ELOG 40m

abs cavity length measurement experiment

Lately I've been dealing with the alignment of the interferometer to have a good beam spot at the AS port. Today the alignment script kept failing because of computer problems (failure of the frame builder) and also because the IFO was probably too far from the range where the automatic alignment works.

An other problem I keep having with the alignment of the optics on the AP table is with multiple reflection beams of the NPRO beam at the Farady.
Although I believe that now the two beams are quite well aligned, I don't see any reflection of the secondary beam from the IFO anymore.

It's like the more I try to improve the alignment, the worse I get from the beam matching. I'll keep working on this.

669

Mon Jul 14 21:34:10 2008

abs cavity length measurement experiment

Quote:

Realigning the OSA I also had to move a little bit the mirror that reflects the IFO beam of at the AS port in order to raise the beam height. This had the effect of changing the position of the AS spot on the camera and on the monitors.

Tonight with John, we made sure that the AS beam was still aligned to the PD.

683

Wed Jul 16 16:59:07 2008

I think the two beams are aligned again - they both pass the Faraday, they match at the irises and all along the optical path on the AP table. Although the NPRO beam does not show up at the AS port.

724

Wed Jul 23 16:31:02 2008

Joe, Rana, Alberto,

we found out the password for Megatron so we could log in and set a new one so that now it's the same as that for controls.
The IP address is 131.215.113.59.

We had to switch to another LAN ports to actually connect it.

725

Wed Jul 23 17:19:48 2008

We changed the IP address. Ther new one is 131.215.113.95.

Joe, Alberto

Quote:

798

Tue Aug 5 10:56:05 2008

ITMX chamber opened and mirror released

D-Mass, Steve, Rana, Koji, Yoichi, Alberto,
We opened the ITMX chamber to check the optics after last week earthquake. In particular, from the spectra, ITMX seemed to be stuck and had to be released again. When we inspected the mirror, we found that it wasn’t necessary to touch it. It had become free again during the vent thanks to the change of conductivity in the air inside during the vent.
We checked the magnets and they seemed to be fine.
A couple of stop screws had lost the rubber on their tips, although we don’t know if that was due to the earthquake.
We also took advantage of the opening to center the LR and the left OSEMs in the mirror to their zero.
Inspecting the table we found a couple of things not totally clear on the configuration of the optics in the table. In particular we found a beam dump located too close to the ifo beam. Eventually we found out that the dump was meant to block a ghost beam coming from the ITM. A better location should probably be figured out for that. We also found that the POXM1 mirror designed to have the maximum reflectivity for the P polarization of the beam at 45 degrees is mounted so that the incident beam is at 22 degrees. This cause the beam to be 90% transmitted and only 10 percent reflected to POX. The transmitted beam appears at ther BSC chamber.

The ifo beam passes so close to the POXM1 mirror so that it can be clipped by its large metal frame ring. The beam at that point is about 6mm large and the ring is about 1cm thick so that we could gain some distance with a different mount.

800

Tue Aug 5 17:56:23 2008

SRM and PRM inspection

Yoichi, Koji, Rana, Steve, Alberto

Today we opened the BSC to inspect the optics, and in particular the SRM and PRM.
We found that one of the side magnets of the SRM was broken and a piece of it fell and got stuck to the LR magnet.
We removed the LR OSEM and took off the broken part with tweezers. Since we couldn’t replace the magnet on the side,
we decided to just switch the OSEM to the other side were a second magnet was available. Then we centered the OSEMs.
Using the optical levers we aligned both the ITMX and the SRM so that now we have to center again the OSEMs on both.

The PRM was visibly tilted and it was out of the range of the OSEMs. To try to fix the tilt we lift it up a little
with the screws on the bottom and pushed it with the third screw on top. That had the effect of making the mirror
tilt to the opposite direction. We looked at the wires (see attached picture) and it seemed centered on the side
of the mirror.

Tomorrow we are going to reset the OSEMs on ITMX and SRM and then we’re going to try to fix the tilt on PRM.

805

Wed Aug 6 19:01:15 2008

ITMX and SRM OSEM post-earthquake diagnostic

Koji, Yoichi, Alberto

Today we reset the OSEMs on ITMX and SRM in order to be centered when the mirrors are aligned to the IFO beam. Since the PRM is still out of order, we used the beam from NPRO laser of the absolute length measurement experiment as it is injected through the AS port.
That’s how we did it:

1) We aligned the SRM so that the reflected beam from the NPRO was at the camera after at the AS port.

2) We traded off the alignment of SRM in order for the reflected beam at the camera to have a nice shape, avoiding any clipping from the optics, and for the optical lever to be not too far from zero. The final alignment for SRM, as read on the sliders on the MDM screen, is: Pitch=1.1650, Yaw=1.4674.

