I think we should follow the established procedure in full, even though it will cost us a few more days.  I dont think we should consider the vacuum bake as something "optional".  If the glue has any volatile components they could be deposited on the optic resulting in a change in the coating and consequently optical loss in the arm cavity.

 Follow full procedure for full strength, minimum risk

As I feared, since I couldn't see the magnet-to-dumbbell joint from all angles, they ended up being off by ~1/3 of a magnet diameter. 

Because I don't want to deal with finding another failed glue joint tomorrow, I removed the magnet and dumbbell from the optic, and broke the manget off of the dumbbell.  As with yesterday, I kept track of which end of the magnet had been glued to the dumbbell. 

I got a new dumbbell, removed all the glue from the magnet, and reglued them together, in the fixture that ensures they are well aligned. 

Tomorrow I will come in and glue the magnet dumbbell assembly to the ITM.

 Glued.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll remove the optic from the fixture, and put it in the oven.

I edited the C1SUS_SUMMARY.adl file and set the channels in alarm mode to show the values in green, yellow and red according to the values of the thresholds (LOLO, LOW, HIGH, HIHI)

I wrote a script in python, which call the command ezcawrite and ezcaread, to change the thresholds one by one.

You can call this program with a button named "Change Thresholds one by one" in the menu come down when you click the  !  button.

I'm going to write another program to change the thresholds all together.

ITMY, which is supposed to be fully free-swinging at the moment, is displaying the tell-tale signs of  being stuck to one of it's OSEMs.  This is indicated by the PDMon values, one of which is zero while the others are max:

UL: 0.000
UR: 1.529
LR: 1.675
LL: 1.949
SD: 0.137

Do we have a procedure for remotely getting it unstuck?  If not, we need to open up ITMYC and unstick it before we pump.

I have restored the damping of BS and PRM. Today is janitor day. He is shaking things around the lab.

The ITMY mirror was released. The OSEM readouts became healthy.

To see what is going on, I changed the PIT DC bias slider on ITMY from 0.8 to -1 or so, and then the optic started showing a free swinging behavior.

If there were no responses to the DC bias, I was going to let people to open the chamber to look at it closer, but fortunately it released the optic.

Then I brought the slider back to 0.8, and it looked still free swinging. Possibly the optic had been stacked on some of the OSEMS as Jamie expected.

Atm1, ITMY and the SRM are on the same isolation stack.  So why does  the SRM move twice as much?

Atm2, We should check the ITMY  SIDE_OSEM before pump down. Anatomically correct, beautiful picture taken by Kiwamu on August 22

Suresh, Kiwamu and Steve

Heavy chamber doors replaced by light ones at  ITMX-west and ITMY-north locations.

The new ITMX was aligned by changing the DC biases.

The resultant DC biases are reasonably small.

C1:SUS-ITMX_PIT_COMM = -0.2909

C1:SUS-ITMX_YAW_COMM = -0.0617

The alignment was done by trying to resonate the green light in the X arm cavity.

The spot position of the green light on the ITMX mirror looked good. This was confirmed by inserting a sensor card.

I did the OSEM mid-range adjustment and the rotation adjustment but at the end the OSEM DC voltage has changed due to the DC bias operation.

The OSEM rotation was approximately optimized so that all the face shadow sensors are sensitive to the POS motion but the SIDE shadow sensor is insensitive to the POS motion.

It needs a free swinging diagnosis.

It stacked again . We should take a closer look at it.

 ITMX OSEMs   UL 1.8V,   UR 1.7V,   LR 0V,   LL 0V,   SD 1.3V  at the same bias setting shown above. May be a lose earth quake tip?or magnet is touching?

[Jenne, Katrin, Jamie]

I'm a bad kid, and forgot to elog my Friday morning work...

Bob gave me back ITMX after a 48hour bake at 80C + clean RGA scan Friday morning after coffee and doughnuts.  Katrin helped me put it back in the suspension wire. 

