I have been editing and reloading the c1ioo model last two days. I have restarted the frame builder several times. After one of the restarts on Sunday evening the fb started having problems which initially showed up as dtt reporting synchronization error. This morning Kiwamu and I tried to restart the fb again and it stopped working all together. We called Joe and he fixed the fb problem by fixing the time stamps (Joe will add details to describe the fix when he sees this elog).

The following changes were made to c1ioo model:

- The angular dither lockins were added for each optics to do the beam spot centering on MC mirrors. The MCL signal is demodulated digitally at 3 pitch and 3 yaw frequencies. (The MCL signal was reconnected to the first input of the ADC interface board).

- The outputs of the lockins go through the sensing matrix, DOF filters, and control matrix to the MC1,2,3 SUS-MC1(2,3)_ASCPIT(YAW) filter inputs where they sum with dither signals (CLOCK output of the oscillators).

- The MCL_TEST_FILT was removed

The arm cavity dither alignment (c1ass) status:

- The demodulated signals were minimized by moving the ETMX/ITMX optic biases and simultaneously keeping the arm buildup (TRX) high by using the BS and PZT2. The minimization of the TRX demodulated signals has not been successful for some reason.

- The next step is to close the servo loops REFL11I demodulated signals -> TMs and TRX demodulated signals -> combination of BS and PZTs.

The MC dither alignment (c1ioo) status:

- The demodulated signals were obtained and sensing matrix (MCs -> lockin outputs) was measured for pitch dof.

- The inversion of the matrix is in progress.

- The additional c1ass and c1ioo medm screens and up and down scripts are being made.

The mechanical assembly of RF distribution box is 99% complete.  Some of the components may be bolted to the teflon base plate if needed. 

All RF cables and DC voltage supply lines have been installed and tested.  I removed the terminal block which was acting as a distribution box for the common zero voltage line.  Instead I have used the threaded holes in the body of each voltage regulator.   This allows us to keep the supply lines twisted right up to the regulator and keeps the wiring neater.  The three regulator bodies have been wired together to provide a common zero potential point. 

I did a preliminary test to see if everything is functioning. All units are functioning well.  The output power levels may need to be adjusted by changing the attenuators. 

The 2x frequency multiplier outputs are not neat sine waves.  They seem to produce some harmonics, unlike the rest of the components.

I will post the measured power output at each point tomorrow.  The RF power meter could not be found in the 40m lab.  We suspect that it has found its way back to the PSL lab.

 http://www.timesmicrowave.com/wireless/index.shtml  

Frank is recommending these PhaseTrack-210 as phase stable low loss rf coax cables.

Larisa Thorne received 40m lab specific, basic safety training. She will attend P. King's Basic Laser Safety Training Session tomorrow.

As per Kiwamu's request I made a light touch to the input steering and the mode matching lens.

Here V_ref and V_trans are C1:IOO-MC_RFPD_DCMON and C1:IOO-MC_TRANS_SUM, respectively.

Result: Visibility = 1 - V_ref(resonant) / V_ref(anti_reso) = 1 - 0.74 / 5.05 = 85%

What has been done:

• Alignment of the steering mirrors before and after the last mode matching lens
     V_ref: 2.7 ==> 2.2, V_trans: 34000 ==> 39000
• Moving of the last mode matching lens away from the MC (+ alignment of the steering mirrors)
     V_ref: 2.2 ==> 0.74, V_trans: 39000 ==> 55000

New noise spectra of the green locking have been updated.

The plot below shows the in-loop noise spectra when the beat signal was fedback to ETMX.

The rms noise integrated from 0.1 Hz to 100 Hz went down to approximately 2 kHz.

The red curve was taken when the beat was controlled only by a combination of some poles sand zeros on the digital filter banks. The UGF was at 40Hz.

This curve is basically the same as that Koji took few weeks ago (see here). Apparently the rms was dominated by the peaks at 16 Hz and 3 Hz.

The blue curve was taken when the same filter plus two resonant gain filters (at 16.5 Hz and 3.15 Hz) were applied. The UGF was also at 40Hz.

Due to the resonant gain filter at 16.5 Hz, the phase margin became less, and it started oscillating at the UGF as shown in the plot.

We wish to have roughly 2 dBm of output power on each line coming out of the RF distribution box.  So I adjusted the attenuators inside the box to get this.