3) We aligned ITMX checking out by an IR card that the incoming and the reflected main beam in between ITMX and the BS matched. The alignment of the two beams was improved checking the matching after the SRM. The final alignment for ITMX, as read on the sliders on the MDM screen, is: Pitch=-1.2937, Yaw=-0.9890.

4) After the alignment of SRM and ITMX these were the voltages at the OSEMs:

SRM
UL=0.957
UR=1.254
LR=0.768
LL=0.620
Side=0.958

ITMX
UL=1.144
UR=1.360
LR=0.591
LL=0.325
Side=-----

5) Finally we centered the OSEMs on both mirrors and we read these voltages:

SRM
UL=0.939
UR=0.994
LR=0.782
LL=0.938
Side=0.953

ITMX
UL=0.918
UR=0.891
LR=0.887
LL=0.875
Side=0.883

916

Wed Sep 3 18:45:01 2008

PD3 gain

Alberto, Yoichi,

We found that the PD3 servo was unstable with a gain of 1, so we switched it to 0.5

940

Wed Sep 10 19:53:53 2008

abs length experiment

Update of the last days work on the experiment to measure the absolute length of the cavities.

I'm trying to repeat the same measurement that Koji did on the Y arm, before switching to the X arm.

I switched to the PHD universal box for the PLL control between the main laser and the secondary laser. I found a good gain value for the servo and now I can set the frequency of the beat to any value as long as I do it slowly turning the LO frequency from the knob on the Marconi.

I laid down a 50m BNC cable from the Y end to near the BS chamber, where all the abs length equipment is. I matched the two laser beams changing the alignment of the injection steering mirror at the the dark port on the AP table. I then locked the Y arm cavity. When I first tried to do that, the locking script didn't work because the beam was off of the 'sweet spot' where Rob had set it on Monday. It turned out that aborting the script during one of its previous run, had changed the alignment of the PZT steering mirrors. So with Rob I brought them back near the positions as in the snapshot and then saved a new one with the latest values.

Eventually I could set the beat frequency to the FSR of the arm cavity and saw it in transmission at the ETMY.

Now I'm working on the LabView interface for the GPIB data acquisition board.

944

Fri Sep 12 11:09:20 2008

abs cavity length experiment

I'm leaving the lab for a couple of hours. I shut the NPRO. The interferometer is available to anyone.

945

Sat Sep 13 23:13:01 2008

abs cavity length experiment

The Y arm was locked all time today but, suddenly, this afternoon it lost lock and since then I've been unable to restore it. I tried unsuccessfully the Restore and the Align scripts several times, although the position of PZT steering mirrors were good (as in the snapshot). I tried things like unlocking/locking the MC, the FSS reference cavity, the PMC but it didn't work. Then I decided to switch to the X arm. Locking it was a piece of cake compare to Y. I'm going to start measuring the FSR of the X arm.

946

Sun Sep 14 18:30:32 2008

Today I measured the X arm FSR.
Hi moved the fast PD (Thor Labs PDA255) from the Y end table to the X end table. I had to use a beam splitter to pick out the transmitted beam from the cavity beam and send it to the PD. I did not want to interpose the BS before the TRANS X PD, so I had to move the ETMXT camera to an other place in the table to gain some room. Now the beam that used to go directly to the camera is 50% split and goes also to the PD. I had to put a lens to focus the beam on the PD. The transmitted beam is currently not aligned to the ETMXT camera, I need to fix the alignment of the BS before.
I'm now doing a rough scan of a frequency range 5 times as large as the FSR. I'll post the results soon.

947

Sun Sep 14 19:29:07 2008

Quote:

I'm leaving a long measurement running. I should be back later on. If I won't, whoever wanted to use the interferometer has just to shut the NPRO laser in the AP table.

956

Wed Sep 17 13:58:36 2008

ABSL: results from the X arm

Today I repeated the measurement of the FSR on the X arm cavity. The noise in the transmitted power that made the measures fluctuate was much reduced after last night Rob worked on the interferometer. The X arm cavity length is now: (38.4580+/-0.0003)m. I'm attaching a summary of the data I've taken.

I'm now preparing the setup to measure the transverse mode spacing.

960

Wed Sep 17 19:13:47 2008

I installed the setup for measuring TEM01/10 on the X end table.
I'm leaving. I shut the laser, flipped down the flipper mirror, disconnected the pzt drive signal from the laser.
For Jenne. The power cable for the Guralps' board is now connected to the PDH box on my instruments cart but you can take it.

979

Mon Sep 22 20:00:35 2008

ABSL: running measurement

I'm leaving the X arm locked on the TEm01 mode while a measurement is running. Just please wait for 40 minute if you need the interferometer tonight.