While I was leveling the optic (making sure the scribe lines on each side of the optic are at the same height off the table), Katrin cut some new viton for replacement EQ stops.  The optic was missing one lower earthquake stop (the one that Jamie noticed last week), and somehow one other rubber piece came out of the EQ stop on another lower screw while we were re-suspending the optic.  We put the new stops in, and then checked the balance of the test mass.

The oplev is still the HeNe laser that is leveled to the level optical table in the cleanroom.  The lever arm is ~1.5 meters, and over that distance the reflected beam was pointed "up" in pitch by ~1.5mm, which is less than one beam diameter of the HeNe.  This is well within our ability to correct using the OSEMs.

We then locked the test mass, and installed it in the chamber.  I approximately did the half-voltage centering of the OSEMs, leaving the fine-tuning to Kiwamu for after lunch. 

Tue Sep  6 17:48:02 PDT 2011
999391697

 Kiwamu excited ITMY (which Suresh had already started).  I just kicked ITMX:

Tue Sep  6 17:55:21 PDT 2011
999392136

[Rana and Kiwamu on ITMX, Jenne and Suresh on ITMY, Zombie/brains meeting on accepting the matricies]

Optic	Spectra	Matrix	"Badness"
ITMX		pit     yaw     pos     side    butt UL    0.584   0.641   1.396  -0.578   0.558  UR    0.755  -1.359   0.120  -0.286   0.262  LR   -1.245  -0.139   0.604  -0.388   0.511  LL   -1.416   1.861   1.880  -0.681  -2.669  SD   -0.753   0.492   3.263   1.000  -1.523	5.85983
ITMY		pit     yaw     pos     side    butt UL    1.000   0.572   1.134  -0.059   0.951   UR    0.578  -1.428   0.916  -0.032  -1.024   LR   -1.422  -0.531   0.866  -0.009   1.086   LL   -1.000   1.469   1.084  -0.036  -0.939   SD   -0.662   0.822   1.498   1.000   0.265	4.47727

 OSEMs were tweaked.  We have decided that both ITMs are okay in terms of their diagonalization.  ITMY isn't stellar when you look at the spectra, but it's kind of close enough.  Certainly the matrix looks fine.

Aside from checking on POX, I think we're now ready to close up.  Check back later tonight for a final decision announced on the elog.

(What we did)

* Moved SUS to edge of table for OSEM adjustment.

* Leveled the table in this temporary tower position.

* Rotated all OSEMs to give some seperation between magnets and LED/PD packages.

* Moved the upper OSEM bracket a little bit upward.

* All the OSEM holding set screws were short with flat heads; this is annoying since we would like to use them more like thumbscrews. Steve took the long set-screws out of the old ITMX cage and we swapped them. Need to order ~100 silver-plated socket head spare/replacements.

* Took pictures of OSEMs.

* Moved tower back to old position.

* Releveled the table (added one rectangular weight in the NW corner of the table).

* Find that ITMX OSEMs were a couple 100 micron out of position; we adjusted them in-situ in the final position of the tower, trying not to rotate them. All mean voltages now are within 100 mV of ideal half-light.

* Back/front EQ positions adjusted by the screw method. bottom/top stops adjusted earlier.

* OSEM cables tied down with copper wire.

* Increased the incident power up to 91 mW going into MC to temporarily make the POX beam more visible.

* The POX beam was checked. It was exiting from the chamber and going through about the center of the viewport.

I just started a freeswing all, as a final check before we pump:

Wed Sep  7 00:43:21 PDT 2011
999416616

Wed Sep  7 00:43:32 PDT 2011
WATCHDOGS WILL BE RESET 5 HOURS AFTER THIS TIME
sleeping for 5 hours...

Jamie: Please do a quickie analysis (at least for the ITMs) before helping Steve with the heavy doors.

I closed the PSL shutter.

Both ITM chambers were checked for tools, so there should be nothing left to do but put the heavy doors on, and begin pumping.

All fine, except ITMX_sensor_UL's  60  counts deep hoop for an hour.