I also looked at why the 2x output looked so distorted and found that the input power was around 17 dBm whereas the maximum allowed (as per the datasheet of Minicircuits MK-2) is 15dBm.  So I increased the attentuation on its input line to 5dBm (up by 2dBm)  The input power levels are around 14.6dBm now  and the distortion has come down considerably.  However the net output on the 2x lines is now down to 0.7dBm.  We will have to amplify this if we need more power.

The schematic and the power output are now like this:

Friday: 

In addition to the other fixes, Alex rebuilt the daqd process. I failed to elog this. When he rebuilt it, he needed change the symmerticom gps offset in the daqdrc file (located in /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/target/fb). 

On Friday night, Kiwamu contacted me and let me know the frame builder had core dumped after a seg fault.  I had him temporarily disable the c1ass process (the only thing we changed that day), and then replaced Alex's rebuilt daqd code with the original daqd code and restarted it.  However, I did not change the symmetricom offset at this point.  Finally, I restarted the NDS process.  At that point testpoints and  trends seemed to be working.

Sunday:

The daqd process was restarted sometime on Sunday night (by Valera i believe).  Apparently this restart finally had the symmetricom gps offset kick in (perhaps because it was the first restart after the NDS was restarted?).  So data was being written to a future gps time.

Monday:

Kiwamu had problems with testpoints and trends and contacted me.  I tracked down the gps offset and fixed it, but the original daqd process only started once successfully, after that is was segfault, core dump non-stop. I tried Alex's rebuilt daqd (along with putting the gps offset to the correct value for it), and it worked.  Test points, trends, excitations were checked at the point and found working.

I still do not understand the underlying causes of all these segmentation faults with both the old and new daqd codes.  Alex has suggested some new open mx drivers be installed today.

Alex and I updated the open mx drivers from 1.3.3 to 1.3.901 (1.4 release candidate).  We downloaded the drivers from: http://open-mx.gforge.inria.fr/

We put them in /root/open-mx-1.3.901 on the fb machine (and thus get mounted by all the front ends.).  We did configure and make and make install.

We did a quick check with /opt/mx/bin/mx_info on the fb machine at this point and realized the MAC addresses and host names were all messed up, including two listings for c1iscex with different mac addresses (neither of which was c1iscex).

We then brought all the front ends mx_streams down, brought the fb down, then cleared all the peer names with mx_hostname.  We then brought the fb up, and the front end mx_stream processes.

/opt/mx/mx_info now shows a clean and correct set of hostnames and mac addresses.  Testpoints and trends are working.

I put the PMC last mode matching lens (one between the steering mirrors) on a translation stage to facilitate the PMC mode matching.

Currently 4% of incident power is reflected by the PMC. But the reflected beam does not look "very professional" on the camera to Rana - meaning there is too much TEM20 (bulls eye) mode in the reflected beam.

I locked the  PMC  on bulls eye mode and measured  the ratio of the TEM20/TEM00 in transmission to be 1.3%. Thus the PMC mode matching is ~99% and the incident beam HOM content is ~3%.

While working on the PMC I found that the source of PMC "blinking" is not the frequency control signal from MC to the laser (the MC servo was turned off) but possibly some oscillation which could be affected even by a small change of the pump current 2.10 A to 2.08 A. I showed this behaviour to Kiwamu and we decided to leave the the current at 2.08 A for now where things look stable and investigate later.

Having finished labeling the existing cables to match their new names, we (Steve, Kiwamu and Larisa) moved on to start laying new cables and labeling them according to the list.

Newly laid cables include: ETMXT (235'), ETMX (235'), POP (110') and MC2 (105').  All were checked by connecting a camera to a monitor and checking the clarity of the resulting image. Note that these cables were only laid, so they are not plugged in.

The MC2 cable needs to be ~10' longer; it won't reach to where it's supposed to. It is currently still in its place. 

The three other cables were all a lot longer than necessary.

[Kevin, Rana, Koji]

I calculated the dark noise of POX and POY due to Johnson noise and voltage and current noise from the MAX4107 op-amp using nominal values for the circuit components found in their data sheets. I found that the dark noise should be approximately 15.5 nV/rtHz. The measured dark noise values are 18.35 nV/rtHz and 98.5 nV/rtHz for POX and POY respectively. The shot noise plots on the wiki have been updated to show these calculated dark noise sources.

The measured dark noise for POY is too high. I will look into the cause of this large noise. It is possible that the shot noise measurement for POY was bad so I will start by redoing the measurement.