987

Wed Sep 24 17:57:04 2008

ABSL: FSS Slow Actuator Control

Rana, Alberto

Today when I started working with the PLL that I use to control the secondary laser on the ABSL experiment, I found that the beat between the two lasers was at a much higher temperature of NPRO than usual (about one Celsius Degrees higher, 49.79 instead of 48.7). It turned out that the main beam frequency had changed, and so had its frequency, because of a too much high value of the slow actuator gain on the FSS. We looked at the trend for the gain and noticed it had changed from 0.3 to 3 at about noon today. We brought it back to the old value and also optimized the single gains in the FSS slow servo to obtain a faster and stabler response to step changes in the laser temperature.

It is very important for the ABSL experiment that the frequency and the NPRO temperature of the main laser do not change.

** update:

you asked for:   diff 2008/09/25,0:00 2008/09/25,8:50:19 utc 'FSS[-_]SLOW'
LIGO controls: differences, 2008 09/25 00:00:00 utc vs. 2008 09/25 08:50:19 utc
__Epics_Channel_Name______   __Description__________   __value1____     __value2____
C1:PSL-FSS_SLOWKD                                      0.000000         0.001000
C1:PSL-FSS_SLOWKI                                     -0.001000        -0.001700
C1:PSL-FSS_SLOWKP                                     -0.000300        -0.001000

It seemed later that it was not being cool with the derivative gain up at -0.001, so I set it to zero. We really need some documentation on this
loop (e.g. pseudo code and a PID tuning procedure). Note that the PID record as documented in the EPICS Reference Manual
has been deprecated and so we run a perl script that Tobin wrote.

1015

Wed Oct 1 12:05:58 2008

"StochMon" added to the Alarm Handler

John, Alberto,

we added the four channels of the RF Amplitude Monitor (aka StochMon) to the Alarm HAndler. First we modified the 40m.alh file just copying some lines and switching the name of the channels to the ones we wanted. Than we also added a few lines to the database file ioo.db in order to define the alrm levels. So far I used just test values for the thresholds of green, yellow and red states and need to update to some reasonable ones. To do that I need to calibrate those EPICS channels. I have the old data saved and I'm now trying to figure out how to properly change the database file.

1016

Wed Oct 1 12:09:25 2008

"StochMon" added to the Alarm Handler

Quote:

John, Alberto,

we added the four channels of the RF Amplitude Monitor (aka StochMon) to the Alarm HAndler. So far I used just test values for the thresholds of green, yellow and red states and need to update to some reasonable ones. To do that I need to calibrate those EPICS channels. I have the old data saved and I'm now trying to figure out how to properly change the database file.

John, Yoichi, Alberto

We restarted the C1iool0 computer both directly by the main key and remotely via telnet. We had to do it a couple of times and in one occasion the computer didn't restart properly and had connection problem with the newtowrk. We had to call Alex that did just the same thing, but used the CTRL+X command to reboot. It worked and the Alarm Handler now includes the StochMon.

1022

Fri Oct 3 12:15:21 2008

This morning, in order to update the threshold values of the alarm handler for the StochMon, I rebooted the C1iool0 computer following the procedure in the wiki, that is telnetting on it and typing CTRL+X. Apparently everything went well in the process.

1028

Mon Oct 6 12:45:41 2008

Alberto, Joe,

The C1LSC medm screen is frozen and the C1LSC computer is down. We tried to reboot and to restart it first turning off the power and then just rebooting remotely. None of them worked. We check whether any of the cable was unplugged but they were ok. Also all the led turned on to green after rebooting.
Trying to reboot we get the following error message: init_module: device or resource busy.

We called Alex who first suggested to check all the connection and then to swap the timing cable between two Pentek boards but the computer was still down.
It is possible that the board is dead. Alex and Rolf are going to look into this problem and for any spare board.

by now we can't lock any DOF of the IFO.

1029

Mon Oct 6 16:41:33 2008

Quote:

Alex, Rob, Alberto,

Alex replaced the Pentek board used by C1LSC with a spare one that they had at the Wilson house. That fixed the DMA failure but since the board had a channel broken, one of the channels (POY) was still not available.

Looking at the wiring diagram of the ASC crate, we found that one of the Pentek boards in it was actually not used by anything and thus available to replace the bad one in LSC. We switched the two boards so that now the one that Alex installed is mounted in the ASC crate and it is connected to the cable labeled 1x2-ASC 6.

C1LSC is up again and all the channels in the C1LSC screen, including POY, now seem to be working properly.

1030

Tue Oct 7 10:49:29 2008

This morning I found that the photodidode of the PLL in the PSL table was not aligned to the beam anymore. The PD support was not tight to the pedestal so that the PD was rotated and completely off of the beam.

It is possible that the BNC cable connected to the PD was pulled very strongly, or the PD was hit so that the support got unscrewed by its pedestal. Anyways, it did not happen spontaneously.

I re-aligned the PD and observed again the beat between the two laser beams. Here are the values from the measurement of the signal from the PD:
I measured the DC values of the hitting power, alternatively occluding one of the two laser beams, and I measured the beat amplitude letting them interfere and reading the peak-to-peak amplitude of the oscillating signal:

main beam DC: 200mV
secondary beam DC: 490
beat: 990mV
beat at the spectrum analyzer (after the two-way splitter of the PLL): -8.40dBm on a noise floor of the photodiode of -75dBm

the frequency of the beast is 8.55MHz and the temperature of the NPRO of the secondary beam, as read from the laser driver display, is 48.7357C.