Here are all suspension diagonalization spectra before close up. Notes:

• TMX looks the worst, but I think we can live with it. The large glitch in the UL sensor at around 999423150 (#5355) is worrying. However, it seemed to recover. The spectra below were taken from data before the glitch.
• ITMY has a lot of imaginary components. We previously found that this was due to a problem with one of it's whitening filters (#5288). I assume we're seeing the same issue here.
• SRM needs a little more data to be able to distinguish the POS and SIDE peaks, but otherwise it looks ok.

ITMX		pit     yaw     pos     side    butt UL    0.355   0.539   0.976  -0.500   0.182  UR    0.833  -1.406  -0.307  -0.118   0.537  LR   -1.167   0.055   0.717  -0.445   0.286  LL   -1.645   2.000   2.000  -0.828  -2.995  SD   -0.747   0.828   2.483   1.000  -1.637	8.01148
ITMY		pit     yaw     pos     side    butt UL    1.003   0.577   1.142  -0.038   0.954   UR    0.582  -1.423   0.931  -0.013  -1.031   LR   -1.418  -0.545   0.858   0.008   1.081   LL   -0.997   1.455   1.069  -0.017  -0.934   SD   -0.638   0.797   1.246   1.000   0.264	4.46659
BS		pit     yaw     pos     side    butt UL    1.612   0.656   0.406   0.277   1.031   UR    0.176  -1.344   1.683  -0.058  -0.931   LR   -1.824  -0.187   1.594  -0.086   0.951   LL   -0.388   1.813   0.317   0.249  -1.087   SD    0.740   0.301  -3.354   1.000   0.035	5.49597
PRM		pit     yaw     pos     side    butt UL    0.546   1.436   1.862  -0.345   0.866   UR    1.350  -0.564   0.551  -0.055  -0.878   LR   -0.650  -0.977   0.138   0.023   0.858   LL   -1.454   1.023   1.449  -0.268  -1.398   SD    0.634  -0.620  -0.729   1.000   0.611	5.78216
SRM
ETMX		pit     yaw     pos     side    butt UL    0.863   1.559   1.572   0.004   1.029   UR    0.127  -0.441   1.869   0.480  -1.162   LR   -1.873  -0.440   0.428   0.493   0.939   LL   -1.137   1.560   0.131   0.017  -0.871   SD    1.838   3.447  -0.864   1.000  -0.135	5.5259
ETMY		pit     yaw     pos     side    butt UL   -0.337   1.275   1.464  -0.024   0.929   UR    1.014  -0.725   1.414  -0.055  -1.102   LR   -0.649  -1.363   0.536  -0.039   0.750   LL   -2.000   0.637   0.586  -0.007  -1.220   SD    0.057  -0.016   1.202   1.000   0.142	4.22572
MC1		pit     yaw     pos     side    butt UL    0.858   0.974   0.128   0.053  -0.000   UR    0.184  -0.763   0.911   0.018   0.001   LR   -1.816  -2.000   1.872   0.002   3.999   LL   -1.142  -0.263   1.089   0.037   0.001   SD    0.040   0.036  -0.216   1.000  -0.002	5.36332
MC2		pit     yaw     pos     side    butt UL    1.047   0.764   1.028   0.124   0.948   UR    0.644  -1.236   1.092  -0.088  -0.949   LR   -1.356  -0.680   0.972  -0.096   1.007   LL   -0.953   1.320   0.908   0.117  -1.095   SD   -0.092  -0.145  -0.787   1.000  -0.065	4.029
MC3		pit     yaw     pos     side    butt UL    1.599   0.343   1.148   0.168   1.101   UR    0.031  -1.647   1.139   0.202  -1.010   LR   -1.969   0.010   0.852   0.111   0.893   LL   -0.401   2.000   0.861   0.077  -0.995   SD   -0.414   0.392  -1.677   1.000   0.018	3.61734

The OSEM pictures taken in Sep/6 have been uploaded to Picasa.

https://picasaweb.google.com/foteee

All the optcs were excited

Sat Sep 10 02:14:11 PDT 2011
999681266
 

Now that we are in a moderately stable condition, its time to design the optical lever feedback transfer functions. We should think carefully about how to do this optimally.

In the past, the feedback shape was velocity damping from 0-10 Hz, with some additional resonant gain around the pendulum and stack modes. There were some low pass filters above ~30 Hz. These were all hand tuned.