Just in case anyone else wants to access it, we now have 30 days of H1 S5 DARM data sitting on Rossa's harddrive.  It's in 10min segments.  This is handy because if you want to try anything, particularly Wiener Filtering, now we don't have to wait around for the data to be fetched from elsewhere.

Cheater cables   for SRM sus tied up. They were dangling aimlessly on the floor.

Uniblitz mechanical shutter was placed into the beam path of the PSL output with razor beam trap. The output power was 1.39W at 2.08A

It is working from the MEDM screen "old map" C1IOO_Mech_Shutter.adl

I did a quick calculation to determine the amount of sideband transmission through the FP cavity.

The modulation frequency of the end PDH is 216kHz. The FSR of the cavity is about 3.9MHz. So the sidebands pick up about 0.17 radians extra phase on one round trip in the cavity compared to the carrier.

The ITM reflectance is r_ITM^2 = 98.5% of power, the ETM reflection is r_ETM^2 = 95%.

So the percentage of sideband power reflected from the cavity is R_SB = r_ITM*r_ETM*(exp(i*0.17) - 1)^2 / (1 - r_ETM*r_ITM exp(i*0.17) )^2 = 0.85 = 85%

So about 15% of the sideband power is transmitted through the cavity. The ratio of the sideband and carrier amplitudes at the ETM is 0.05

So, on the vertex PD, the power of the 80MHz +/-200kHz sidebands should be around sqrt(0.15)*0.05 = 0.02 = 2% of the 80MHz beatnote.

Once we get the green and IR locked to the arm again, we're going to look for the sidebands around the beatnote.

Two different measurement have been performed for a test of the green locking last night.

Everything is getting better. yes. yes.

[ measurement 1 : IR locking]

The X arm was locked by using the IR PDH signal as usual (#4239,  #4268) .

The in-loop signal at from the IR path and the out-of-loop signal at from the green beat note path were measured.

Let us look at the purple curve. This is an out-of-loop measurement by looking at the green beat note fluctuation.

The rms down to 0.1 Hz used to be something like 60 kHz (see here), but now it went down to approximately 2 kHz. Good.

This rms corresponds to displacement of about 260 pm of the X arm. This is barely within the line width. The line width is about 1 nm.

[ measurement 2 : green locking]

The motion of the X arm was suppressed by using the green beat signal and feeding it back to ETMX.

After engaging the ALS servo, I brought the cavity length to the resonance by changing the feedback offset from epics.

Then took the spectra of the in-loop signal at the beat path and the out-of-loop signal at the IR PDH path.

 Here is a time series of TRX after I brought it to the resonance.

TRX was hovering around at the maximum power, which is 144 counts.

Since I put one more 10:1 filter to suppress the noise around 3 Hz, the rms of the in-loop beat spectrum went to about 1 kHz, which used to be 2 kHz (see #4341).

But the out-of-loop (IR PDH signal) showed bigger noise by a factor of 2 approximately over frequency range of from 2 Hz to 2 Hz. The resultant rms is 2.7 kHz.

The rms is primarily dominated by a peak at 22 Hz (roll mode ?).

I calibrated the IR PDH signal by taking the peak to peak signal assuming the finesse of the cavity is 450 for IR. May need a cooler calibration.

I forgot to mention about the whitening filter for the ALS digital control system.

As usual I used a whitening filter to have a good SNR against ADC noise, but this time our whitening scheme is little bit different from the usual our systems.

I used two ADC channels for one signal and put a digital summing point  and digital filters to keep good SNR over the frequency range of interest.

It's been working fine but it's still primitive, so I will study more about how to optimize this scheme.

     The diagram above shows our scheme for the signal whitening.

Basically the SNR at DC is bad when we use only a whitening filter as shown on the bottom part of the diagram because the signal is quite tiny at DC.

On the other hand if we take raw signal into ADC as 'DC path'  shown above, the SNR is better at DC but not good at intermediate frequencies (30 mHz - 1kHz).

So the idea to keep the good SNR over the frequency range of interest is to combine these 'DC path' and 'AC path' in a clever way.

     In our case, the 'DC path' signal is not as good as the 'AC path' signal above 30 mHz, so we cut off those high frequency signals by using a digital low pass filter.

In addition to it, I put a gain of 1000 in order to match the relative gain difference between 'DC path' and 'AC path'.