Alberto

1031

Tue Oct 7 12:17:57 2008

Yoichi, Alberto

I noticed the MEDM screen time was about 7 minutes ahead of the right time. The time on MEDM is read on channel C0:TIM-PACIFIC_STRING which takes it from the C1VCU-EPICS computer. Yoichi found that that computer did not have the right time because one of the startup scripts, ntpd, which are contained in the directory /etc/init.d/ for some reason did not start. So restring it by typing ./ntpd start updated the time on that computer and fixed the problem.

1039

Fri Oct 10 10:20:42 2008

Quote:

The front-end machines are all down. Another cosmic-ray in the RFM, I suppose. Whoever comes in first in the morning should do the all-boot described in the wiki.

Yoichi and I went along the arms turning off and on all the FE machines. Then, from the control room we rebooted them all following the procedures in the wiki. Everything is now up again.

I restored the full IFO, re-locked the mode cleaner.

1040

Fri Oct 10 13:57:33 2008

Omnistructure

Problems in locking the X arm

This morning for some reason that I didn't clearly understand I could not lock the Xarm. The Y arm was not a problem and the Restore and Align script worked fine.

Looking at the LSC medm screen something strange was happening on the ETMX output. Even if the Input switch for c1:LSC-ETMX_INMON was open, there still was some random output going into c1:LSC-ETMX_INMON, and it was not a residual of the restor script running. Probably something bad happened this monring when we rebooted all the FE computers for the RFM network crash that we had last night.

Restarting the LSC computer didn't solve the problem so I decided to reboot the scipe25 computer, corresponding to c1dcuepics, that controls the LSC channels.

Somehow rebooting that machine erased all the parameters on almost all medm screens. In particular the mode cleaner mirrors got a kick and took a while to stop. I then burtrestored all the medm screen parameters to yesterday Thursday October 9 at 16:00. After that everything came back to normal. I had to re-lock the PMC and the MC.

Burtrestoring c1dcuepics.snap required to edit the .snap file because of a bug in burtrestore for that computer wich adds an extra return before the final quote symbol in the file. That bug should be fixed sometime.

The rebooting apparently fixed the problem with ETMX on the LSC screen. The strange output is not present anymore and I was able to easily lock the X arm. I then run the Align and the Restore full IFO scripts.

1066

Wed Oct 22 09:42:41 2008

DAQ

c1iool0 rebooted and MC autolocker restarted

This morning I found the MC unlocked. The MC-Down script didn't work because of network problems in communicating with scipe7, a.k.a. c1iool0. Telneting to the computer was also impossible so I power cycled it from its key switch. The first time it failed so I repeated it a second time and then it worked.
Yoichi then restarted c1iovme. It was also necessary to restart the MC autolocker script according to the following procedure:
- ssh into op440m
- from op440m, ssh into op340m
- restart /cvs/cds/caltech/scripts/scripts/MC/autolockMCmain40

1070

Wed Oct 22 20:50:30 2008

Today I measured the GPS clock frequency at the output of CLOCK_MON in a board on the same crate where the c1iool0 computer is located. The monitor was connected with a BNC cable to the 10MHz reference input of the frequency counter on top of that rack, where it was used to check the 166MHz coming from one of the Marconi.

The frequency was supposed to be 10MHz but I actually measured 8 MHz. I tracked down the GPS input cable to the board and it turned out to come from one of the 1Y7 rack. Here it was connected to a board with a display that was showing corrupted digits, plus some leds on the front panel were red.

I'm not sure the GPS reference is working properly.

1072

Thu Oct 23 15:27:19 2008

Here are the measurements I've got yesterday. The plot shows the transmitted power after the X arm while sweeping the frequency of the beat between the two lasers. That frequency is changed by scanning the frequency of the local oscillator of the PLL (that is the Marconi).
The X arm cavity has been locked to the TEM00 of the main beam. I tilted ITMX in order to enhance the higher modes of the secondary beam with the purpose of making them beat with the main beam.
Three traces are shown in the plot correspondent to three different measurements in which I clipped the transmitted beam at the X end with a razor blade from up and from the side of the photodiode.
Both the beats of the TEM00 mode of the main laser with the TEM01 and TEM10 modes of the secondary laser are expected to be at 6.2763 MHz. The plot has a candidate peak at 6.325MHz but it does not appear on both the measurements with the blade. the peaks at 3.897MHz and 7.795MHz are the first and the second longitudinal modes of the X arm cavity.