I propose that we should look into designing optimal feedback loops for the oplevs. In principle, we can do this by defining some optimal feedback cost function and then calculate the poles/zeros in matlab.

How to define the cost function (? please add more notes to this entry):

1) The ERROR signal should be reduced. We need to define a weight function for the ERROR signal: C_1(f) = W_1(f) * (ERR(f)^2)

2) The OL QPDs have a finite sensing noise, so there is no sense in suppressing the signal below this level. Need to determine what the sensing noise is.

3) The feedback signal at high frequencies (30 Hz < f < 300 Hz) should be low passed to prevent adding noise to the interferometer via the A2L coupling. It also doesn't help to reduce this below the level of the seismic noise. The cost function on the feedback should be weighted apprpriately given knowledge about the sensing noise of the OL, the seismic noise (including stack), and the interferometer noise (PRC, SRC, MICH, DARM).

4) The servo should be stable: even if there is a negligible effect on the ERROR signal, we would not want to have more than 10 dB of gain peaking around the UGFs.

5) The OL QPDs are dominated by drift of the stack, laser, etc. at some low frequencies. We should make sure the low frequency feedback is high passed appropriately.

6) Minimize transmitted power rms in single arm lock etc.

The PRM damping was restored at side sensor var 1050

I've found that a few of the screens still have Whited-Out fields due to naming changes (OL SUM and ALS-> TM OFFSET). I attach a screen shot of it.

The OL screens have the wrong SUM names and the IFO ALIGN screen is pointing to the wrong SUS screens.

I went to see what was wrong with the ITMs and found that people have been working on them and have left them in a broken state with no elog entry.

This is sad and unacceptable.

Whoever is working on these should post into the elog what the Oplev layout plan is, have someone check it, and ONLY THEN get to work on it.

The layout as it looks tonight is too complicated. With too many optics we will not have a low noise optical lever setup. The new layout should use a bare minimum number of optics and only use very stable mounts.

 The PRM sus damping restored.

The f2a filters were newly designed and installed on BS and PRM.

So the lock of PRMI will be more stable .

Once the SRM oplev project settles down, I will adjust the f2a filters on SRM too.

Today I worked on getting the ITMY and SRM oplevs back in working order. I aligned the SRM path back onto the QPD. I put excitations on the ITMY and SRM in pitch and yaw and observed the beam at the QPDs to check for clipping. They looked clean from clipping.

 We have made a new plan for the ITMY and SRM oplev optical path which uses as few optics as possible. This should help to reduce coupling from vibrations of optics in the oplev path back into the GW channel. To get enough room for the turning mirror into the SRM it might be necessary to move the POY optics a bit nearer to the tank. 

Just to find out where we are currently, I plotted the ITMY and SRM oplev spectra along with the ETMY oplev spectra. ETMY seems to be very good, so comparing with this seemed useful, so we know how much we have to improve by. The SRM power spectrum appears to be around 2 orders of magnitude higher than ETMY over pretty much the whole measurement band. The ITMY power spectrum is not so bad as the SRM above about 60Hz. Next thing to do is to check the dark noise level for the ITMY and SRM QPDs.

 The title of this post should of course have been " ... - comparison with ETMY" not " ... - comparison with ITMY"

 I took a dark noise measurement for the ITMY QPD, for comparison with measurements of the oplev noise later on. Initially I was plotting the data from test points after multiplication by the oplev matrix (i.e. the OLPIT_IN1 / OLYAW_IN1), but found that the dark noise level seemed higher than the bright noise level (!?). Kiwamu realised that this is because at that test point the data is already divided by QPD SUM, thus making the dark noise level appear to be greater than the bright level, since QPD SUM is much smaller for the dark measurements. The way around this was to record the direct signals from each quadrant before the division. I took a power spectrum of the dark noise from each quadrant, then added them in quadrature, then divided by QPD SUM at the end to get an uncalibrated PSD. Next I will convert these into the equivalent for pitch and yaw noise spectra. To calibrate the plots in radians per root Hz requires some specific knowledge of the oplev path, so I won't do this until I have adjusted the path.