Then the resultant signal after the summing point keeps the good SNR with a flat transfer function up to 1 kHz. 

In this past weekend I replaced a summing amplifier for the end green PDH locking by a home-made summing circuit box in order to increase the control range.

It's been working well so far.

However due to this circuit box, the demodulation phase of the PDH locking is now somewhat different from the past, so we have to readjust it at some point.

(background)

    At the X end station, the voltage going to the NPRO PZT had been limited up +/- 4 V because of the summing amplifier : SR560.

Therefore the laser was following the cavity motion only up to ~ +/- 4 MHz, which is not wide enough. (it's okay for night time)

So we decided to put a passive circuit instead of SR560 to have a wider range.

(summing box)

   We made a passive summing circuit and put it into a Pomona box.

The circuit diagram is shown below. Note that we assume the capacitance of the 1W Innolight has the same capacitance as that of the PSL Innolight (see #3640).

The feedback signal from a PDH box goes into the feedback input of the circuit.

Then the signal will be low passed with the corner frequency of 200 kHz because of the combination of RC (where R is 681 Ohm and C is capacitance of the PZT).

Because of this low pass filter, we don't drive the PZT unnecessarily at high frequency.

On the other hand the modulation signal from a function generator goes into the other input and will be high passed by 50 pF mica capacitor with the corner frequency of 200 kHz.

This high pass filter will cut off noise coming from the function generator at low frequency.

In addition to it, the 50 pF capacitor gives a sufficient amount of attenuation for the modulation because we don't want have too big modulation depth.

Here is a plot for the expected transfer functions.

You can see that the modulation transfer function (blue curve) has non-zero phase at 216 kHz, which is our modulation frequency.

 I made several scripts to handle the mcass configuration and sensing measurements:

- The scripts and data are in the scripts/ASS directory

- The mcassUp script restores the settings for the digital lockins: oscillator gains, phases, and filters. The MC mirrors are modulated in pitch at 10, 11, 12 Hz and in yaw at 10.5, 11.5, and 12.5 Hz. The attached plot shows the comb of modulation frequencies in the MCL spectrum.

- The mcassOn and mcassOff scripts turn on and off the dither lines by ramping up and down the SUS-MC1_ASCPIT etc gains

- The senseMCdecenter script measures the response of the MCL demodulated signals to the decentering of the beam on the optics by imbalancing the coil gains by 10% which corresponds to the shift of the optic rotation point relative to the beam by 2.65 mm (75mm diameter optic) and allows calibration of the demodulated signals in mm of decentering. The order of the steps was MC1,2,3 pitch and MC1,2,3 yaw. The output of the script can be redirected to the file and analyzed in matlab. The attached plot shows the results. The plot was made using the sensemcass.m script in the same directory.

- The senseMCmirror script measures the response of the MCL demodulated signals to the mirror offsets (SUS-MC1_ASCPIT etc filter banks). The result is shown below (the sensemcass.m script makes this plot as well). There is some coupling between pitch and yaw drives so the MC coils can use some balancing - currently all gains are unity.

- The senseMCdofs scripts measures the response to the DOF excitation but I have not got to it yet.

- The next step is to invert the sensing matrix and try to center the beams on the mirrors by feeding back to optics. Note that the MC1/MC3 pitch differential and yaw common dofs are expected to have much smaller response than the other two dofs due to geometry of this tree mirror cavity. We should try to build this into the inversion.

The beam of IR for doubling  is clipping on bnc cable to green beam transmitted pd.

-- Alignment

     - C1ASS

     - MC WFS 

    - OPLEVs

-- Optimization of Suspended Optics

  - diagonalizations

  - damping control

  - upgrading of electronics

   - weekly check

-- Input Optics

   - PMC

         * mode matching
         * epics LO HI values

   - FSS and ISS

        * recover FSS
        * make ISS working

   - EOM

   - doubling and RFPD for green

-- Length Sensing and Control

   - digital system and electronics

-- Green Locking

    - X end station

    - Y arm green locking ==> Suresh/Bryan

    - digital control systems

      - noise budget

   - cavity scan and handing off

-- misc.

 This experiment deals with measuring the total harmonic distortion (THD) contribution of mixers in a circuit.

(a circuit diagram is attached) where:

Mixer: ZFM-3-S+ at +7dBm

Attenuator: VAT-7+, at +7dB

Low-pass filter: SLP-1.9+, which is set to DC-1.9MHz

The total harmonic distortion can be calculated by the equation: 

where Vn represents the voltage of the signal at a certain harmonic n.