1073

Thu Oct 23 18:23:47 2008

Quote:

Today I repeated the measurement and I'm attaching the resulting plot. Still, not clear and (and most of all) not nice.
It seems like tilting ITMX is introducing a lot of unwanted higher modes that don't let us to clearly identify TEM01 and TEM10.
I think I'm going to stop it to get back to technique in which the arm cavity is locked to the TEM01/10 of the main beam.

1074

Thu Oct 23 18:27:04 2008

Quote:

Here is the Matlab code I use to calculate the HOM frequencies.

1075

Thu Oct 23 18:45:18 2008

Computer Scripts / Programs

Omnistructure

Python code for GPIB devices developed for the Absl length experiment

I wrote two Python scripts for my measurement that can be also used/imitated by others: sweepfrequency. py and HP8590.py. The first is is the one that we run by a Python interpreter (just typing "python <name script> <parameters>"from the terminal). It manages the parameters that we have to pass it for the measurement and calls the second one, HP8590.py which actually does most of the job.

Here what it does. It scans the frequency of the Marconi and, for each step, searches the highest peak in the Spectrum Analyzer (which is centered 50 KHz around the frequency of the Marconi). It then associates the amplitude of the peak to the frequency of the Marconi and write the two number in two columns of a file.
The file name, the GPIB-to/LAN interface IP address, the frequency range, the frequency step amplitude and the number of measures we want it to average for each step, are all set by the parameters when we call sweepfrequency.py.
More details are in the help of the function or just looking at the header of the code.

I guess that one can perform other similar measurement just with little changes in the code so I think it could turn out useful to anyone else.

1076

Thu Oct 23 18:51:19 2008

I checked it and the latest version of the elog software, the 2.7.5 (we have the 2.6.5) has, among new nice features, the very good ability to fit the entries into the screen width without showing kilometric lines like we see now. Should we upgrade it?

1084

Fri Oct 24 11:42:48 2008

Abs length: locking the X arm cavity in TEM01/10

I went back to lock the arm cavity in either TEM01 or TEM10 mode. Attached are the results. We still have several resonances which we can't clearly identify. I expect TEM01/10 to be at 6.276MHz but we don't have a peak exactly there. What we have is:
- a peak at 6.320MHz in the measurement of the TEM01 mode (the one with the lobes of the spot almost on the vertical axis)
- a peak at 6.590MHz in both the TEM01 and TEM10 measurements.

I'm either missing the real TEM01/10 mode or the peaks at 6.590MHz are those. If that were true, that would mean that the radius of curvature of ETMX is 49.29 m instead of 57.57 m as listed in the IFO data sheets. I think it's much more likely that the measurements are missing the right peaks.

1086

Fri Oct 24 17:21:13 2008

Abs length: the right amount of beam clipping

I found the reason why the peak at about 6.3MHz appeared only on the TEM10 mode: the blade was clipping the beam too much and it was probably totally killing the mode. I'm attaching a plot that shows that difference when I did that.

1087

Fri Oct 24 18:05:01 2008

Abs length: transverse mode spacing measured for the X arm

The ETMX suffers of astigmatism. I measured the following frequencies for the higher order modes:
- f_01 = 6317500 +/- 500 Hz
- f_10 = 6305500 +/- 500 Hz

From

g2=1/g1*(cos(A*L*pi/c))^2

where A= (fsr-f_i), fsr=(3897654+/-15)Hz (see elog entry 956), L=(38.4580+/-0.0003)m, g1=0.9947 (from R1=7280m), I get the following values for the g-factor coefficients:

g2_x = 0.3164 +/- 0.0002
g2_y = 0.3209 +/- 0.0002

from which we have the radius of curvature of ETMX:

R_x = 56.26 +/- 0.01 m
R_y = 56.63 +/- 0.01 m

The specs for the mirror have R2= 57.57 m (unc).

So, they seem conditions similar of those of ETMY that Koji measured:

Rx = 56.1620 +/- 0.0013 [m]
Ry = 57.3395 +/- 0.0011 [m]

for which L_yarm: 38.6462 m +/- 0.0003 m

1093

Mon Oct 27 11:16:23 2008

I implemented the calibration for the four channels of the StochMon in the ioo EPICS database. Now the output of those channels, as shown in the medm screen, gives the peak-to-peak amplitude in voltage of each frequency from the RFAMPD at the transmission of the MC, normalized by the DC output from the same photodiode.

Basically the calibration takes into account the following factors:
- two in series RF preamplifiers, currently laying on the PSL table near the RFAMPD, with gains of 19 dB and 17 dB, respectively
and, inside the StochMon blue box:
- a resonant band-pass filter with the following gains h_f(f) for each of the frequencies of interest: 33MHz -39.5 dB; 133MHz -40.8 dB; 166MHz -49.0 dB; 199MHz -45.0 dB
- a power detector that provides an output voltage linearly proportional to the input power in dBm, with a factor alpha of proportionality equal to an average value of -0.0271 V/dBm for all the frequencies

The calibration that relates the output voltage from the PD to the output voltage from the StochMon is then obtained as:

V_pd(f) = sqrt(2*R*P0)/h_f(f) * 10^( (Vo-q)/(20*alpha) )

where R=50ohm, P0=1mW and q=0.772 V, the latest being the offset in the calibration of the power detector (that is its output for a 0 dBm input).