I changed some colors on the Summary of Suspension Sensor  using my italian creativity.

I wrote a script in Python to change the thresholds for the "alarm mode" of the screen.

The script takes a GPS-format start time as the 1st argument and a duration time as the second argument.

For every channel shown in the screen, it compute the mean value during this time.

The 3rd argument is the ratio between the mean and the LOW threshold. The 4th argument is the ratio between the mean and the LOLO threshold.

Then it sets the thresholds simmetrycally for HIGH and HIHI threshold.

It does that for all channels skipping the Gains and the Off Sets because this data are not stored.

For example is ratio are 0.9 and 0.7 and the mean is 10, thresholds will be LOLO=7, LOW=9, HIGH=11, HIHI=13.

You can run the script on pianosa writing on a terminal '/opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/SUS/set_thresholds.py' and the arguments.

I already run my program with those arguments: 1000123215 600 0.9 0.7

The time is of this morning at 5:00 for 10 minutes

This is the help I wrote

HELP: This program set the thresholds for the "alarm mode" of the C1SUS_SUMMARY.adl medm screen.

 Written by Manuel Marchio`, visiting student from University of Pisa - INFN for the 2011 summer at Ligo-Caltech. Thrusday, 15th September 2011.

The 1st argument is the time in gps format when you want to START the mean

The 2nd argument is the DURATION

The 3rd argument is the ratio of the LOW and the HIGH thresholds. It must be in the range [0,1]

The 4th argument is the ratio of the LOLO and the HIHI thresholds. It must be in the range [0,1]

Example: path/set_thresholds.py 1000123215 600 0.9 0.7

and if the the mean is 10, thresholds will be set as LOLO=7, LOW=9, HIGH=11, HIHI=13

 I tried again at plotting the ITMY_QPD noise spectra in for dark and bright operation. Before we had the strange situation where the dark noise seemed higher, but Kiwamu noticed this was caused by dividing by the SUM before the testpoint I was looking at. This time I tried just multiplying by the measured SUM for bright and dark to normalise the spectra against each other. The results looks more reasonable now, the dark noise is lower than the bright noise for a start! However, the dark noise spectrum now doesn't look the same as the one I showed in my previous post.

 I checked the dark and bright noise of the SRM oplev QPD. The SRM QPD has a rather high dark level for SUM of 478 counts. The dark noise for the SRM QPD looked a little high in the plot against the bright noise (see first attachment), so I plotted the dark noise with the ITMY QPD dark noise (see second attachment). It seems that the SRM QPD has a much higher dark noise level than the ITMY! In case anyone is wondering, to make these traces I record the data from the pitch and yaw test points, then multiply by the SUM (to correct for the fact that the test point signal has already been divided by SUM). I will check the individual quadrants of the SRM QPD to see if one in particular is very noisy. If so, we/I should probably fix it.

New f2a filters were installed on SRM.

The lock of DRMI should be more stable than last night.

I've calculated a suitable collimating telescope for the ITMY/SRM oplev laser, based on the specs for the soon-to-arrive 2mW laser (model 1122/P) available here: http://www.jdsu.com/ProductLiterature/hnlh1100_ds_cl_ae.pdf

Based on the fact that the 'beam size' value and 'divergence angle' value quoted don't match up, I am assuming that the beam radius value of 315um is _not_ the waist size value, but rather the beam size at the output coupler. From the divergence angle I calculated a 155um waist, (zR = 12cm). This gives the quoted beam size of about 316um at a distance of 8.5" away from the waist. This makes me think that the output coupler is curved and the waist is at the back of the laser, or at least 8.5" from the output coupler.

The collimating telescope gives a waist of size 1142um (zR=6.47m) at a distance of 1.427m away from the original laser waist, using the following lens combo:

L1 f=-0.15 @ 0.301m

L2 f=0.3 @ 0.409m

This should be fine to get a small enough spot size (1-2mm) on the QPDs.

 I just drew a basic picture of how the ITMX oplev path could be reworked to minimise the number of optics in the path. Only possible problem with this might be the turning mirror onto the ITMX getting in the way of the collimating lenses. Should be easy to solve though. Does anyone know if there is a ITMX pick off beam I should be careful to avoid?