In this experiment, only the voltages of the first three harmonics were measured, with the first harmonic at 400Hz, the second at 800Hz, and the third at 1.2kHz. The corresponding voltages were read off the spectrum analyzer after it had time averaged 16 measurements. (picture of the general shape of the spectrum analyzer output is attached)

(results for this mixer's particular configuration are on the pdf attached)

There really isn't that much correlation between the modulations and the resulting THD.

We won't know how good these numbers are until more experiments on other mixers are done, so they can be compared. Since the rest of the mixers are relatively high levels (+17dBm, +23dBm in comparison to this experiment's +7dBm), an RF amplifier will need to be hooked up first to do any further measurements.

- Put priority on the list

- Put names on the items

- Where is the CDS TO DO ==> Joe

-

- Remote disconnection of the greeen PDH 

- What is the situation of the PD DC for the LSC PDs?

- SUS Satelite box Resister replacement ==> Jamie

- IMC mode matching ==> Jamie/Larisa 

- Mechanical shutters everywhere

- SRM OPLEV Connection

- MC OAF

- Better LSC whitening boards

- DAFI 

[Rana / Koji]

The MC servo loop has been investigated as the MC servo was not an ideal state.

With the improved situation by us, the attached setting is used for the MC and the FSS.
The current UGF is 24kHz with phase margin is ~15deg, which is unbearably small.
We need to change the phase compensation in the FSS box some time in the next week.

- We found the PD has plenty of 29.5MHz signal in in-lock state. This was fixed by reducing the LO power and the modulation depth.

- The LO power for the MC demodulator was ~6dBm. As this was too high for the demodulator, we have reduced it down to 2dBm
by changing attenuator to 12dB (at 6 oclock of the dial) on the AM stabilization box.

- The RF power on the MC PD was still too high. The PD mush have been saturated. So the modulation slider for 29.5MHz was moved
from 0.0 to 5.0. This reduced the 29.5MHz component. (But eventually Koji restored the modulation depth after the servo shape has been modified.)

- The openloop gain of the loop has been measured using EXC A/TEST1/TEST2. The UGF was ~5kHz with the phase mergin of ~10deg. 

- This quite low phase margin is caused by the fact that the loop has f^-2 shape at around 4k-100kHz. The reference cavity has
the cavity pole of 40kHz or so while the IMC has the pole of ~4kHz. Basically we need phase lead at  around 10-100kHz.

- We decided to turn off (disable) 40:4000 boost of the MC servo to earn some phase. Then MC did not lock. This is because the LF gain was not enough.
So put Kevin's pomona box in the FAST PZT path (1.6:40). By this operation we obtain ~75deg (max) at 560Hz, ~35deg at 5kHz, ~20deg at 10kHz.

- In this setup the UGF is 24kHz. Still the phase margin is ~15kHz. This phase lag might be cause by 1)  the MC servo circut 2) PMC cavity pole

NEXT STEP

- Put/modify phase lead in the FSS box.
- Measure the PMC cavity pole
- Measure and put notch in the PZT path
- Increase the UGF / measure the openloop TF

 The power ratio of the beatnote signal vs. the 216kHz sideband has been measured.

The measured ratio was -55 dB, which is smaller by about 20 dB than Aidan's estimation.

To confirm this fact we should check the modulation depth of the end PDH somehow.

The below is a picture showing the sidebands around the beatnote locked at 66.45 MHz.

Other than the +/-216 kHz sidebands, we can see some funny peaks at +/- 50 kHz and +/-150 kHz

I wonder if they come from the servo oscillation of the MC servo whose UGF is at 24 kHz.  We can check it by unlocking the MC.

Can we set up a fiber-PD on the end table to look at the beat between the "end laser IR beam" and the "PSL IR beam fiber-transmitted end beam"? 

We should see the same thing on that PD that we see on the green PD (plus any fiber noise and I'm not really sure how much that'll be off the top of my head). If we unlock the lasers from the arm cavity then the free-running noise of the lasers wrt to each other will probably swamp the 50kHz and 150kHz signals. Maybe we could lock the end laser to the free-running PSL by demodulating the beat note signal from the fiber-PD and then we could look for the extra sidebands in the IN-LOOP signal. Then we could progressively lock the PSL to the MC and arm cavity and see if the sidebands appear on the fiber-PD at some point in that process. 