1097

Tue Oct 28 11:10:18 2008

Higher Order Mode resonances in the X arms

LSC

Quote:

Recently we had been having some trouble locking the full IFO in the spring configuration (SRC on +166).
It was thought that an accidental higher order mode resonance in the arms may have been causing problems.

I previously calculated the locations of the resonances using rough arm cavity parameters(Elog #690). Thanks to Koji
and Alberto I have been able to update this work with measured arm length and g factors for the y arm (Elog #801,#802).
I have also included the splitting of the modes caused by the astigmatic ETM. Code is attached.

I don't see any evidence of +166MHz resonances in the y arm.

In the attached plot different colours denote different frequencies +33, -33, +166, -166 & CR.
The numbers above each line are the mn of TEMmn.
Solid black line is the carrier resonance.

I plugged the measures of the length of the X arm and radius of curvature of ETMX I made in to John's code to estimate the position of the resonances of the HOM for the sidebands in the X arm. Here's the resulting plot.

1109

Mon Nov 3 19:18:47 2008

Phil Ehrens kindly poured our elog's content in a CD that now is here at the 40m.
I've been trying to install the 2.7.5 version of the elog on Nodus, a Sun machine, but the installing procedure is different from linux and I dont' know it. I tried to recompile the elog from the source code but the way gcc is called must be wrong because I get this error message:

nodus:elog-2.7.5>make
gcc -DHAVE_SSL -o elog src/elog.c -lsocket -lnsl -lssl
src/elog.c:45:25: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
src/elog.c:329: error: parse error before "SSL"
src/elog.c: In function `ssl_connect':
src/elog.c:331: error: `SSL_METHOD' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/elog.c:331: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
src/elog.c:331: error: for each function it appears in.)
src/elog.c:331: error: `meth' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/elog.c:332: error: `SSL_CTX' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/elog.c:332: error: `ctx' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/elog.c:340: error: `ssl_con' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/elog.c:341: error: `sock' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/elog.c: In function `retrieve_elog':
src/elog.c:383: error: `SSL' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/elog.c:383: error: `ssl_con' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/elog.c: In function `submit_elog':
src/elog.c:631: error: `SSL' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/elog.c:631: error: `ssl_con' undeclared (first use in this function)
make: *** [elog] Error 1

Joe, Yoichi, anyone else knows how to do that?

1114

Tue Nov 4 17:58:42 2008

DAQ

PSL

MC temperature sensor

I added a channel for the temperature sensor on the MC1/MC3 chamber: C1:PSL-MC_TEMP_SEN.
To do that I had to reboot the frame builder. The slow servo of the FSS had to get restarted, the reference cavity locked and so the PMC and MZ.

1115

Wed Nov 5 12:41:36 2008

Absolute Length and g-factor measurements conclusions

LSC

Absolute Length and g-Factor Measurement for the 40m Arm Cavities, Summary of Results

MOTIVATION OF THE EXPERIMENT
Lately locking the interferometer in the so called spring configuration (SRC on +166 MHz sideband) has been difficult and a possible resonance of an higher order mode of the +166 MHz sideband in the arms was
hypothesized as the cause. We wanted to know the frequencies of the HOMs of the sidebands and see where they are, relatively to the carrier resonance.

THE EXPERIMENTAL TECHNIQUE IN BRIEF
A second laser beam from an NPRO is injected into the interferometer through the AS port. The beam is mode matched to the arm cavities so that it can resonate inside of these. The secondary beam interferes with
the PSL beam and the incident intensity on one end mirror, excluding by now any higher mode, is I(t)=I1+I2+(interference terms)*exp[-i*(f1-f2)*t]. The last term comes from the beat between the two fields at the
relative frequency of the two lasers. For beating frequencies multiple of the FSR of the cavity, the beat gets transmitted and appears at the trans PD.
Whereas the PSL has a constant frequency, the NPRO frequency fluctuates, so that the relative phase between the two is not constant. To prevent that, a PLL servo locks the phase of the NPRO to that of the PSL.
The result is a beat frequency at the steady and tunable value set by the local oscillator of the PLL.

