, since the DC signal there is suppressed by the demodulation.

NDS2 is not designed for non DQ channels - it gets data from the frames, not through NDS1.

For getting the non-DQ stuff, I would just continue using our NDS1 compatible NDS mex files (this is what is used in mDV).

  Don't try to re-invent the mic mount: just copy the LIGO mic mount for the first version.

 This looks like a good performance tuning for these. It would be good if you can codify this procedure in the wiki so that even unexperienced people can tune up the system after reboots or vacuum work.

Is it possible to have some python scripts automatically measure and set the phases and matrices? If so, can we also run them iteratively so that after the second run we can confirm that they have converged? Then the script can output a short report of numbers telling us how well the system is now tuned.

I suppose that there is also a similar system possible to align the arms in a continuous way; i.e. low level drives and very low bandwidth. Also something fast / slow for the the DRMI.

 Some explanation of how you define power buildup please. Also some plots showing the evidence.

 Looking at the PEM BLRMS, I noticed that the GUR1Z channel had a much reduced microseism compared to the GUR1X. Looking at the BLRMS screens everything seems ON, although its a mess (too many filters in the banks, etc. - clean this up, PEM people).

 Looking at the Z channel in DTT, I see that the Z spectra looks double high pass filtered below ~1 Hz.     Needs some attention in the daytime.

From Den and Ayaka's elog entry from Nov 29, its clear that this problem is there at that time. It seems that the seismometer was not even hooked up before then. Perhaps Tara returned the seismometer around Thanksgiving and then someone here hooked it up but neglected to log this work? If so, please make an elog now describing the installation of this sensor at the 40m and log any future work which takes place at the 40m lab even if you think it is inconsequential.

This is NOT calibrated. Its sort of calibrated in the 500-1000 Hz area, but does not correctly use the loop TF or the cavity pole.

As for the noise, remember that the whole point of changing the AS whitening gain was to turn on the whitening filter AFTER locking. With the WF OFF, there's no way that you can surpass the ADC noise limit.

I have updated the Seismic Striptool display which is plotted on the wall in the control room. Please take a look and make comments. We should finalize it and not change it anymore.

By having an unchanging display, we can get used to small changes in the seismic environment which disrupt our locking.

1. y-scale is now linear; the log-scale was suppressing the factor of 2-3 variations which are important to us.
2. Just as the rainbow does, the colors now go from red to purple to represent the noise from 0.1 - 30 Hz: the red traces are 0.1-0.3 Hz, the green/yellow traces are 0.3-3 Hz, and the blue/purple traces are 3-30 Hz.
3. This is just showing GUR1. Let's try to keep this seismometer working so that we can have some long term record of the seismicity here. This means don't click off the buttons, disconnect the sensor, reboot the machine, etc. When you do do these things, elog them.

Just in case we want to retrofit the Tip/Tils with Beryllium Copper wire, here are links to a few sources which have a supply of the right composition and temper:

http://www.lfa-wire.com/Tempered-Alloy-25_C17200.htm

http://www.alloywire.com/beryllium_copper_CB_101.html

http://www.ngk.co.jp/english/products/electronics/berylliumcopper/wire/index.html

http://www.goodfellow.com/E/Copper-Beryllium-Wire.html

I don't think its worth it to do something to modify them unless we get a real reduction in the hysteresis - need a benchtop test setup ASAP.

Be Prepared

http://xkcd.com/936/

 Needs

Today I found 3 power cables in the orange Pomona cable tray, put in so that the cables were damaged and therefore dangerous.

Please think about what you are doing before doing it. Damaging these things because your are in a hurry or frustrated will just waste our time and damage our interferometer.

For reference, we only use the thick blue Pomona racks for power cables. We use the orange and black ones for thinner cables. Pay attention and keep the cables organized.

Cable Rack Selection

You have to correct this transimpedance ratio by correcting for the different levels of DC photocurrent in the two devices.

For the dark noise, you must always include a trace showing the noise of the measurements device (i.e. the analyzer noise must be less than the dark PD noise) with the same input attenuation setting.

1. Front Panel switch supplies power, but does not light up - its unsafe as is. Needs new switch.
2. Output has current limiting (which is nice) and schematic inside the box (which is very nice).
3. Output voltage is not filtered or regulated ? LM7812 / 7912 would do the trick - or pick a PS with 18V outputs to reg down to 15 V.
4. Box needs rubber feet.
5. Overall B-

Also, we still need to get a 32GB SD card for the new camera. It only has an 8GB one.