It's possible that the 216kHz drive of the PZT on the Innolight is somehow driving up some sub-harmonics in the crystal. I think this is unlikely though: if you look at Mott's measurements of the Innolight PZT response, there are no significant PM resonances at 50 or 150kHz.

When Koji and I were massaging the MC, we noticed that the oscillations were at 48.5 kHz. They were pretty huge and are probably what you're seeing on the beat. My guess is that they are the PZT resonances of the PSL 2W NPRO; we need to put a notch in the FSS box - it still has the notch from the old NPRO.

CDS To Do:

1) Get ETMY working - figure out why signals are not getting past the AI board (D000186) to the coils.

2) Get TDS and command line AWG stuff working

3) Get c1ass and new c1lsc (with Koji) fully integrated with the rest of the system.

4) Get CDS software instructions up to date and well organized.

5) Redo cabling  and generally make it a permanent installation instead of hack job:

   a) Measure cable lengths, check connectors, wire with good routes and ensure strain relief.  Ensure proper labeling

   b) Get correct length fiber for c1sus RFM and timing.

   c) Fix up final BO adapter box and DAC boxes.

   d) Make boxes for the AA filter adapters which are currently just hanging.

   e) Get two "faceplates" for the cards in the back of the ETMY IO chassis so they can screwed down properly.

   f) Remove and properly store old, unused cables, boards, and anything else.

6) Create new documentation detailing the current 40m setup, both DCC documents and interactive wiki.

7)  Setup an Ubuntu work station using Keith's wiki instructions

Simulated Plant To Do:

1)Create simulated plant to interface with current end mass controls (say scx).

2) Create proper filters for pendulum and noise generation, test suspension.

3) Propagate to all other suspensions.

4) Working on simulated IFO plant to connect to LSC.  Create filters for near locked (assume initial green control perhaps) state.

5) Test LSC controls on simulated IFO.

6) Fix c code so there's seamless switching between simulated and real controls.

CDS Status:

 The elog was dead this morning. I reanimated it. It is now undead.

[Koji / Rana]

- Since the MC servo had UGF up to ~20kHz and huge servo bump at 50kHz, we needed more phase between 20kHz to 100kHz.

- Today a phase compensation filter in a Pomona box has been inserted between the MC servo box and the FSS box.
  This is a passive filter with zero@14kHz and pole@140kHz. We obtain ~60deg at around 50kHz.

- After the insertion, the lock of the MC was achieved immediately. The overall gain as well as the PZT fast gain was tweaked
  such that the PC feedback is reduced down to 1~2.

- The OLTF has been measured.
  The insertion of the filter change increased the UGF to 130kHz even with "40:4kHz" and double super boost turned on.
  The phase margin is 54deg. Quite healthy.

- Rana modified the existed Auto Locker script.
  It is now continuously running on op340m!
  We made a couple of testsif it correctly relock the MC and it did. VERY COOL.

-----------------

NEXT STEPS
- Measure the PMC cavity pole
- Measure the circuit TF and try to shave off the phase lag.
- Measure the PZT resonance of the NPRO and put notch in the PZT path
- Increase the UGF / measure the openloop TF

I moved old POX shutter from ITMY optical table to the south end. MEDM POX mechanical shutter screen is now closing the green beam  injection into the Y arm.

I kluged in a 40m long bnc cable that Alberto left on the floor for control. It is labelled POX-sht  This is a temporary set up.

As previously noted, there are multiple beams coming back from the ETM surface onto the PDH PD on the end table. They are spread out in a vertical pattern. All the spots swing together (as the ETM moves?).

I moved the PDH Green PD on the end table so that it was further away from the Faraday and I added an iris in between the Faraday and the PD. Now only the principle reflection from the ETM is incident on the PD. See attached photos. In order to sneak past the neighbouring optics, I had to steer the beam down a bit, so the PD is now lower than it previously was.

Just FYI: the angle between the returning beams is about 5 or 6 mrad at the PD. Before the beams get to the PD they go through a telescope that de-magnifies the beam by about 5 or 6 times. This implies that the angle between adjacent returning beams from the ETM is around 1 mrad at the ETM.

This does make the position of the spot on the PD more susceptible to the alignment of the ETM - we should use a short focal length lens and image the ETM plane onto the PD.

First image - overview of table

Second image - the three returning beams immediately before the IRIS

Third image - a close up of the IRIS and PDH PD. 