Length Measurement
One arm at a time, the cavity is locked to the TEM00 mode of the main laser. The beat frequency is then scanned for a few cavity FSRs and the transmitted power is measured. A linear fit of the resonant frequencies gives
us the FSR of the cavity.

g-factor Measurement
For non-planar Fabry-Perot cavities, the HOMs of the laser are not degenerate and resonate in the cavity at frequencies different from the correspondent fundamental mode. The shift in frequency is measured by the
Transverse Mode Spacing (TMS) and it is a function of the g-factors of the cavity:

TMS=FSR*acos[sqrt(g1*g2)]/pi

with g1=1-L/R1, where L is the cavity absolute length and R1 the radius of curvature of the input mirror, and similarly for g2 for the end mirror.
We measured the TMS by means of the beat between an HOM of the main laser and the TEM00 of the secondary beam. To do that we locked the cavity to either TEM01/10 and looked at the transmitted power for frequencies
of the beat around the TMS expected from the design parameters of the cavity.
Since the phase of the intensity of the beat between TEM01/10 and TEM00 has only DC components if measured across a symmetric portion of the spot, it is necessary to brake the symmetry of the incident beam on the
PD by chopping it just before it hits the sensor.
We approximated g1=1 for the ITMs. The effect of an astigmatic ETM is to brake the degeneracy of the TEM10 and TEM01 modes and split their resonant frequencies. By measuring that shift, we can evaluate the radius
of curvature of the mirror for the axis of the two transverse modes.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

X Arm
FSR     =  (3897627 +/- 5 )   Hz
L       = (38.45833  +/- 0.00005) m
g2x     =   0.31197  +/- 0.00004
g2y     =   0.32283  +/- 0.00004
R-ETM_x = (55.8957   +/- 0.0045) m
R-ETM_y = (56.7937   +/- 0.0038) m

Y Arm
FSR     = ( 3879252 +/- 30 )  Hz
L       = (38.6462   +/- 0.0003) m
g2x     =   0.31188  +/- 0.00004
g2y     =   0.32601  +/- 0.00004
R-ETM_x = (56.1620   +/- 0.0013) m
R-ETM_y = (57.3395   +/- 0.0011) m

CONCLUSIONS
The attached graphs,one for the X arm and the other for the Y arm, plot the distributions of the first HOMs of the sidebands near the carrier resonance in the arm cavities. As it appears, the resonances of
the +166 sideband are far enough for not resonating in the arm cavities if the arms are locked to the carrier.
We have to look for something else to explain the locking problem of the interferometer in the spring configuration.

1124

Fri Nov 7 18:38:19 2008

MC temperature sensor hooked up

DAQ

PSL

Alberto, Rana,
we found that the computer handling the signals from ICS-110B was C1IOVME so we restarted it. We changed the name of the channel to C1:PEM_TEMPS and the number to 16349. We tracked it up to the J14 connector of the DAQ.
We also observed the strange thing that both of the differential pairs on J13 are read by the channle. Also, if you connect a 50 Ohm terminator to one of the pairs, the signal even get amplified.

(The name of the channel is PEM-MC1_TEMPS)

1132

Thu Nov 13 11:33:25 2008

Making (good) Matlab figures

HowTo

Treasure

Just a little summary of some useful ways to change plot settings in Matlab that I wanted to share and remember for the future:

http://saig.phys.ualberta.ca/toolbox/Matlab/making_figures.html

1133

Thu Nov 13 15:50:44 2008

The schematic of the 1Y7 rack that Alan pointed out (see attachment) don't represent anymore the actual rack.
First, with Yoichi we found that the GPS receiver for the 10 MHz is in a different position,
on the other side of the VME computer. It seems to output 1 kHz, which also appears in some modulated way.
This signal is then passed to a board on 1Y7 that seems make just copies of the signal. One of these goes
to an other board in 1Y6 that looks like a GPS receiver but has actually no GPs antenna input. Here it is
not connected to anything, but on its same crate is a the awg computer, so it might be providing the clock
to that by the crate.

We also checked the clock monitor output on the boards in the PSL that provides for the clock to the Penteks
and it seems that these are actually getting 4MHz.

1139

Mon Nov 17 11:01:15 2008

Calibrating the Frequency Standard of the Marconi

HowTo

Electronics

I locked the SRS Rubidium Frequency Standard FS275 to the the 1pps from the GPS. The specs from the manual provide a frequency accuracy of 5x10^-11, that is 5x10-4 @ 10 MHz, since this is the reference signal frequency we're are going to use.
The Marconi internal frequency standard is provided by a TCXO oscillator. The instrument can be set in either one of these ways: 1) Indirect Synchronization, by which the internal TCXO is phase-locked to the external frequency standard (i.e. the SRS FS275 in our case) 2) Direct Sync, in which the internal TCXO is bypassed and the frequency standard is the external one.

I checked the specs of both frequency standards and found:

SRS FS275: 5x10^-11 -> 5x10^-10 Hz @ 10 MHz

Marconi: here what the data sheet says is that "the temperature coefficient is 7 in 10^7 in the temperature range between 0 and 55 C" and so should be also the frequency accuracy.

The SRS FS275 seems more accurate than the TCXO therefore I'm going to set the Marconi on the direct external mode.