[Jenne, Anamaria]

I put the new matricies in from the free swinging test for the: ITMX, ITMY, ETMX, ETMY, PRM, BS

Some of the optics damped okay, but ETMX and BS were not good at all.  ETMX was ringing up when I turned on the damping.  BS wasn't, but when I gave it a kick, it wouldn't damp.  No good.

I tried ITMY, and it was totally fine, with nice damping Qs of ~5.  So, I don't know what's going on. 

Anamaria is trying a new 4x4 matrix-inverter, so we can look at the inversion of just the face osems.  We'll see how it goes. 

Since things were crappy, I did a BURT restore, so things are as they were earlier this morning.

The bad medm screens have been fixed. There are no blank fields and all the links are correct.

First of all I moved the lenses on the ITMY/SRM oplev path to get a smaller spot size on the QPDs. I couldn't get the beam analyzer to work though, so I don't know quite how successful this was. The software brought up the error "unable to connect to framegrabber" or something similar. I don't think the signal from the head was being read by the software. I will try to get the beam analyzer working soon so that we can characterize the other oplev lasers and get decent spot sizes on the QPDs. I searched the elog for posts about the analyzer, and found that it has been used recently, so maybe I'm just doing something wrong in using it. 

After this I measured the transfer function for the ITMY oplev yaw. I did a swept sine excitation of the ITMY in yaw with an amplitude of 500, and recorded the OSEM yaw values and the oplev yaw values. This should show a flat response, as both the QPD and the OSEMS should have flat frequency response in the measurement band. This measurement should therefore just yield a calibration from OSEM yaw to oplev yaw. If the OSEM yaw values were already calibrated for radians, we would then immediately have a calibration from oplev yaw values to radians. However, as far as I'm aware, there is not a calibration factor available from OSEM yaw values to radians. Anyway, the TF I measured did not appear to be very flat (see attached plot). Kiwamu suggested I should check the correlation between the OSEM measurements and the oplev QPD measurements - if the correlation is less than 1 the TF is not reliable. Indeed the coherence was poor for this measurement. This was probably because at frequencies above the pendulum frequency, the excitation amplitude of 500 was not enough to cause a measurable change in the optic angle. So, the plot attached is not very useful yet, but I learned something while making it.

 In order to estimate the amount of noise that the oplevs are injecting into the GW channel, we first need to calibrate oplev signals in terms of angular change in the optic. I said in my previous post that there wasn't a calibration factor for OSEM values to radians, but I found that Kakeru had estimated this in 2009 - see entry 1413. However, Kakeru found that this was quite a rough estimate, and that it didn't agree with his calibrated oplev values well. He does quote the 2V/mm calibration factor for the OSEM readings though - does anyone know the provenance of this factor? I searched for OSEM calibration and found nothing.

With the new input matrix, it looks like YAW and SIDE are not quite decoupled on ETMX.

It needs one more kick and free swinging test.

- - - details

 To see what exactly is going on, I changed the input matrix from the default to the new one, which Jenne computed (#5421) on ETMX.

I started putting the elements of the input matrix from POS through SIDE, one by one.

It seemed that POS and PIT worked fine. However the YAW signal looks containing a lot of the SIDE signal.

Similar to YAW, SIDE also interact with the YAW motion and somehow rings up both YAW and SIDE signals as Jenne reported ( #5438).

So right now the YAW and SIDE rows are partially reburted to the default elements in order to avoid ringing up.

Excited all the optics. They will be automatically back after 5 hours.

Sat Sep 17 02:02:07 PDT 2011
1000285342

We don't need a high quality calibration for the optical levers. ~50% accuracy is fine.

For that you can use the OSEM calibration of ~1.7 V/mm (its less than 2 since the OSEMs have been degrading) or you can use the cavity power method that Kakeru used; it worked just fine. There's no benefit in trying for a 1% number for optical levers.

The f2a filters were installed on ITMs and ETMX.

Now all of the suspensions has the f2a filters.