Kiwamu and I noticed that there is a ghost beam on the green beam going into the ETM. What we see is some interference fringes on the edge of the transmission of the green beam through the dichroic beam splitter (DCBS). If we look at the reflection from the dichroic beam splitter these are much more pronounced.

The spacing of the fringes (about 2 per 10mm) indicates an angle between the fields of around 0.1 mrad.

We were able to cause significant motion of the fringes by pushing on the knobs of the steering mirrors that steer the beam into the DCBS. A rough calculation of the derivative of optical path difference between the ghost and the primary beam as a function of input angle gives about 15 microns per mrad. What filtering the effect the arm cavity will have on the ghost beam is not immediately clear, but the numbers shouldn't be too difficult to determine.

The previous measurement for the shot noise of POY had the dark noise at ~100 nV/rtHz. I redid the measurement and got 26 nV/rtHz for the dark noise. I think that when I made the previous measurement, the spectrum analyzer had automatically added some attenuation to the input that I failed to remove. This added attenuation raised the noise floor of the measurement making the dark noise of POY appear larger than it is.

The updated measurement can be found on the wiki at http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Electronics/POY.

Here is a partial list of stuff which is being packed at LLO to be shipped to CIT.  The electronics ckt boards are yet to be added to this list.  Will do that tomorrow.

 I somehow screwed up the PDH box at the X end station. 

Right now it's not working, so I am going to check and fix it today.

 In the last evening I found that one of the gain stages on the PDH box wasn't fully functional.

So I started investigating it and I though it was going to finish soon, but actually it wasn't so easy.

  The PDH box has several gain stages. So an input signal goes through a buffer, a filter, a boost and an output buffer stages sequentially.

The boost stage is supposed to have gain of 10, but I found it didn't have such gain.

In fact the gain was something like -30dB which is pretty small. Plus this boost stage was imposing an wired bump on the transfer function around 50 kHz.

I checked the voltages on some components around the boost stage and confirmed there were no strange voltage.

Then I suspected that the op-amp : LF356 had been broken for some reason. So I replaced it by LT1792 to see if it fixes the issue.

Indeed it did make it functional. However after few minutes of the replacement, it went back to the same bad condition.

I have no idea about what was going on at that time. Anyway it needs more careful investigations.

  I temporarily put a jumper cable on the board to skip this stage, but now the PDH lock is not healthy at all.

Finished calculations for harmonic distortion at each of the 10 outputs of the RF distribution box. The diagram can be found on Suresh's post  http://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:8080/40m/4342

THD calculation consisted of gather data on the dBm at harmonics of the fundamental frequency. These dBm values were converted into units of power and plugged into the appropriate THD equation pulled from Wikipedia: 

On the table, the number 1-6 correspond to the harmonic number of the input frequency used. For example, the first five PD's listed used an 11MHz source, while the second set of five PD's listed used a 55MHz source. Values listed under certain harmonics are dBm measurements at the corresponding frequency. The P-subscript values are essentially the dBm measurements converted to units of power (Watts) for ease of calculation in the equation above. THD is then calculated using these power units; I have converted the ratios to percentages.

It should be noted that as with all THD calculations, the more data points collected, the more precise the THD % will be.

By the way, the outputs on the physical RF distribution box for REFL165 and AS165 are actually labeled as REFL166 and AS166. 

Its been well noted in the past that sweeping the PMC at high power leads to a distortion of the transmitted power curve. The explanation for this was coating absorption and thermo-elastic deformation of the front face of the mirrors.

Today, I did several sweeps of the PMC. I turned off its servo and tuned its PZT so that it was nearly resonating. Then I drove the NPRO via the HV driver (gain=15) with 0-150 V (its 1.1 MHz/V) to measure the PMC transmitted light. I adjusted the NPRO pump diode current from 2A on down to see if the curves have a power dependent width.

In the picasa web slideshow:

There are 3 significant differences between this measurement and the one by John linked above: its a new PMC (Rick says its the cleanest one around), the sweep is faster - since I'm using a scope instead of the ADC I feel free to drive the thing by ~70 MHz in one cycle. In principle, we could go faster, but I don't want to get into the region where we excite the PZT resonance. Doing ~100 MHz in ~30 ms should be OK. I think it may be that going this fast avoids some of the thermal distortion problems that John and others have seen in the past. On the next iteration, we should increase the modulation index for the 35.5 MHz sidebands so as to get a higher precision calibration of the sweep's range.