1145

Tue Nov 18 19:44:53 2008

X Arm Cavity "Negative" FSRs Measured

Previous measurements on the X arm cavity revealed a shift of the frequencies of the cavity resonances from where one would expect these to be by just looking at integer multiples of the cavity FSR. In particular, plotting the resonant frequencies versus the order of their occurrences while sweeping the laser frequency (in our case that of the beat between the two lasers), the linear fit of the data contained an unwanted offset:

resonant_frequency = n x FSR + offset

In part, we attributed this offset to the local oscillator of the PLL, the Marconi, which was not referred to an absolute frequency clock.
For that reason, I connected the Marconi to the RS FS275 which uses the 1PPS from the GPS to generate a 10 MHZ reference signal, and then scanned the cavity again. This time I started from negative beat frequencies, that happen when the frequency of the secondary laser is smaller than the main laser's, to positive frequencies. The way I made sure of the sign of the frequency was looking at the effect of changing the temperature of the NPRO. I decided that negative frequencies where those for which an increase in temperature lowered the beat frequency and positive frequencies those for which increasing the temperature made the beat frequency go up.
I then plotted the data and obtained the attached plot.

The offset was reduced to about 80 Hz (from more than 200 in the previous measurements). I think the residual offset has to do with something that happens in the cavity, something, as Koji found out, related to the alignment of the mirrors.

Thanks to the more data points, the measurement of the FSR improved to (3897627 +/- 5) Hz, which would let us know the measure of the cavity length with an error of 50um, if it weren't for the offset. I have to understand whether and how to take this into account to determine the precision in the cavity length. I guess it depends on whether it is real or it is still a systematic error due to the measurements.

1146

Wed Nov 19 10:32:11 2008

All the Marconi Set to the Rubidium Frequency Standard

Electronics

I placed the SRS Rubidium FS275 over the PSL rack, next to the frequency counter. This one and the Marconi on the PSL rack have been connected to the 10MHz output of the frequency standard. I set also the first Marconi, the one that used to drive the others, to external, direct frequency reference. Now it reads 166981718 Hz versus 166981725 Hz measured by the frequency counter: 8 Hz difference.

1169

Wed Dec 3 11:58:10 2008

Rana, Alberto,

more details on the MC alignment we did yesterday.

Last week Rana re-aligned the Mach Zender (MZ) on the PSL table to reduce the power at the dark port (see elog entry #1151). After that, the beam was aligned to the MZ but not properly aligned to the Mode Cleaner (MC) anymore. As a result the MC could not lock or did it on unwanted transverse modes. To fix that we decided to change the alignment of the MC input periscope on the PSL table.

The ultimate goal of the operation was to align the MC transmitted beam to the IFO and to maximize the power. Such a condition depends on:
a) a good cavity alignment and
b) input beam matching to the cavity TEM00 mode.

Since the MZ alignment had only affected the input beam, we assumed the cavity alignment was still good, or at least it had not changed, and we focused on the input beam.

The IOO computer, by the MC autolocker script, is able to change the cavity alignment and the length to match the input beam and lock the cavity. Although both the length servo (LSC) and the alignment servo (WFS) have a limited effective operating range. So for the script to work properly and at best, input beam and cavity matching have to be not far from that range.

The MC periscope has two mirrors which control the pitch and yaw input angles. By changing either yaw or pitch of both mirrors together (“two-knob" technique) one can change the input angle without moving the injection point on the cavity input mirror (MC1). So this is the procedure that we followed:

1) turned of the autolocker running the MC-down script
2) brought the reflected beam spot back on the MC-reflection camera and on the reflection photodiode (REFL-PD)
3) turned on the LSC servo
4) tweaked the periscope's mirrors until the cavity got locked on a TEM00 mode
5) tweaked the periscope aiming at ~0.3V from the REFL-PD and ~3V on the transmission photodiode (TRANS-PD).

Following the steps above we got ~0.5 V on the REFL-PD and ~2V on the TRANS-PD but no better than that.

Looking at the Drift Monitor MEDM screen, we found that the cavity was not in the reference optimal position, as we initially assumed, thus limiting the matching of the beam to the MC.

We restored the optics reference position and repeated the alignment procedure as above. This time we got ~3V on the TRANS-PD and ~0.5 on the REFL-PD. We thought that the reason for still such a relatively high reflection was that the beam was not well centered on the REFL-PD (high order modes pick-up?).

On the AS table we centered the REFL-PD by aligning a beam splitter in the optical path followed by the light to reach the photodiode.

We also centered the beam on the reflection Wave Front Sensors (WFS). To do that we halved the power on the MZ to reduce the sidebands power and prevent the WFS QPD from saturating. We then aligned the beam splitters on the QPD by balancing the power among the quadrants. Finally we restored the power on the MZ.

As a last thing, we also centered the transmitted beam on the TRANS-QPD.

The MC is now aligned and happily locked with 3V at the TRANS-PD and 0.3V at REFL-PD.

1192

Thu Dec 18 12:52:00 2008