By eye I find that the FWHM from image #4 is 11 ms long. That corresponds to 300 mV on the input to the HV box and 15 V on the PZT and ~16.5 MHz of frequency shift. I think we expect a number more like 4-5 MHz; measurement suspicious.

I made a noise budget for the ALS noise measurement that I did a week ago (see #4352).

I am going to post some details about this plot later because I am now too sleepy.

 
Fast work indeed! It would be nice if we could have the following details filled in as well
a) A short title and caption for the table, saying what we are measuring
b) the units in which this physical quantity is being measured.

It is good to keep in mind that people from other parts of the group, who are not directly involved in this work, may also read this elog.

with script

Here I explain how I estimate the contribution from the differential noise shown in the plot on my last entry (#4376) .

(background)

 According to the measurement done about a week ago, there is a broadband noise in the green beatnote path when both Green and IR are locked to the X arm.

The noise can be found on the first plot on this entry (#4352) drawn in purple. We call it differential noise.

However, remember, the thing we care is the noise appearing in the IR PDH port when the ALS standard configuration is applied (i.e. taking the beatnote and feeding it back to ETMX).

So we have to somehow convert the noise to that in terms of the ALS configuration.

In the ALS configuration, since the loop topology is slightly different from that when the differential noise was measured, we have to apply a transfer function to properly estimate the contribution.

(How to estimate)

 It's not so difficult to calculate the contribution from the differential noise under some reasonable assumptions.

Let us assume that the MC servo and the end PDH servo have a higher UGF than the ALS, and assume their gains are sufficiently big.

Then those assumptions allow us to simplify the control loop to like the diagram below:

 Since we saw the differential noise from the beatnote path, I inject the noise after the frequency comparison in this model.

Eventually the noise is going to propagate to the f_IR_PDH port by multiplying by G/(1+G), where G is the open loop transfer function of the ALS.

The plot below shows the open loop transfer function which I used and the resultant G/(1+G).
 

In the curve of G/(1+G), you can see there is a broad bump with the gain of more than 1,  approximately from 20 Hz to 60 Hz.

Because of this bump, the resultant contribution from the differential noise at this region is now prominent as shown in the plot on the last entry (#4376).

[Joe, Jamie]

We modified the c1scx model to have a switch to go between simulated and real plants.  The channel is currently C1:SCX-SIM_SWITCH. 

When this channel is zero, the simulated plant channels are going to the ADCs and zeros  are going out to the real DACs.  When this channel is one, the real ADCs are coming in, and real data is going out to the DACs.

Jamie will be adding a big green/red light to the suspension screens which indicate the state of the simulated plant.  We will also eventually add this to the overall status screen.

A control screen for the simulated plant is located at /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/medm/c1spx/master/C1SUP_ETMX.adl.  These are currently a work in progress.

[Jenne, Chris, Kiwamu]

 A photo diode and an AOM driver have been newly setup on the PSL table to measure the intensity noise coupling to the beat note signal.

We tried taking a transfer function from the PD to the beat, but the SNR wasn't sufficient on the PD. So we didn't get reasonable data.

(what we did)

  - put a DCPD after the doubling crystal on the PSL table. The PD is sitting after the Y1 mirror, which has been used for picking off the undesired IR beam.

  - installed the AOM driver (the AOM itself had been already in place)

  - injected some signals onto the AOM to see if we can see an intensity fluctuation on the PD as well as the beat signal

(intensity noise)

  In order to have better SNR for the intensity measurement, we put an AC coupled SR560 with the gain of 100 just before the ADCs.

When a single frequency signal was applied from a Stanford Research's function generator to the AOM, we could clearly see a peak at the doubled frequency of the injected signal.

Also a peak at the same frequency was found on the beat note signal as well.

But when random noise was injected from the same function generator, the random noise looked below the ADC noise.

Jenne adjusted the output voltage from the PD to about 1 V to avoid a saturation in the analog path, but later we realized that the ADC counts was marely ~ 20 counts.

So we will check the ADC tomorrow. Hopefully we will get a good SNR.

[Joe/Kiwamu]

 We found there are some filter names that we can not properly build for some reason.

The following names are not properly going to be built :

 - REFL_DC

 - AUX

If we use the names shown above for filters, it doesn't compile any filter modules.

We took a quick look around the src files including feCodegen.pl, but didn't find any obvious bugs.